During UC Berkeley’s Campaign for the New Century, Rausser established the Gordon Rausser Endowed/Honorary Scholarship Fund. He has continued to add to the endowment, with his contributions matched through an incentive program for faculty and staff who give to Berkeley. Today, the market value of the fund is more than $620,000, and its payout supports exceptional Ph.D. students in the top-ranked Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics as well as undergraduates with financial need in the Environmental Economics and Policy major sponsored by CNR.
In 2020, Rausser pledged $50 million to the College of Natural Resources to support the school’s land-grant mission to take on key economic, social, environmental and health challenges facing the state and the nation. Major initiatives led by the college include mitigating and adapting to climate change, accelerating the clean energy transition and improving food security and nutrition for all. Under Rausser’s explicit terms, “the majority of his donation will create an unrestricted endowment that can be used at the direction of the dean, in consultation with faculty leadership, to support a variety of needs across the college’s five departments — from supporting graduate students to launching new interdisciplinary research programs.” Portions of the fund will be used to establish the Gordon Rausser Endowed Chair in the Department of Agriculture and Economics as well as to establish a Rausser-Zilberman Program Endowed Fund for the Master of Development Practice (MDP).