2024 Alumni Honors: Dave Miedema

Dave Miedema, ’76, is one of the most prolific fundraisers in the history of the University of North Dakota Foundation and yet he sees his legacy as helping others establish theirs.

Hometown: Marion, N.D.

Area of Study: Management and Marketing

“There’s no one thing I can point to,” said Miedema when asked about his legacy at UND. “I just happened to be the fortunate person serving as a conduit, helping people achieve what they wanted to do for the benefit of UND.”

Other than a two-year stint in the Trust Department at Bremer Bank, Miedema worked at the UND Alumni Association & Foundation from 1985 to 2018. He held several roles with the organization, including time as the Executive Vice President and CEO.

After earning UND degrees in management and marketing in 1976, Miedema says he gained valuable sales experience working at Team Electronics in Grand Forks for respected local businessman Don Fisk.

“At some level, we are all involved in sales, whether of a product, a service or ourselves.” At Team, Miedema says he learned the value of being a good listener, knowing your product, and to never prejudge people – all lessons he would use as a fundraiser for UND.

That job came to him one Saturday morning in 1985 when he was summoned to meet Earl Strinden at his UND Foundation office on campus. Earl was the Executive Vice President and CEO of the Alumni Association & Foundation. While Dave knew two of Earl’s brothers, he had only met Earl once, when he went to UND for a school visit while a high school senior more than a decade earlier.

Miedema, selling small business and educational computer systems for Team Electronics at the time, thought perhaps Earl was interested in a new computer system for the alumni office, but instead, Strinden asked him to join the organization. 

“To this day, I’m not sure how he made the connection or why he was interested in me,” said Miedema, “but I ultimately accepted his offer to join the Foundation, and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.”

Dave spent most of his years with the organization as a development officer, a person who works with potential donors to best structure their gift to UND. He describes the job by using a quote featured on the Wall of Honor in the old J. Lloyd Stone Alumni Center, honoring those who had “reached back in appreciation and expressed their faith in the future of the University of North Dakota.”

“My primary responsibility was to help people express their faith in the future of UND. Many of the donors I worked with were oftentimes making the single largest gift commitment of their lives, and I felt a tremendous responsibility to ensure the process was meaningful to them and that they would experience the true joy of giving.”
Miedema says he is proud that in the three jobs he held throughout his career, he was recognized with each organization’s highest honor: the national Sales Master Award from Team Electronics, the Eagle Award from Bremer Bank, and now, the Sioux Award for Distinguished Achievement & Leadership from UND.

“This recognition is an especially humbling experience. When I review the names of past Award recipients and realize my name will now become part of that list, I’m tremendously appreciative, but above all, very honored. How could one possibly top the experience of receiving recognition like this from the university you love? It simply doesn’t get any better than that.”