Virginia Commonwealth University has one. So do the University of Richmond and the University of Virginia. St. Catherine’s, St. Christopher’s and Collegiate schools have one each. Harvard University has one big enough to buy 5,000 large private islands in the Caribbean.
What they all have in common is an endowment fund, which is “a collection of financial assets that a school can periodically pull from to cover an array of costs while intentionally growing funds over time,” according to U.S. News & World Report.
Endowment funds are financial staples for public and private colleges and private preparatory schools but are rarely used in funding public school systems. That’s about to change in Richmond, where two entrepreneurs, Michael Bor and Chris Bossola, have created The Endowment Project, a startup with the lofty goal “to eventually create a $65 million endowment for every public high school in the country,” Bor says.
Hitting that ambitious mark will take time, Bor admits, but The Endowment Project is already successful after launching in May 2023 with 12 pilot projects in Richmond-area schools.
The first high school, Douglas S. Freeman, has raised “almost $100,000 so far,” Bor says. The school used the funds to award two first-generation college scholarships, refurbish a concession stand and buy furniture for a flex learning room. “We have received some innovative, flexible furniture,” says Douglas S. Freeman Principal John Marshall. “We are transforming some common space inside the building into a 21st-century learning area.”
The goal for 2024, Bor says, “is to significantly expand and to ultimately include all of Virginia as our first test state. Education is the second-largest destination for philanthropy behind religion, but it all goes to colleges and private schools. Not many people currently give to public high schools.”
(From left) Michael Bor and Chris Bossola at Armstrong High School, where funds from The Endowment Project were used to purchase and install 20 SmartBoards (Photo by Ash Daniel)
Inspiration
While public school endowments are rare, there are a few successful programs. Boston Latin School in Massachusetts, the country’s oldest school and largest of the Boston Public School System, has a $75 million endowment (see story below). The money is raised through the Boston Latin School Association, which is independent from the school. In 2018, Peter Kelly, president and CEO of the BLSA, led the Boston Latin School Prima Perpetua Campaign to $54 million, the largest known campaign on behalf of a single public school in U.S. history.
“It has really developed over the last 30 years,” Kelly says. “There was an ascendence of the notion of private philanthropy supporting public good.”
“It’s a really interesting idea,” Marshall says. “This model works for higher ed, so I think there is a model for that. I support anything that gives more funds to public education. There are a lot of public schools, and a lot of need in our schools, so anybody who is working to support public schools is someone I’m excited about.”
Bor, a graduate of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, says his private school had a $1.5 billion endowment. “Teachers were supported. International programs were offered. It was a fantastic place.”
In 2021, when Bor and his then business partner Will Boland took their startup, CarLotz, public, Bor got a phone call from his old prep school seeking a donation. Boland, who went to Douglas S. Freeman, got no such call. “That started a conversation around fundraising in high schools and how it just doesn’t exist in the public system as it does in the private system,” Bor says. “I realized that there were no gifts because there was no infrastructure for it, no donor platform, no 501(c)(3), no annual report on what happened with your gift and what impact it made. We need to start by building the infrastructure to enable and encourage that level of giving.”
Two years later, Bor resigned from CarLotz and started The Endowment Project LLC with Chris Bossola, a fellow entrepreneur and founder of Need Supply Co., to build the infrastructure to make charitable giving to public high schools easy and focused while ensuring accountability.
Infrastructure
Since then, The Endowment Project has built the technological infrastructure to allow individual schools to set up their own funds, created a database of prospective donors, templated marketing campaigns and established an accountable and transparent way to disburse the funds.
“There is no real setting up that the school has to do,” Bor says. “Everything we are doing is — I don’t want to say independent of the school because we do need them to tell us how to spend the money — but we don’t really ask anything of the school, and that’s key for this model. We are not adding work to the principal or the administration, we don’t have a contract with the schools. We view our customer as the alumni and the school as the beneficiary.”
He continues, “We are building a database of where everyone went to high school and how to reach them today. It’s relatively difficult and expensive technology. We are also building a giving platform so when alumni find out about what we are doing, they are able to give online [and] with Apple Pay or Google Pay.”
Fundraising in high schools doesn’t exist in the public system as it does in the private system.
