In Foundation and Endowment Investing, authors Lawrence Kochard and Cathleen Rittereiser offer you a detailed look at this fascinating world and the strategies used to achieve success within it. Filled with in-depth insights and expert advice, this reliable resource profiles twelve of the most accomplished Chief Investment Officers within today’s foundation and endowment community—chronicling their experiences, investment philosophies, and the challenges they face—and shares important lessons that can be used as you go about your own investment endeavors.
In the years since the now-classic Pioneering Portfolio Management was first published, the global investment landscape has changed dramatically -- but the results of David Swensen's investment strategy for the Yale University endowment have remained as impressive as ever. Year after year, Yale's portfolio has trumped the marketplace by a wide margin, and, with over $20 billion added to the endowment under his twenty-three-year tenure, Swensen has contributed more to Yale's finances than anyone ever has to any university in the country. What may have seemed like one among many success stories in the era before the Internet bubble burst emerges now as a completely unprecedented institutional investment achievement. In this fully revised and updated edition, Swensen, author of the bestselling personal finance guide Unconventional Success, describes the investment process that underpins Yale's endowment. He provides lucid and penetrating insight into the world of institutional funds management, illuminating topics ranging from asset-allocation structures to active fund management. Swensen employs an array of vivid real-world examples, many drawn from his own formidable experience, to address critical concepts such as handling risk, selecting advisors, and weathering market pitfalls. Swensen offers clear and incisive advice, especially when describing a counterintuitive path. Conventional investing too often leads to buying high and selling low. Trust is more important than flash-in-the-pan success. Expertise, fortitude, and the long view produce positive results where gimmicks and trend following do not. The original Pioneering Portfolio Management outlined a commonsense template for structuring a well-diversified equity-oriented portfolio. This new edition provides fund managers and students of the market an up-to-date guide for actively managed investment portfolios.
Praise for Endowment Building "This comprehensive work shows how endowments can provide multiple opportunities for donor involvement when the solicitation program is well designed and integrated with other fund development and program goals. Emphasizing the critical ethical issues inherent in marketing and structuring endowment gifts, it is an excellent reference manual and training guide." --Joanne Scanlan, PhD, Senior Vice President for Professional Development Council on Foundations, Washington, D.C. "Endowment Building provides both practical, hands-on advice and a philosophical, inspirational framework to guide novice and experienced mission-based organizations. Given the demographic opportunities and challenges facing the nonprofit world, this book is a must-read." --Nancy Herrold Strapp, Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer Buckhorn Children & Family Services, Louisville, Kentucky "A comprehensive guide on how to start, grow, and maintain an endowment. It shows how to put theory into practice with numerous real-life examples and success stories." --Joe Bull, Director of Planned Giving, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio "After you read this book, you will know what to do and how to do it. It is a wonderful tool for new and emerging community foundations!" --Kay M. Marquet, President and CEO, Community Foundation Sonoma County, California "Endowment Building is an insightful, succinct, easy-to-read resource on building successful endowment programs. It's a well-organized guide containing practical suggestions and reminders of things development professionals know but some-times forget." --Jeff W. Smith, Vice President and Trust Counsel, Baptist Foundation of Texas, Dallas
You often begin the monumental task of building an endowment with few resources, little support and even less time. In this book you will learn how to overcome these pressures and also learn the process of setting up and securing an endowment fund. We will examine where money comes from, where it goes and how it grows. We will set forth rules and guidelines for its management. We will unlock and outline the ways in which an endowment fund can become a most effective fundraising investment.After reading this book, you will not only have a solid grasp of what endowment is and how it works, you will be ready to build an endowment right from the start.
"This excellent and thorough guide to asset management for foundations and endowments of $1 billion or less can help your foundation or endowment achieve these goals. The result? More money for your foundation's objectives - and more assurance that, in all market conditions, those objectives will continue to be funded." "This expert-authored guidebook gives you step-by-step directions for putting to work asset allocation methods appropriate for foundations and endowments. It tells you how to take full advantage of state-of-the-art financial techniques currently being used by multibillion dollar foundations. It shows you how your foundation or endowment assets can be managed for maximization of both capital growth and income return."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Time for Endowment Building is Now: Why and How to Secure Your Organization’s Future describes endowment contributions both through outright and deferred gift giving. It puts the concept of endowment development front and center and explains the steps and mindset that are necessary to create the capacity to build and increase the endowment of an organization. The role and responsibility of the executive and the board in encouraging endowment development are described, and a chapter is devoted to the identification of endowment prospects not through wealth analysis or “major gift giving” but by donative history. A highlight of the book is a case study of the Harold Grinspoon Foundation’s LIFE & LEGACY Program that provides training and mentoring as well as incentives to local community-based organizations to encourage the building of endowment funds. The book will be particularly appealing to boards and staff members of those not-for-profit organizations contemplating whether to launch an endowment program or are in the beginning stages of doing so. This book will be valuable to veterans in the field considering their policies in relation to the use of endowment contributions as well as the marketing of them to prospects and donors. It will also be of interest to those teaching fundraising courses in not-for-profit management programs.
