Page 13 - 2022 November Report

Resilience
Endowment program meeting report
October 7, 2022
ATTENDEES:
American Indian College Fund – Juan Ruiz
College of Menominee Nation – Chris Caldwell
Fort Lewis College – Steve Elias, Melissa Mount
Heritage University – David Wise
Institute of American Indian Arts – Mattie Reynolds, Melanie Buchleiter Northern Arizona University – Pam Ramos
Northwest Indian College – Brandon Morris, Barbara Lewis
Oglala Lakota College – Marilyn E. Pourier
Salish Kootenai College – Rachel Andrews-Gould, Makenzi Skellenger Scottsdale Community College – Ana Cuddington
Turtle Mountain Community College – Robert Monette
United Tribes Technical College - Scott Skaro
Johnson Scholarship Foundation - Bobby Krause, Sherry Salway Black, Rick Williams, Lady Hereford, Sharon Wood
Rick opened this meeting by speaking to the history of creating endowments in Indian Country which has long been a passion of his. Endowments create resources to create permanency. Several endowments were created under his watch as CEO of the American Indian College Fund, including two with the help of the Johnson Scholarship Foundation. When the idea of a trust land consolidation settlement with the US government first emerged, Rick met with Elsie Meeks during the nearly 7 years of settlement discussions, pleading the case for not just restitution payments, but the creation of an endowment for Native students. The result was the creation of the $64 million Cobell endowment.
In an effort to document good stewardship on the part of the Foundation, Rick did an analysis of all of the endowments the Johnson Scholarship Foundation has helped create. Since 2005 when the first endowment building agreement was executed, the Foundation has spent $15 million on endowments. 13 endowments are in place and 5 others are in the process of being built. Because the endowments have been established over so many years, terms, reporting requirements and reporting timing vary. These variations make it difficult to track the status of the endowments. The Foundation would like to correct this by moving to a standardized reporting form going forward.
A question was immediately raised on whether this would shorten the time schools have to secure their matching funds. The answer is “No”. This would be for reporting the status of the endowment funds and how the funds were distributed during the previous year. This would not change the matching requirements in any of the current or future agreements.
There was some discussion about determining the amounts of payouts. Ft. Lewis College, for example, uses a 5 year rolling average to determine the required percentage. Rick agreed that this is the kind of thing that he would like to understand better regarding every individual endowment and another reason why standardized reports would be beneficial.
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