Dr. Brenda Solomon
Vice President, Development
Brenda Solomon, Ed.D., a native Californian, returned to southern California after serving in several roles at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK. During her 18 years at OSU, Brenda was a Manager in Continuing Education bringing national recognition to the University with the partnership she created with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Because of Brenda’s efforts, the partnership creates 700 summer jobs for teachers annually and brought in $1milliion in economic impact to the state.
Most recently, Brenda served as the Senior Director of Development for the OSU Foundation and has been in this role for eight years. Brenda has raised $60.689 million for the university in the form of cash and planned gifts.
Brenda is looking forward to bringing together donor’s passions with Marymount College’s priorities to create opportunities for individual and corporate/foundation donors to provide transformational gifts that will benefit both the faculty and students at Marymount.
Brenda has been very successful in her current role in engaging new donors and creating sustainable relationships through her focus on stewardship and looks forward to building on the momentum President Michael Brophy has created.
She said, “President Brophy is a true visionary, and I look forward to being part of the Marymount family.” Solomon will lead an already successful fundraising team as they work together to identify donors who have an interest in supporting the college’s priorities and making a difference in the lives of others.
Brenda was the first in her family to obtain a college degree, and holds a doctorate in Adult Education from OSU. Her dissertation research entitled, “Computer Assisted Technology Transfer: Understanding Technology Diffusion in Small to Medium Sized Manufacturers” was funded through the Department of Defense. Solomon received her master’s degree from Loyola Marymount University, where she wrote a screenplay for her thesis. Her bachelor’s degree is from California State University Northridge in Radio-Television Broadcasting. Prior to working in higher education, Brenda served as a broadcast business affairs consultant negotiating contracts for producers on large films and industrial videos. She also served as a voice-over agent and office manager for Special Artist Agency. Solomon has also served as an adjunct professor in adult and continuing education teaching graduate level courses on funding for adult education and holds an alternative teaching certificate in journalism from Oklahoma. She also has participated in numerous fundraising professional development seminars including those provided by the Indiana University Center for Philanthropy and is a member of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).
Brenda has presented at numerous conferences throughout her career and most recently presented “Assessing the Learning Strategies of Your Donors, Yourself and Your Colleagues” at the 2011 Big 12 Development Conference. She has also published an article on the Economic Impact: One Methodology for Valuing Adult Education Programs in the Journal of Adult Education. Brenda was selected to serve on the Strategic Planning team at OSU by OSU President Schmidly to evaluate all system-wide OSU strategic plans and was appointed by the Oklahoma Speaker of the House for eight years to serve on the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education Minority Teacher Recruitment Center committee to provide insight as the only state-wide research university appointee. She also served as the President of Region V (representing five state and two Canadian provinces) for the University Continuing Education Association.
Brenda is married to attorney G. Michael Solomon and they have three sons. Joshua age 13, Michael a junior at OSU and Mark an OSU graduate in engineering employed at Honeywell in Phoenix.
