The United Negro College Fund announced a $100 million donation from the Lilly Endowment, the largest unrestricted gift to the organization since its founding 80 years ago.
The gift announced Thursday will provide a pooled endowment for UNCF’s 37 historically black colleges and universities, with the goal of increasing the schools’ long-term financial stability.
HBCUs, which have small endowments compared to other colleges, have seen an increase in donations since the racial justice protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota. Michael Lomax, president and CEO of UNCF, said donors today are no longer questioning the need for HBCUs, but are instead asking how donations to the schools can have the greatest impact.
The president and CEO of the Lilly Endowment said the gift continues the organization’s history of supporting UNCF’s work. “The UNCF programs we have helped fund in the past have been successful, and we are confident that the efforts supported by this bold campaign will have a major impact on UNCF’s member institutions and the lives of their students ” said N. Clay Robbins. in a statement.
The Lilly Endowment provides financial support for reporting on religion and philanthropy at The Associated Press.
Lomax said he hopes other charities will take note of Lilly’s trust in UNCF’s vision by making an unrestricted gift.
“They rely on the judgment of the United Negro College Fund to make a decision on where to best deploy this very important and sizable gift,” Lomax said. “We don’t get many gifts like this.”
As part of a $1 billion capital campaign, UNCF aims to raise $370 million for a shared endowment, Lomax said. For some UNCF schools, the Lilly Foundation gift alone, when distributed among all member organizations, will double the size of their individual donations.
On a per-student basis, private non-HBCU donations are about seven times larger than private HBCU donations, according to a report from The Century Foundation. For public schools, non-HBCU institutions average a per-student endowment that is three times greater than that of their public HBCU counterparts.
“We don’t have the same asset base as private non-HBCUs,” Lomax said. HBCUS “does not have a strong balance sheet as a result. And they don’t really have the opportunity to invest in the things that matter to them.”
Schools with significant, unrestricted financial resources are better able to weather crises and invest in major expenses that have long-term consequences, such as infrastructure repairs.
The financial disparities between HBCUs and their counterparts in many ways reflect the racial wealth gap between black and white families, especially in the ability to create lasting wealth. The pooled donation, Lomax said, is intended to provide some of that stability to the member schools.
“Black families have fewer assets than non-black families,” Lomax said. “They live paycheck to paycheck. Many of our smaller HBCUs live semester after semester on tuition revenue. They need a pillow. This is that pillow.”
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