You know, it's difficult to build an endowment, because for most small Christian colleges and universities, they have so many demands for their resources. So, when I get asked the question, "should we have an endowment?" my answer is absolutely yes. I mean, budget $50K a year that goes into the endowment--or $10K a year. Budget something. And then as you're talking to donors you can say, "we have an endowment fund and we're <br />building it." You'll find that people will become interested in making gifts to your endowment or doing planned gifts so that at the time of their death or after a certain number of years, assets would flow to the endowment. And I really encourage college presidents also when they have a capital campaign to build a building, that they include in part of that campaign an endowment to underwrite the operational costs of the <br />building. And it's one small way to start gradually building endowments for a university that don't have large endowments right now. So there's no quick fix to building endowments. It's one gift at a time; one estate plan at a time; but if you get started you can be successful. And to some extent, you're planting seeds for a tree that someone else is going to enjoy the shade of in the future.
