Heather Engel

Heather serves as Associate Vice President for Gift Planning at the University of Virginia, where she leads the gift planning team and is tasked with helping to drive the $5 billion Honor the Future Campaign to success.

Her fundraising and leadership experience span the disciplines of gift planning, as well as principal, and major gifts.  During her fifteen years with Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), she held progressively senior positions where she managed the entire front-line fundraising team in a division of 100 staff.

Her accomplishments at RIT include successfully closing a $309 million comprehensive campaign, initiating and managing all pre-campaign efforts, the quiet phase, and the public launch of a $1 billion campaign, and personally overseeing the closure of over $96.8 million in planned gifts and over 21 outright gifts of $1 million or more.

She holds a Juris Doctor, cum laude, from John Marshall Law School, in Chicago, Illinois.  Her legal practice, prior to joining RIT, emphasized estate and charitable planning for high net worth individuals.  She is experienced in preparing estate planning documents including wills, revocable and irrevocable trusts, qualified subchapter S trusts, and insurance trusts, as well as charitable remainder trusts and donor advised funds.  She has helped clients establish private foundations and has advised not-for-profit organizations in establishing charitable gift annuity programs and donor advised fund programs.