Dr. Barton Discusses Endowments

You know, it's difficult to build an endowment, because for most small Christian colleges and universities, they have so many demands for their resources. So, when I get asked the question, "should we have an endowment?" my answer is absolutely yes. I mean, budget $50K a year that goes into the endowment--or $10K a year. Budget something. And then as you're talking to donors you can say, "we have an endowment fund and we're
building it." You'll find that people will become interested in making gifts to your endowment or doing planned gifts so that at the time of their death or after a certain number of years, assets would flow to the endowment. And I really encourage college presidents also when they have a capital campaign to build a building, that they include in part of that campaign an endowment to underwrite the operational costs of the
building. And it's one small way to start gradually building endowments for a university that don't have large endowments right now. So there's no quick fix to building endowments. It's one gift at a time; one estate plan at a time; but if you get started you can be successful. And to some extent, you're planting seeds for a tree that someone else is going to enjoy the shade of in the future.