Endowments

The Surdna Foundation plans to put $100 million of its roughly $1 billion endowment into investments that seek both financial and social returns. "The investments are an experiment," Shuaib Siddiqui, director of impact investing at Surdna, said. "We’re carving out this $100 million pool of capital to figure out: Can we continue to meet the needs…

When Robert Morin, a University of New Hampshire alumnus who worked for nearly 50 years in the school's library, died in 2015, he left his entire $4 million estate to the university. The university school said it'd spend $100,00 on the library, $2.5 million on renovations to the student center and $1 million on a scoreboard for its new $25 million football stadium. That last bit has people very angry...

Is an endowment campaign worth it? Do you ever wish your organization had an endowment? Do your board members believe an endowment campaign is the answer to all of your fundraising woes? If you said, “Yes,” you’re not alone. It would be fantastic if you had a huge reserve, generating interest for your organization. You could…

Each year, more than 87,000 U.S. foundations make grants to help improve their communities, their nation and their world. With more than $800 billion of foundation assets, these annual grants total more than $56 billion—doing a lot of good. Each year, however, nearly $750 billion remains in endowments—where it usually is invested for the single bottom…

With a $22 billion endowment, Stanford University is hardly hurting for money. Yet the West Coast school keeps pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, and its fundraising efforts are pulling away from the rest of the nation’s elite schools, including the traditional Ivy League powerhouses on the other side of the country. Stanford…

With many of the largest U.S. college endowments at record values, two congressional committees that determine tax policy jointly opened an inquiry about how the wealthiest schools manage and spend those funds. The Republican leadership of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee emailed letters late Monday to 56 private schools…

NPQ has reported on large university foundations in the past, with an emphasis on the debate over whether public policy should be changed to force more endowed funds to be disbursed to fund scholarships and salaries. The largest U.S. universities have billions in endowments (and growing); meanwhile, tuitions continue to rise, and the nation’s student…

The California Institute of Technology has announced a $100 million endowment gift from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation—to be used as the Caltech leadership chooses. To strengthen Caltech for generations to come, the institute's president and provost have chosen to dedicate the second-largest gift in its history to funding fellowships for graduate students. Caltech…

AccuFund Inc., the provider of nonprofit accounting and fundraising solutions, shared its results from a commissioned survey conducted by NonProfit PRO of its readers (nonprofit finance professionals and top organization management) to benchmark the methods used to manage endowment accounting. The 2015-2016 Endowment Accounting Insights & Analysis Survey sought information central to endowment accounting management,…

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