Harvard College’s Housing Day Fundraising Challenge Brings in $276,000, Led by Adams House

Harvard College alumni donated a total of roughly $276,000 to their former residential Houses on Friday in the College’s first-ever 24-hour interhouse fundraising competition, with Adams House collecting more than the other eleven Houses combined.

Adams House raised around $170,000 across 444 individual gifts — outpacing all other Houses by a wide margin and accounting for 62 percent of all money donated. Lowell House finished in second place with approximately $51,310 raised and 403 gifts. No other House broke $12,000 or received more than 90 donations, and Kirkland House finished last with about $2,400 and 30 gifts.

The Housing Day Challenge leaderboard, hosted by the Harvard Alumni Association, was updated at eight intervals throughout the day — beginning at 9:30 a.m. and ending at 12:30 a.m.

As upperclassmen stormed freshman dorms to welcome the newly sorted Class of 2029 into their Houses, the parallel fundraising competition offered alumni a way to participate in the festivities from afar. The campaign, announced last month, routed donations directly to House budgets — bypassing the typical process in which alumni gifts flow through the College first.

Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne said in a Friday interview that the donations will benefit House social programming.

“This will be a great benefit to the student experience at Harvard,” Dunne said. “There will be more funds available for social programming, which students say is really important to them.”

Each House will receive the full amount its alumni donated, leaving it to House deans and student-run House Committees to distribute the funds. Dunne said the Dean of Students Office does not plan to adjust its existing budget allocations in response to the results.

“This is seen as supplemental funds that every House had the opportunity to raise,” he said. “We’re keeping our financial commitments to each House the same.”

Currently, the House Committees for Houses like Mather and Cabot operate with annual budgets of around $30,000, according to the two Houses’ HoCo chairs.

Dunne said House leadership will have broad discretion over spending.

“It’s not our role to overstep or try and micromanage that process,” he said. “They can say, ‘Our priority is to make our formal free for all members of the House,’ or double the number of steins.”

Though houses like Adams and Lowell raised tens of thousands of dollars more than the others, Dunne said the disparity did not concern him, noting that every House’s baseline funding will remain unchanged.

“The person who is in whatever House is in the bottom is in the exact same place as the students are this year and have been for the last couple years,” he said.

Dunne predicted the gaps will narrow as Houses refine their outreach strategies, attributing this year’s spread partly to uneven alumni networks.

“Some Houses, I think, had an easier time in getting the word out than others based on pre-existing relationships they have with alumni,” he said.

Beyond the money, Dunne said the competition was also meant to keep alumni — especially recent graduates — connected to House life.

“It’s been a really gratifying way to reconnect with alumni,” Dunne said. “This is the first time that something like this happened.”

Christopher Hidalgo ’25, who led Cabot’s fundraising efforts, called Adams’s dominance “inspiring,” though stinging.

“While it does hurt that Adams is at the lead, because, you know, I think everyone naturally at Harvard is a little bit competitive, it’s still super cool to see,” he said.

Hidalgo said he remains hopeful that the competition will strengthen alumni ties and improve student life, regardless of the interhouse gap.

“Any sort of extra bucks really does help,” he said. “It’s a House for life.”

He added that Adams’s fundraising haul may help offset what he sees as the House’s other shortcomings.

“They have to live with the rats, so I don’t think it really matters,” he said. “If they need money to make them feel a little bit better, that’s fine.”

—Staff writer Wyeth Renwick can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @wzrenwick.

—Staff writer Claire L. Simon can be reached at [email protected] and Signal at csimon.13. Follow her on X @ClaireSimon.