What will you leave behind? 

August is National Make‑A‑Will Month, an annual nudge to take care of something that is easy to put off and important to get right. Most of us know we should have a will. Many of us still don't. It rarely feels urgent until it does, and so it waits.

But a will is more than paperwork. It is one of the clearest ways to say, in writing, what and who you love. It protects the people who depend on you, and it lets you point your resources toward the things that shaped your life. For a lot of us, one of those things is a place: a campus, a college, a professor who saw something in us before we saw it in ourselves.

Few people understand that better than Lynette Marshall and her husband, Jeffery Ford.

A full‑circle legacy

Before she became one of the most respected leaders in the country's advancement profession, Marshall earned a bachelor’s and master's degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and took on a role that had never existed before: the very first fundraising professional in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. There was no playbook, and the job she built is, in many ways, the foundation of the work ACES Advancement does today. From there she went on to serve as the university's associate vice chancellor for development, and in 2006 she became president and CEO of the University of Iowa Center for Advancement, where she led the largest fundraising campaign in that university's history before her retirement in summer 2026.

Now, after more than 40 years in a profession she views as a calling rather than a job, Marshall and Ford are making that belief personal. They have chosen to leave a planned gift to the College of ACES, the place where Marshall’s own career began. It is a quiet, full‑circle decision: the college's first fundraiser, ensuring that the work she helped start will carry on long after her.