Since my appointment as a trustee of the Duluth Public School Board Endowment Fund last fall I’ve been slowly working on a plan to raise a serious endowment for the Duluth Schools. The present endowment is a hair over $450,000 and it has generated enough income to finance a dozen or more modest grants for innovative teaching projects every year for the past decade.
On May 2nd we are having a meeting of people who care about the schools to organize a massive fund raising project.
Over the last week we wrote and will be sending out a fund raising letter to our eighty or so past contributors. it also invites them to join us on May 2nd. That’s a very modest number of people but its all who have contributed to our endowment to date. I want a fund of 20 million dollars which should earn about a million dollars annually. That requires raising 40 times as much money as we currently have.
I’m planning to get at a minimum 40 people signed up to join us May 2nd. Getting them to the meeting will be my challenge. I’ll keep you up to date. In the meantime it will be the subject of my next column in the Reader. I hope I’m up to it.
