Laura Hansen Dean
February 9, 1951 - July 7, 2026

Our profession lost one of its greats: a dedicated mentor, educator, and innovator, with the death of Laura Hansen Dean on July 7, 2026, aged 75, from cancer. I was lucky to meet Laura in 1976 when we were part of the first class at the Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis, with a third of the class women. She was the president of our Women’s Caucus, and I was treasurer. To the dean’s delight, we held an all-day conference at the school—a first. She had to visit and negotiate with the dean repeatedly, as many sensitive and potent issues affected the first female students in those days. A group of about ten of us have had an annual reunion since we graduated in 1980, a great delight and a commitment that has kept us connected. We discovered she had lived for a year in the same town of 400 that I was raised in, our dads knew each other, and she had been a third grader with my older sister. Serendipity!

We know Laura as a prominent lawyer and charitable gift planner of more than four decades. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from the IU School of Law at Indianapolis in 1979, and had a B.A. from Ball State University in Muncie, IN. She maintained active state bar memberships in Texas and Indiana, and most recently served as the senior director of gift design and documentation at the University of Texas at Austin. Throughout her productive career, she was key in securing planned gifts for Ball State University, the University of Colorado, the University of Texas at Austin, and several community foundations—mostly in Indiana. She even went to NYC to meet Dave Letterman, Ball State’s famous graduate. She was a very determined fundraiser, with goals. Laura met her first husband, Mike Dean, at age 17 at Ball State University, where as a couple they served as house parents for a house of adolescent girls—people skills! When Mike was working on a roof, she would climb up with her law books to keep him company. Her second husband, Tim, she loved and cared for devotedly, including his medical needs. And the last three years of her life, she met online and then married Ray DuPont from Indianapolis, a very happy union. I always called her the Matriarch, incredibly loving and supportive to her mom, a nurse, and to her siblings, two of whom survive her, their children, and to three cousins who had lived with them in childhood.

Laura served on the board of CGP (then NCPG), and five of us—Laura, Betsy Mangone, Cynthia Wilson Krause, Kathryn Miree and I—were all inducted into its Hall of Fame in 2018. Laura is the reason we were inducted together; she was the first of us in consulting and made sure ALL of us could succeed in that work, collaboratively and professionally and not undermining our expertise. She even employed me for two years before I formed my own company in 1999. She was the key factor in the five of us launching our own careers, just as she mentored countless gift planners in her decades. We and the profession are forever in her debt as are the many communities that benefited from her fundraising skills and ethics. Indiana mourns her passing and knows we are not alone in such a profound loss. Laura leaves a lasting legacy: the mission statement of our work and practice, and a lifelong practice of generous collegiality to her highly-valued colleagues.

Pamela J. Davidson, J.D.