With shrinking budget appropriations, challenging student demographics, and rising expenses, today’s public higher education institutions are looking to their foundations for more resources.
As institutionally-related foundations seek to provide these resources, foundation board members should make certain that they are addressing 3 important questions:
- Separate. Is our foundation-institution relationship appropriately separate?
- Secondary. Does our board and foundation leadership understand that we derive our purpose as a foundation from the institution we support?
- Supportive. Are we being as aligned, cooperative, and planful as we can be with our institution’s leaders so that our support helps them in the ways they most need?
From my experience, most foundations are appropriately separate. Most foundation and university leaders understand the legal and fiduciary reasons behind the firewall between private gift resources and state resources. Separate, of course, doesn’t mean unrelated. In fact, the healthiest foundation-university relationships have a lot of support going in both directions.
Similarly, most foundations recognize their mission is derived from the university’s mission. They don’t view being a “secondary” organization as less than. In fact, many foundation board members embrace their derived mission because they care so deeply and meaningfully for the university.
However, it can be common for foundation and university leaders to struggle to identify how best the foundation can strategically support the institution. Communication gaps, planning missteps, and even personality clashes can become significant hurdles in the quest for foundations to be sufficiently supportive of the institutions they serve.
If our aim is to create foundations that are meeting the growing needs of the university’s they support, a good place to begin is by asking, “Are we sufficiently separate from, secondary to, and supportive of our university?”
Getting the relationship right is always the first step.
