You could say it was a meeting of the minds when Lana Fontenot and Natalie Harder began working together at South Louisiana Community College in 2012.

Fontenot, associate vice chancellor for institutional advancement, brought a background in communications and marketing with her when she left the University of Louisiana at Lafayette to become a public relations specialist at SLCC, which serves 13,000 students each year at campuses in nine parishes (counties).

"I knew how much growth was taking place at a two-year level and how much attention nationally was being placed on the necessity of two-year colleges," Fontenot says of the decision to change jobs.

Little did she know that one change would lead to a much bigger one when she stepped into the role of director of development and executive director of the SLCC Foundation in 2014, which subsequently led her to the associate vice chancellor's role in 2017.

"I was very nervous about taking on the vice chancellor role because I know nothing about fundraising or development," admits Fontenot.

Enter Natalie Harder, who served as vice chancellor for institutional advancement at Patrick Henry Community College in Virginia before heading even further south (she's a native of upstate New York) just over six years ago to take on the role of chancellor at SLCC.

"Dr. Harder said ‘I can teach someone the tactics of fundraising, but I can't teach someone to have passion and drive. If you innately have those skills, the rest I can teach you along the way and you'll learn it,'" Fontenot says. "And that I did. I spent my first several months soaking everything up like a sponge."

The two complement each other and clearly have fun together, as evidenced by a video they made to showcase Harder winning the 2018 E. Joseph Savoie Chief Executive Leadership Award for CASE District IV. The chancellor is shown in a white coat practicing CPR with nursing students, donning welding goggles in a shop class and rolling out from under a car in the SLCC automotive shop.

"I think any partnership is all about being open-minded and open-hearted and being willing to learn from one another. The ability to listen, to be self-reflective really has been the key to our working together so well," Harder says. "Lana brings a great energy and she's open to taking risks. I'm a big proponent of let's try it, and if it doesn't work, let's learn from it. It's a lot of back and forth."

It's clearly paying off for the two and for the college, which just finalized the addition of two campuses earlier this month, six years after merging with all of the technical vocational colleges in the region. The bigger footprint means more responsibility for the pair, as well as more opportunity for the college and its students.

Some other accomplishments since Harder and Fontenot have worked together include:

• Tripling the foundation's total assets and quadrupling SLCC's endowment portfolio,
• Raising a $2.1 million match for a new $17 million Health & Sciences building for the college's Lafayette campus,
• Garnering $500,000 in support for the establishment of the college's new registered nursing program, and
• Accepting more than $200,000 in in-kind donations for hands-on training programs, and increasing employee giving from 1.8% to 65% within four years. 

Additionally, the SLCC Foundation, which implements a scholarship program that awards approximately $100,000 annually, has grown ten-fold since 2012.

"It's never dull," Harder says, "and I appreciate the fact that we work at an institution that recognizes that higher education is changing just like every other institution is changing."

This article is from the July/August 2018 issue of the Community College Advancement News.