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| Best Practices: Education |
Well Endowed
Michelle Seaton
01/01/2006
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Funderburke expects to have some input in the process at OSU by
participating on the scholarship committee. More often, this is the closest a
donor can get to directing the funds, although by law there must be enough votes
on the panel so that the donor can be outvoted. Benefactors on these committees,
however, should be forewarned that slogging through the applications can devour
hours and days. “We tell people to get involved when the finalists have already
been chosen,” says Lisa Philp, head of philanthropic services at JPMorgan
Private Bank in New York.
There are a number of approaches that donors
can employ to streamline the endowment process and ensure funds are used
effectively.
Like Funderburke, you can set up a tiered system of targeting
scholarship recipients. It can work just as well for students from a
disadvantaged side of town as students in a particular scholarly discipline.
First, you earmark the scholarship for a particular group, such as those
studying African history. If no students majoring in that subject apply, then
the scholarship would be open to any applicants in the department at large. In
the unlikely event that no suitable candidates apply, the recipients could be
drawn from any discipline or school at the discretion of the dean.
Eastern
University, a Christian school in St. David, Pa., has an endowment from a
now-deceased donor that has been sitting idle for several years. Decades ago,
the donor, whose name the school would not reveal, set up a full academic
scholarship to attend Eastern for a Native American student who grew up on a
reservation in one of a handful of Western states. (Pennsylvania does not have
laws against race-based scholarships.) But as it happens no Native American
applicant has stepped forward to apply recently.
No doubt the prospective
winners would have been better served by the late benefactor if he had instead
funneled his gift through an organization that serves Native Americans, or even
created a private foundation offering a general scholarship to these students
instead of one linked directly to a single university.
A donor at New Mexico
State wanted to endow a $200,000 engineering scholarship for students who
demonstrated a belief in Christianity. Rebecca Dukes, once again, had the
delicate task of explaining that the restrictions he had in mind were
problematic. First, it would be awkward for a state university to create a
scholarship biased toward a particular religion. Second, even with all of the
talented engineering students in need of scholarship funds, it might be
difficult to find a large constituency willing to jump through this particular
hoop. The donor agreed to recast his criteria, creating a scholarship process
under which applicants must state their belief in a higher power, a conviction
that is measured by the applicant’s volunteerism.
Donors who wish to sponsor
a particular discipline in a particular community or even within a particular
neighborhood may find that, rather than approaching a college outright, their
goals might be better met by working with a community foundation. In this case,
the foundation will take on the job of identifying deserving recipients. There
are more than 600 community trust organizations around the country that can help
donors set up named scholarships. The Foundation Center has a list of them on
its website at www.fdncenter.org/funders/grantmaker/gws_comm/comm.htmlMichelle Seaton, based in Massachusetts, is a senior correspondent for Worth.
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