Michael Bor, co-founder of The Endowment Project
A typical public high school has 400 graduates each year, Bor says. “Most people live about 60 years on average after they graduate, so there are about 24,000 graduates per school. Our systems today can probably figure out a third of those immediately, just through technology. We hope to get to half or more over time.”
Douglas Freeman has “a proud, supportive Freeman community and alumni, and strong alumni base,” Marshall says. “There are almost 70 years of history here. There are a lot of folks who have a lot of interest in making sure we continue a tradition that is really rich and impactful for a lot of years. We have an active [parent-teacher-student association], a very active, wonderful athletic booster program, and several other booster programs. If you have a student here, you might be part of our PTSA. If you have student athlete here, you might be part of our booster program.
The Endowment Project “is for trying to reach those alumni who live outside of the area, like California, or don’t have school-age kids but are still willing to give back,” he continues. “We have a lot of alumni out there, a lot of successful folks that [The Endowment Project] thought they could tap into to help support the school as it is now. Ultimately [The Endowment Project] is a separate organization who are making some donations to this school on behalf of the alumni who have donated to them. They were working with a group we weren’t readily accessing.”
Accountability
Critical to the decision to support The Endowment Project was transparency, Marshall says. He had to make sure that the funds or the collection of funds didn’t duplicate or diminish fundraising for other school supporters.
Prior to deciding to work with The Endowment Project, Marshall included critical groups in the discussions, including the school’s active alumni association. “It was really important to me that we were transparent about the whole thing and all the different groups and constituents I report to, that I serve, were aware and supportive of this,” he says.
On the accountability side, The Endowment Project Foundation was created. An independent 501(c)(3), the Foundation is responsible for raising and distributing funds to benefit individual public high schools. The Endowment Project LLC takes 20% to cover its operating costs for raising the money and charges an annual annual maintenance fee to manage each endowment.
“We have a foundation board with people who are familiar with public education and people who are familiar with the nonprofit sector and who have a passion for what we are trying to accomplish,” says Bill Hoffman, chairperson of The Endowment Project Foundation. “We have a startup board, and we expect that to be growing. Virginia is a pilot program. If it works out, we can take The Endowment Project to a national level.”
Hoffman, a 12-year member and past chairperson of the National Schools Foundation Association, has an extensive education and nonprofit leadership credentials. He heads the Tampa-based consulting firm Bill Hoffman & Associates LLC, specializing in educational engagement strategies and nonprofit leadership transitions.
“I have worked with a number of school districts to understand what they are lacking in terms of funding. People think that public dollars are going into my elementary school, my high school, so there are no needs there. There is certainly a lot of money that goes to public education, but all that is restricted,” he explains.
Building an Endowment
What drew Gerard Robinson, the former secretary of education for Virginia and professor of practice in public policy and law at UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, to join the foundation board was the novelty of the Endowment Project idea and the two entrepreneurs who created it.
“As someone who has worked in government, I know what levers I can pull. I also know when I have to have someone else pull that lever,” Robinson says. “The fact that you have two entrepreneurs saying, ‘Hey let’s create an endowment, let’s do what some of the wealthier private schools are doing.’ Just imagine having some of our urban high schools in Virginia, where you have 20, 30, 100 people deciding they are going to contribute. That’s building wealth. It’s building capital. It’s also building a social network.”
Building an endowment starts with the schools. “We connect with the school principal to see if they want to be part of the pilot program and to see what it takes to go forward,” says Rachel Biundo, executive director of The Endowment Project Foundation.
A web portal is set up for each school and an alumni advisor is selected to help determine which projects the school needs or wants. “If you view the webpage, there is a bucket of projects, including teacher development and the annual fund. The annual fund is money folks can give for the school to use for any need.”
The goal of The Endowment Project Foundation is creating sustainable funding over time for each school that participates. While this may work for high schools in wealthy areas, what is the impact on those communities with a less-prosperous population?
Biundo believes the pilot program of 12 Richmond-area schools is a good cross section of socioeconomic groups. “There are people who care in every school,” she says.
