Pictures of donors, sponsors, and friends made along the way act as wallpaper in her small cubicle office. University concert, lecture, and endowment posters act as mementos of a job well-served. T-shirts from athletics, fundraisers, or past PLU students sit draped over the back of her chair as reminders of the connections made along the way. As the school’s longest-standing staff member, Lauralee Hagen is a testament to people-centered work at PLU.
Hagen’s first exposure to PLU was on a youth day trip to campus with her church. Growing up in The Dalles, Oregon, she assumed that a college in Oregon would be where she ended up, “But I came up for more of an official visit… but my folks helped me see that PLU was a good fit for me.”
Hagen lived on campus during her time at PLU while majoring in elementary education. She spent time on The Mast, and was an RA during her junior year. After graduating in 1975, she stayed at PLU to complete her master’s in higher education while working with the Residential Life office as an Assistant Hall Director. Around the time of her graduation in 1978, Hagen began a position in the residential life office, the start of her long-standing PLU career.
She left the Residential Life office in 1993, and began a new journey in the Admissions office. “When I left the Residential Life office in 1993, I had pretty much done every job you could possibly do in Residential Life,” Hagen shared. On direct request from then-university president Lauren Anderson, Hagen worked in the admissions office for one year before transferring to Alumni Director for the next 20 years. From there, she moved into her current position as Senior Gift Planner in University Relations, where she has been for 13 years. “People always ask me, is this your favorite job or what was your favorite job? And I can never answer that because I literally loved every single job.”
At the heart of Hagen’s many roles, one thing is clear: relationships matter. “It’s kind of my superpower,” she shared. Hagen reflected that before she came to her current position in University Relations, President Anderson would tell her she’d end up in advancement. While this was something Hagen thought she would never do, her work building relationships with the community has proved to be one of her biggest assets in her role. “I thought, you know, who better than me, someone who feels passionately about this place and wanting students to have the same opportunities I had. I thought I kind of owed it to PLU to at least try, because it’s all about relationships… The truth is I’ve loved it since the day I got here, even though I was pretty sure it wouldn’t.”
Hagen’s primary role in University Relations is to raise money for scholarships, programs, and overall university needs. She sees this as an opportunity to raise relationships over money, “because in order for people to want to give financially, they usually want to have a relationship with the place they want to be engaged and connected to.” She spends a lot of time attending and participating in PLU events so that she can “stay relevant all the time,” and “remind myself why I’m trying to raise money for the university.” Hagen shared that you can almost always find her at PLU athletic events, lectures or concerts, and is self-proclaimed for streaming multiple athletic events at a time when she is unable to attend in-person. Hagen most recently toured with Choir of the West in California, and has been very involved with the program of the natural sciences speaker held on Feb. 23. She engages with ongoing events and invites people she knows well to join, so they can experience PLU’s lifelong learning opportunities.
Hagen’s passion for community, relationships, and education extends beyond the campus. She was an early board member for the Children’s Museum of Tacoma, and continues to be involved with them today. “It’s always been the people that I enjoy the most in my job and the different experiences, and that never changes.”
Although Hagen has seen PLU go through many changes in her time at the university, she notes that “I’m as excited for it today as I ever have been.” This semester, Hagen is looking forward to upcoming lectures, meeting fundraising goals, and the release of a project close to her heart. Hagen has been working on “an initiative to engage PLU constituents who identify as women in a more active way.” While the project hasn’t been released yet, Hagen notes that she is excited about it and encourages readers to keep an eye out for the release.
With building relationships comes the grief of mourning those who have passed. Hagen shared, “I attend a lot of memorial services, and I always have because I find that feels like part of my work in the sense that I always want, if I can, to be there to remember and honor with a family, people who’ve served at PLU or I’ve been close to.” She notes that celebrating these lives gives her a sense of appreciation and renewed understanding for those who have passed. In reflecting on what she hopes her legacy will be, Hagen shared that “I want to be remembered as someone that showed up.”
While Hagen’s work at PLU isn’t done, she shared that “PLU talks so much about vocation and finding where your greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need, and I was just lucky enough to have that happen to me that I’ve always found that things that I’m passionate about fit in really well to things that I had the opportunity to do here.”
