Major Gifts

Alumni and Friends of the Harvard Graduate School of Education can have a unique impact on the School's mission and well-being through major gifts for our highest priorities. The HGSE major gifts team is prepared to work with interested donors to help them advance their philanthropic goals and priorities. While each philanthropic conversation and decision is unique, major gifts staff will help donors with two broad considerations: the structure of a gift and its purpose or topical focus.

Structuring Your Gift

Major gifts may be directed for current use or toward an endowed fund. Gifts awarded for current use are spent down during a set timeframe, typically three to five years. Gifts to establish or increase endowed funds are used in perpetuity, with a reasonable percentage of the income generated from the gift principal spent each year.

Donors also have the option of making unrestricted gifts or of designating them to particular topics or issues. The advantage of unrestricted gifts, especially when incorporated in endowed funds, is that they provide HGSE's leaders maximum flexibility to address pivotal demands and needs in the education field, both now and into the future. On the other hand, designated gifts, when carefully established, allow donors to connect their particular interests with the ongoing work of HGSE faculty and students.

The major gifts team can help donors determine what gift structure is best for them, while simultaneously bolstering HGSE's priorities.

Directing Your Gift: High Impact Philanthropic Opportunities

HGSE's emerging strategic and academic plan features four areas requiring philanthropic partnerships. Taken together, these four areas represent the School's highest priorities. Each priority ensures that HGSE has the human and physical capital necessary to produce the best talent and knowledge necessary to improve education. Working with members of the major gifts team, donors can determine personally rewarding ways in which to support one or more of these areas.

Faculty Growth and Renewal

Strategic, aggressive growth and renewal of the faculty are critical to achieving the Ed School's mission over the next decade and beyond. This imperative arises not only from the demographics of the current, small faculty but also from the need to power a dramatic expansion of HGSE's impact on education practice, policy, and research at the school, district, state, and national levels. Donors can participate in this critical expansion of the School's impact through their gifts of named endowed professorships or named endowed faculty development funds.

$4,000,000* Named Endowed Professorship

$2,000,000* Named Endowed Faculty Development Fund

*In February 2006, Harvard announced a $50M Professorship Challenge that will enable donors of endowed professorships to earn a $1M match when they commit $3M to the establishment of a new professorship and donors of faculty development funds to earn a match of $500,000 when they commit $1.5M to establish a new faculty development fund.

Fellowships and Financial Aid

HGSE has a long record of preparing exceptional leaders in education. We must continue to enroll a student body of unsurpassed quality, not only by drawing from the best of the national pool of education school applicants, but also by attracting exceptional individuals who might not otherwise be considering a career in education. A key factor in the School's ability to enroll such students is the expansion of its fellowship and financial aid opportunities. Through their gifts of fellowship and financial aid funds, alumni and friends can help eliminate the financial barriers to an HGSE education.

$250,000 Named Endowed Fellowship Fund

$100,000 Named Endowed Financial Aid Fund

$50,000+ Current Use Financial Aid Fund

Space and Facilities

The most significant capital gift opportunity at the Ed School is naming the Learning Technology Center, the virtual heart of the School's educational, informational, and media environment. The School also faces a pressing short-term need for additional classroom space as a result of changes in academic programming and in the sizes of the doctoral and masters programs over the past two decades. Alumni and friends can assist the School in addressing these challenges with targeted gifts for new classrooms and the technological supports required for adequate teaching in those spaces.

$8,000,000 Naming Opportunity for Learning Technology Center

TBD: Naming Opportunities for New and Upgraded Classrooms and Commons Areas

New Centers and Initiatives

As part of its strategic and academic plan, HGSE is pursuing several initiatives to increase its impact on education policy, practice and research. These initiatives will feature cross-faculty collaboration, harnessing the tremendous resources of the University in the service of improving education. While specific gift opportunities are still being determined for these initiatives, donors who have an interest in learning more about these efforts may contact the HGSE major gifts team for more information.

TBD: Center for School Research

TBD: Education Research Venture Fund

TBD: Harvard Fellows in Education

TBD: Harvard Teacher Fellows Program

TBD: Expansion of Large-Scale School Improvement Models

If you would like to explore the possibility of making a major gift to the Ed School, please contact Patricia Brown at 617-496-1107 or at patricia_brown@gse.harvard.edu.