Endowments

On Tuesday the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown District's only school of its type, received a $17.2 million endowment from the Eugene B. Casey Foundation.

"We have struggled for so long and waited so long for an angel, and now we've got one," Dr. Mary Jane Ayers said.

At a time when for-profit theaters may be feeling the pressure to cave in to the economic pinch and roll out the revivals, nonprofit San Francisco-based American Conservatory Theater is still taking chances.

Endowments fared well last year, achieving investment returns of about 12 percent, but that is far less than what they achieved in 2009, when returns topped 20 percent, according to two studies — one of foundations and the other of charities — released by the Commonfund Institute.

While returns were smaller compared with last year, they were a marked improvement over 2008, when returns on investment portfolios dropped 26 percent.

An $800 million endowment from the Walton Family Foundation will help fund Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art "in perpetuity," museum officials said Wednesday.

The museum, the brainchild of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. heiress Alice Walton, is under construction in Bentonville and scheduled to open Nov. 11. It is expected to exhibit one of the finest collections of American art in the world.

Teach For America, the education organization that places recent college graduates in low-income public schools, is getting $100 million to launch its first-ever endowment in hopes of making the grass-roots organization a permanent fixture in education. The program — which is now in communities from Atlanta to rural New Mexico to Los Angeles — announced Thursday that four philanthropists are joining to create a stable, long-term source of money. It's welcome news for an organization that had more than 46,000 applications for just 4,400 teaching slots this academic year.

Foundation and charity endowments grew by an average of 21 percent last fiscal year, but that was not enough to make up for the sharp declines of 2008, according to two studies by the Commonfund Institute.

More than 170 grant makers in one survey saw their investments increase by an average of 20.9 percent, compared with a 26-percent drop in 2008. In a separate study, 66 cultural, religious, and social-service groups recorded very similar returns in their endowments.

The National Endowment for the Arts is inaugurating a new program Monday to give active military personnel and their families free admission all summer to hundreds of U.S. museums, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection.

BOSTON, September 22, 2009, Reuters — Yale University said on Tuesday that its endowment produced an investment loss of 24.6 percent in the fiscal year ended June 30, when big bets on private equity holdings, real estate and commodities soured.

September 13, 2009 — Like many donors to universities, Dr. David B. Stevens wasn’t surprised when he got a letter from the University of Kentucky this summer saying that the fellowships he established had taken a hit from the stock market.

September 11, 2009, The Wall Street Journal ­— It's a tie in the Harvard-Yale investment game. Both schools were thrown for colossal losses.