The book is a history of the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience and an assessment of its effectiveness in advancing neuroscience. The book discusses the Fund's early and steady commitment to basic science as well as it's tradition of leveraging relatively modest dollars to make a big difference in careers and the field overall. The fund exists strictly to give awards and create a community of peers through an annual conference dedicated to research. In near unison, scientists who have received awards say they were able to test a risky idea, get their career off the ground, or make a significant change in their career because of McKnight's flexible dollars. The book consists of three parts: (1) origins--including both the funder and the scientists who shaped the program; (2) a review of the science to show how McKnight awardees have advanced the field; and (3) 10 keys to success. We also have an interview with Julius Axelrod (one of the early advisors, done shortly before his death in 2004) and stories of how awardees used their McKnight grants, plus other information.
Trustees are responsible for the stewardship of assets and for implementing the mission of their endowment or foundation. Almost invariably trustees delegate the management of those assets to agents who are investment professionals. In this increasingly sophisticated and litigious financial world there can be a growing gap of comprehension, exacerbated by mathematics and jargon, between trustees who are responsible and agents who are accountable. This book aims to fill that gap. The book draws on the author's own experience and research and that of generations of investment professionals and academics to explain the fundamentals of investment strategy. Key features are therefore: Foreword by George Keane (founder and former president of Commonfund, won the first ever Lifetime Achievement Award from Foundation & Endowment Money Management) one of the icons of endowment fund management in the US Aimed at professional trustees An holistic approach to strategy Avoidance of jargon and mathematics Focus on principles underlying asset strategy
The primary objective of perpetual endowment funds and long-lived trust funds is to generate spendable cash. Ideally, these cash disbursements would be stable from one year to the next and would grow to keep pace with inflation. Too-high disbursements today would lead to too-low disbursements tomorrow, and vice versa. Setting a proper spending rate is difficult. Trustees often set percentage spending rates based on the real returns they expect to earn from their investments and then link those spending rates to their funds’ market values. But linking spending to market values causes problems. One problem is that market values of common asset classes, such as stocks and bonds, are volatile. Trustees fight this volatility by averaging market values over time, but averaging does not work very well. Another problem is that trustees who base spending on market values often understandably come to believe that market values themselves determine spending. In other words, if market values increase (or fall) by a significant amount, then trustees feel justified in increasing (or cutting) spending by similar amounts. This belief is misguided. For equities, the predominant asset class in most endowment and trust funds, the source of returns is not market values but, rather, corporate profits. This brief argues that, counter to common practice, trustees should turn their backs on market values and instead focus on the real cash flows that their assets can generate. For bonds, this would mean their real interest rate. For equities, this would mean their underlying profits. This focus on asset cash flows, rather than on asset market values, is a better way to go. This brief offers two spending rules based on cash flows. One looks at corporate dividends, and the other at corporate profits. Trustees who base spending on market values usually include bonds in their funds to dampen market value swings. A 30% bond allocation is not uncommon. Yet the cash-flow spending rules described here lead to less volatile spending, even when applied to a 100% equity portfolio, than that of a 30% bond/70% equity portfolio whose spending is based on market values. In addition, spending rules based on cash flows free trustees from fretting about market values. Diversification can still be beneficial, but no longer do trustees need to diversify primarily to dampen market downturns. When equity market values decline, as they invariably will from time to time, trustees may be able to say, “We don’t care.” Furthermore, spending rules based on cash flows enable trustees to keep score. Trustees of perpetual endowment funds and of long-lived personal trust funds often feel obligated to be intergenerationally equitable—that is, to treat current and future beneficiaries the same. The near-universal way to evaluate intergenerational equity is to look at market values. Instead, a spending rule based on cash flows works better. Finally, basing spending on cash flows, rather than on market values, encourages trustees to focus on something that is very important but often overlooked: the long-term health of the economies in which their funds are invested. No spending rule is perfect. But many trustees who now base spending on market values would benefit by focusing on asset cash flows instead.
