Last Tuesday it was announced that we, along with 384 institutions, are receiving a large gift from Ms. MacKenzie Scott, an author, activist and philanthropist. Our gift from her is $30 million. The combined total of gifts that were announced is over $4 billion.
We were tremendously surprised, thrilled and moved to tears when we were informed of this transformational gift. As she announced her gifts on Tuesday, Ms. Scott described “using a data-driven approach to identifying organizations with strong leadership teams and results, with special attention to those operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital.” She went on to describe the kind of work done by recipient organizations including “education for historically marginalized and underserved people,” an apt descriptor of Lehman College.
By giving in the way she is, Ms. Scott is “disrupting the norms around billionaire philanthropy by moving quickly,” an expert on charities said as quoted by the New York Times in its reporting. Many organizations receiving gifts from Ms. Scott provide basic needs and are particularly stretched in this moment of the pandemic and financial crisis. Those include many food banks, Goodwill, Meals on Wheels, Easter Seals and others. There were also a number of colleges, most of them like Lehman, effectively serving the historically marginalized and underserved; her first round of 116 gifts included six HBCUs.
To give you an idea of the scale of $30 million, Lehman currently has an endowment of $6 million; City College has an endowment of over $300 million and Harvard has an endowment of $40 billion, or ten times the total of what Ms. Scott just gave out. So, is this a lot of money, and what is it for?
Yes, by any measure this is a lot of money and it will be empowering for Lehman. And, it is a little like receiving a MacArthur Foundation award. We were selected for what we do and how well we do it. Now our challenge is to make this a gift that keeps on giving. In receiving it, I was told very clearly that we would not receive another from Ms. Scott, and that we could not apply for another one. I was also told that Ms. Scott believes in the organizations she has selected, and that they know best what to do with their resources, so she would not specify how we use the funds.
So, what will we do with these funds when they arrive, which will probably be in early January, after the CUNY Board of Trustees formally accepts them, as it must do? Although Lehman College is not an organization whose mission is to fill basic community needs like Meals on Wheels, we are committed to helping our students address their food insecurity and other emergency needs they have. This year, we have received generous support to do this from the Robin Hood Foundation, the Petrie Foundation, the Campaign for Lehman, Giving Tuesday and many individuals in the Lehman Community. Some of these new funds from Ms. Scott will also be used to fill these immediate basic needs, particularly in the coming months when so many Lehman students are having a very difficult time keeping their lives together. (By the way, Congress has finally agreed on a new stimulus bill, which seems to include $20 billion for higher education, about half of which would be designated for direct student aid, so this may be another source of support for students’ needs in the new year.)
Of course, we have many other needs at Lehman, but it is important to note what these funds are not intended for. They are not a way to mitigate our near-term operating budget challenges, which are due to what we hope are temporary decreases in state funding. They are not the answer to every long-standing and legitimate need at the college, of which there are many. Very importantly, they are not a replacement for funding for initiatives and projects that can be obtained from other sources in the future.
Then what is this new funding for? Although we received the funds with no strings attached, we did not receive them with no values attached. In our case, they are for meeting basic needs and “education for historically marginalized and underserved people.” Education is our core mission and what we do as an institution. This gift will be used for four broad categories that further our educational mission:
- Student Impact: Immediate basic student needs, scholarships, and other activities that support students
- Academic Excellence: Faculty capacity building; pedagogy and curricular innovation, and other activities that support enhancing what we do;
- Campus-wide initiatives that are cross-disciplinary, some of which also further Lehman’s role as a catalytic anchor institution in the Bronx; and,
- Institutional Capacity Building: Building our ability to attract additional outside funding for a wide range of initiatives and projects, thus amplifying the gift.
These areas will be funded by two different methods. The largest will be through endowments that produce income from investments that is available year after year. The other is direct spending that is non-replaceable and over a finite period of time. The largest amount will be in endowment because that helps guarantee funding not only for students and faculty today, but into the future as well.
The four funding categories I mentioned above are broad and could support a wide range activities in the coming years. Because we will invest in capacity building, we should expect that in the future, the endowment funds will grow with additional gifts. We will be ambitious and set a significant goal for fundraising over the next five years. This gift brings recognition and credibility that will help us convince other donors that Lehman College is a good investment of their resources.
I have been asked about the process of deciding which initiatives and areas will receive funds now and in the future, and there isn’t a full answer for that question yet. At the college, we allocate resources based on administrative decisions—the president and the cabinet--that are made in consultation with the Lehman Senate Budget Committee and the Faculty Budget and Promotion Committee. Our resources need to be allocated in ways that further our strategic plans and our mission, and those groups always need to be sure that happens.
Some of the funds will be earmarked right away, including what I have already mentioned for basic student support through the food bank, microgrants and scholarships. This week, I received a thorough report from the Campus Climate, Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, and acting on some of its recommendations will require funding that this gift can help provide. Other funds will be allocated over time for initiatives that are deemed important for the college and likely to produce significant outcomes.
In conclusion, this is a gift for the students and faculty at Lehman today, and for students and faculty at Lehman a generation from now. We should think of this not as $30 million, but as $1 million annually from endowment funds year after year, plus an additional $1 million per year in the first four years for shorter-term efforts. In a few years from now, with successful fundraising, we should have $2 million, $3 million, $4 million, and eventually $5 million and more in annual income from our endowment that is available to support college activities that our regular budget does not fund. That growth in funding should be our goal, and the gift last week from MacKenzie Scott is a major start towards achieving it.
Daniel Lemons
