Setting Impact in Motion

When most people imagine the idea of leaving a philanthropic legacy, they picture charitable giving that happens after a long career, after decades of saving and planning, or as a result of immense generational wealth. But Laura Raines (A.B. ’13) began leaving an enduring and personal imprint on the University of Michigan (U-M) while the experiences that shaped her were still fresh.

Raines made her first significant gift to U-M in 2017, just four years after graduating from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) with a degree in communications and social computing informatics.

She was not a retiree planning her estate or a seasoned executive with decades of giving behind her. She was a young professional at Google when she made a practical discovery: Google’s corporate gift match. Every dollar Raines gave to an eligible nonprofit, she learned, could be matched by her employer.

“To me, the employer match was free money that I could steer toward something with real power to create societal change,” she says. “I knew I wanted to give it to the University of Michigan. The hardest part was figuring out what to support.”

So Raines asked herself, “What did I do at the University of Michigan that shaped me?” 

Because she had so recently graduated, the answers were close at hand.

While an undergraduate in LSA, Raines enrolled in one of the Program on Intergroup Relations (IGR)’s intergroup dialogue courses. A partnership between LSA and U-M Student Life, IGR helps students develop leadership skills, learn from others, and form authentic, community-centered relationships.

Raines’ IGR discussion group had two student facilitators—one from the United States, one from China—and other participants from Mexico, China, Malaysia, Eastern Europe, and a range of communities across the United States. They met weekly and talked frankly about social, cultural, and current events topics in personal ways that didn’t come up in most of Raines’ classes, from the perspective of their own experiences.

“Suddenly, the stories I was hearing weren't just news headlines,” Raines says. “They were real events my classmates had lived through.”

Those conversations did something she hadn’t anticipated: they made the world feel populated by human beings rather than abstractions. That shift from news to neighbor, and from concept to story, stayed with her long after the course ended. 

With the help of Google’s corporate matching dollars, Raines was able to leverage her first, relatively modest contributions to U-M into something larger and establish her own student support fund for IGR.

A few years later, Raines encountered LSA’s Legacy Match Challenge. The program, in place from late 2022 to early 2026, offered an immediate cash match equal to 10 percent of the face value of a qualified planned gift, with donors directing those match dollars to any expendable LSA fund of their choice. 

For Raines, it was the nudge she needed to start her estate plan.

This time, she asked herself a different question, “What do I wish I had done—and how can I make that possible for someone else?”

The answer came easily. Although Raines has traveled the world, she had never studied abroad.

Travel has been an important part of Raines’ life for as long as she can remember. Her mother, Sandy, worked as a flight attendant for decades. Her stepfather, Ron, was an avid and curious traveler who set out to visit 100 countries in his lifetime. From backpacking across South America to meeting Mother Teresa in India and spending time on a sheep farm in New Zealand, travel shaped Ron’s outlook on life. He often took Raines along. When she was a student at U-M, she and Ron took advantage of standby flights to jaunt off to distant destinations, turning long weekends into spontaneous adventures.

After her stepfather unexpectedly passed away in 2021, Raines created the Ron Cadieux Global Experiences Fund in his memory. The fund supports study abroad scholarships so LSA students can gain the cultural exposure and personal growth that come from living and learning outside of their familiar surroundings.

For Raines, access is the point. Students who cannot afford to study abroad may miss not only the chance to see another part of the world, but the chance to develop the kind of perspective that shapes how they move through their lives.

Having already created the Cadieux fund, Raines had seen firsthand what travel made possible for students who otherwise couldn’t go. That made the decision easy: she directed half of her Legacy Match planned gift there, so even more students could have that experience. 

Seeing how far that money has already traveled has been a gift to Laura.

“I met one recipient who took a weekend trip to Slovenia during their study abroad semester,” she says. “I’ve never been there, and neither had Ron. To keep his values alive and spread his reach to a new place in that way was so rewarding.”

The other half of her planned gift will benefit Wolverine Pathways, a college preparation program that expands access to higher education for Michigan middle and high school students.

The thread connecting IGR, the Cadieux fund, and Wolverine Pathways is not hard to find. Each reflects the same conviction: that exposure to people and places beyond your own experience changes you in ways that last. That thread now runs through her work as founder of avec, an app that helps keep connections with friends and colleagues alive by surfacing the moments when your paths are going to cross worldwide.

“We’re one global community,” Raines says. “The more experiences you can have that inform your own opinion and your own experiences, the more prepared you are after graduation.”

Raines knows her story doesn’t fit the traditional image of a “legacy” or “major” university donor. She’s still in her early 30s, and her giving began with the push of a corporate match and a question she asked herself four years out of college.

Raines wants to encourage more people her age to see themselves as philanthropists. It’s one of the reasons she is serving as a co-chair on U-M’s Chicago Campaign Council, working to recruit other young alumni to participate in the capital fundraising campaign supporting the Look to Michigan vision. Thanks to her active personal outreach, the Chicago council has seen a boom in next-gen volunteers.

She’s also committed to helping alumni of any age see how accessible becoming a major donor to U-M is when you begin by including the university in your estate plan. Her advice is simple. Start with what you know. The experiences still close enough to feel real. The class that stirred something in you. The opportunity you wish you’d taken. The community you want to strengthen.

“People think estate planning is for later, or for the wealthy, but adding the university to my estate plan was the most accessible way to make a gift,” says Raines. “And programs like the Legacy Match meant my gift started working for students immediately, not decades from now.”

Decades from now, students will sit in IGR dialogue courses and take flights to places their families never reached, funded in part by commitments Raines made while those experiences were still fresh in her own life. She’s not waiting to make her mark on the University of Michigan. She’s already well on her way to building a great legacy.

Life-changing education in the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts expands students’ worldviews through meaningful encounters with people, places, and perspectives different from their own. When global issues become human stories, students gain a deeper understanding of the world—and carry that perspective into the communities they shape for years to come.