The mission of the LCFEF Endowment Fund is to support and sustain the excellence of the La Canada Unified School District in perpetuity. Gifts to the Endowment are pooled together and invested to create a perpetual source of income for our schools.

While gifts to the LCFEF Annual Fund improve our schools today, funds donated to the LCFEF Endowment Fund are an investment in the future. Gifts to the endowment ensure the ongoing health and vitality of our schools and, by extension, our community.

Let’s assume you establish a savings account that grows in value through interest income and you decide to only spend a portion of the interest each year. That is how an endowment works. Endowment funds are invested in the market and will grow depending upon the investment assets.

The LCFEF Endowment is a permanent fund and donations to the endowment are invested in perpetuity. Only a portion of the endowment fund is spent each year. As the endowment grows in the value, annual contributions from the LCFEF Endowment to the school district may grow as well. A group of Trustees (Insert LINK) has fiduciary oversight over these investments and determines how much the LCFEF Endowment will donate to the schools each year.

Invested wisely, the income provided by the LCFEF endowment will grow to keep pace with inflation and will support the schools in times of hardship. In past years, the LCFEF Endowment has been the largest donor to the LCFEF Annual Fund.

The LCFEF Endowment Fund is the safety net for our schools in times of financial contraction. During the U.S. fiscal crisis of 2008/09, annual gifts from individuals to the Educational Foundation dropped off at the same time that the bottom fell out of public school funding from the State of California. In response, the Endowment Fund gifted the MAXIMUM allowed by its bylaws and even revised its bylaws in order to make a gift at all given the drop in value of the Endowment’s own assets. And while public funding for education in California is never great (especially for more affluent school districts like La Cañada), in times of lesser crisis the Endowment fund may not make the maximum allowable gift in favor of growing the Endowment’s assets — but rather, growing and planning for the next inevitable “rainy day”.