Vandever Batten sets the gold standard for helping Charlotte’s nonprofits envision and fund their future. We have a hand and heart in initiatives that have made our region more resilient and vibrant.
At Vandever Batten, we know what makes an organization
invaluable. Let’s get to work.
Lauren Batten has enjoyed 30 years in fundraising, grant making, and strategic organizational planning, with a campaign success rate of 126% and more than $400 million raised to enrich the Charlotte region. Long after founding Vandever Batten in 1999, she recently served as in-house advancement director for Charlotte Country Day School to help propel the institution through the most transformational season of its 77-year history. After refreshing its brand, conducting a strategic planning process, hosting a master facility planning process and comprehensive capital campaign, and shaping a more innovative advancement function, Country Day raised an historic $100 million over the last decade, adding more than $25 million to the endowment’s corpus and doubling the Annual Fund to $2.4 million annually.
Lauren was previously a vice president with the First Union Foundation (now Wells Fargo), vice president for development for the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Arts & Science Council, and regional program director of Wellesley College. She found her love for consulting as an associate director with Coxe Curry & Associates, Atlanta’s premier nonprofit consulting firm.
In the community, Lauren is an elder of Covenant Presbyterian Church and helped Covenant’s recent capital campaign raise more than $12 million for affordable housing and preschool education. She serves on Queens University of Charlotte’s Board of Visitors and has chaired every reunion since graduating from Duke University in 1992, breaking the University’s 25th reunion fundraising record. An alumna of Leadership Charlotte and founding member of the Women’s Impact Fund, she received a Women in Business Achievement Award from the Business Journal. She is also on the Advisory Board for ParentChild+, a national nonprofit helping at risk families break the poverty cycle through education. Beyond raising her three children, one of Lauren’s greatest joys is being a reader with the Read, Roar, Soar program at Highland Renaissance Academy.
Who is Vandever?
Vern Vandever was Lauren Batten’s great grandfather. He and his four older brothers owned and operated Vandever’s — Tulsa’s first modern-day department store — at the turn of the 20th century. Vern was a generous and active civic leader beyond being a pioneering retail merchant. He valued relationships deeply, which he illustrated by greeting customers and their children by name as they entered the store, and sacrificing to keep all of Vandever’s employees fully engaged during the depression. His kindness, generosity, and civic-minded leadership serve as a spiritual guide to Vandever Batten’s work today.