“I don’t think you have to have wealthy people to build wealth,” Robinson says. “You just need a marketing idea, a network of people who want to do it and the belief that it’s not about money. It’s about building wealth. In a previous life I was the director of a nonprofit organization where a group of moms in Philadelphia had a fundraiser. These were all African American women, low-income women, who ended up raising $15,000. The owner of the Philadelphia Phillies was so interested in what had happened that he ended up matching the $15,000. That opened an opportunity to network and then move on from there.”
But does that come at a cost to established educational foundations?
“Their work is a little different than ours,” says Taikein Cooper, executive director of the Richmond Public Schools Education Foundation. “Since 2001, we used to fund individual programs. But 5 1/2 years ago, we decided to move out of individual programs and move into big-dollar programs. School-based grants haven’t been our focus. We have five buckets: literacy, teacher recruitment and retention, career and technical education, the Richmond Public Schools’ RPS200 to combat the learning loss due to COVID and LEAP for English language learning.”
Cooper sees engaging alumni as a huge opportunity for individual schools. While he would prefer The Endowment Project to operate in areas without an educational foundation, he foresees little crossover. “At this time, no one has said that they are not participating with us because of The Endowment Project. I am aware it could happen, but it hasn’t so far.” Cooper has met with The Endowment Project and plans to do so again. “I would love to find a way for us to partner.”
“I see us as a partner to supplement, not to supplant,” Robinson says. “The amount of time you would need to put into human resources, marketing development and research to reach the range of people that we can is beyond the capacity of most high schools.”
Building on the 12-school pilot program, The Endowment Project’s next goal is to contact every school in Virginia — at press time, the organization was up to 71 member schools. After that? Bor hopes to take The Endowment Project to the national level. “While alumni are our focus, there are philanthropists and people who care about education who can also give to the schools.”
Boston Latin School archival photo (Photo courtesy Boston Latin School)
A History of Giving
Boston’s oldest and biggest public school enjoys a substantial endowment
Established in 1635, Boston Latin School is not only the oldest existing public school in the country, but it is the top high school in the Boston Public School System and ranked No. 33 in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report. It produced five signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and four Massachusetts governors.
Boston Latin School is also the richest public high school in the country, with an endowment of $75 million. Perhaps that’s not surprising for a school that was started by donations. However, its financial trajectory is anything but historic.
“The association itself came into existence in 1844,” says Peter Kelly, president and CEO of the Boston Latin School Association, an independent, affiliated nonprofit that works with the school to raise and manage endowment assets. “But its ambitions as a fundraising organization were quite modest for many decades. It was really only in the ‘90s that fundraising became a serious focus, and it has really developed over last 30 years.”
Kelly, who has managed the school association for almost 15 years, takes pride in the resources they’ve raised. “The public has always been amenable in modest form to support the ambitions of talented educators and talented public-school students,” he says. “We happened to have some folks in our alumni association who were successful and saw the potential to do something really big [for the school] with really big money. ... They had a running start with a modest endowment. Over time, it’s been a train that has picked up momentum.”
The results have been tremendous. In addition to several programs, the endowment has funded seven positions at the school, including a director of athletics, all outside the Boston Public Schools’ budget. “People assume these positions are funded by state resources, but there is no director of athletics at any Boston public school,” Kelly says.
And that’s the secret to making an endowment work for both school systems and donors. “We have people who opt out simply because they think it’s the city’s responsibility and they don’t want us relieving the taxpayer,” Kelly says. “The way we answer that is by trying really hard not to fund something that is funded in another public school. We don’t pay for the football coach because the football coach exists in many other schools. We do pay for a bus to take our teams out to suburban schools because we have chosen to compete with suburban schools.” Kelly notes that BLSA does not fund classroom teachers or college scholarships.
While raising money for one of the oldest and largest schools in the country may be an easier sell, Kelly believes The Endowment Project has a great chance of succeeding. “Every school has successful alumni, and every school presumably has charitable alumni. I believe there is an opportunity for success.”
But Kelly admits it won’t be easy. “It’s an unusual model and it’s an uphill climb. ... Urban public education is in the political crosshairs in a lot of ways,” he says, “but I almost think the fact that The Endowment Project is independent of specific schools could be a boost to what they are trying to do. It puts them as sort of removed from the politics.”
