The United Negro College Fund announced a donation of $100 million from the Lilly Endowment, the single largest unrestricted gift to the organization since its founding 80 years ago.
The gift announced Thursday will go toward a pooled endowment for the 37 historically Black colleges and universities that form UNCF’s membership, with the goal of boosting the schools’ long-term financial stability.
HBCUs, which have small endowments compared with other colleges, have seen an increase in donations since the racial justice protests spurred by the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota. Michael Lomax, president and CEO of UNCF, said donors today no longer question the need for HBCUs and instead ask how gifts to the schools can have the largest impact.
The Lilly Endowment provides financial support for coverage of religion and philanthropy at The Associated Press.
“They’re trusting the judgment of the United Negro College Fund to make a decision about where best to deploy this very significant and sizable gift,” Lomax said. “We don’t get a lot of gifts like that.”
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 gift from the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment alone, when split across all member organizations, will double the size of their individual endowments.
“We don’t have the same asset base that private non-HBCUs have,” Lomax said. HBCUs lack “a strong balance sheet as a result. And they don’t really have the ability to invest in the things that they think are important.”
Schools with substantial unrestricted financial resources are better able to weather crises and invest in large expenses that have long-term impact, such as infrastructure repairs.
The financial disparities between HBCUs and their counterparts, in many ways, mirror the racial wealth gap between Black and white families, particularly in the ability to create lasting wealth. The pooled endowment, Lomax said, is meant to provide some of that stability to member schools.
