Endowments

A gift for your lifetime and beyond

You can create a lasting tribute to a family member or friend or ensure your own legacy when you establish a named endowment to provide ongoing support for the director’s initiatives, a collection, a staff position, a program, or a museum of personal significance. Your gift today will keep on giving—forever—providing a reliable source of funds year-after-year to meet your philanthropic goals and to help create a solid, permanent foundation for the Briscoe Center now and in the future.

You can fund your endowment with an outright gift, or a pledge of up to five years, with cash, stock, or IRA charitable gift transfers. You can also establish an endowment today to be funded later through a bequest, retirement account, life insurance beneficiary designation, or other tax-wise methods.

With an endowment gift, the principal is not spent on the gift purpose. Your gift is invested in a pooled fund by The University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO) on behalf of the Briscoe Center. Each year, a percentage of the returns is distributed to support the purpose you set forth in the endowment gift agreement. Investment returns above the distribution rate are reinvested, raising the value of the endowment over time in order to keep up with inflation and maintain the endowment’s spending power. As time passes and the endowment grows, even more students, scholars, and visitors will benefit from your gift.

Create an essential endowment

The Briscoe Center competes with other top research centers, museums, and archives in recruiting and retaining the best talent. The center’s expert staff provide exemplary service to students, scholars, and other researchers by helping patrons navigate through vast resources created in a variety of media. They serve as facilitators for uncovering information that might otherwise remain hidden. They master a wide range of technological tools and software. They also provide access to the collections for both the academic community and the general public by curating exhibitions, publishing books, producing educational programs, digital projects, and documentary film. You can help provide exceptional access to the collections by establishing a named endowment supporting key professional staff, student internships, and research fellowships, or in support of the center’s projects based on the collections.

Curators

Establish an endowment to support a preeminent historian specializing in a collection strength at the center. Curatorial endowments enhance the center’s academic reputation. Endowed curators in the center’s collection strengths attract major archives, stimulate significant research, facilitate learning, and produce projects from the collection.

Senior archivists

Create an endowment to support senior-level archivists at the center in recognition of their work and accomplishments as leaders in their field. The center’s archivists organize and care for the collections, provide public access to the material using the latest technologies, partner with faculty to teach information literacy and research skills, and assist researchers working with the center’s archival material. Archivists work with a variety of collection material, including documents, photographs, films, material culture, textiles, and digital records.

Academic Programs Coordinator

Your gift to establish a new professional position will help the center facilitate and support instructional use of the center’s collections among university faculty across a variety of disciplines. 

Internships

Your gift to establish an internship will help one or more graduate students synthesize lessons learned in class, practice skills, and acquire valuable experience as they work alongside the center’s staff of experts on digitization, archival, library, preservation, conservation, research and exhibition curation projects. Working at the Briscoe Center helps prepare students from a variety of disciplines to launch careers or pursue advanced degrees upon graduation.

Graduate research fellowships

Competitive research fellowship awards acknowledge the student’s academic achievement. Graduate fellows are selected based on their potential to make a positive, long-lasting contribution to their academic discipline. The stipend provided by the endowed graduate fellowship gives students an opportunity to dedicate significant time in their academic schedules to substantial on-site research in the center’s collections in preparation for writing their dissertation. The fellowship may be limited to students at The University of Texas at Austin, or open to graduate students at any accredited university to travel to Austin to work in the center’s collections.

Research fellowships

You can establish an endowed research fellowship in American history to help expand the impact of the Briscoe Center’s collections by helping scholars from all over the world access the material for onsite research. Research fellowship awards help scholars produce journal articles and bring book-length manuscripts to completion. Competitive research fellowship awards acknowledge the scholar’s academic achievement and help advance careers. The stipend provided by the endowed fellowship provides resources for travel and living expenses while the scholar works in the center’s collections.

Travel awards for professional journalists, writers, and filmmakers

The Briscoe Center’s collections provide resources for a variety of projects which help disseminate evidence-based history to the public. Many influential book and film projects are produced by independent writers without the backing of a major employer behind them to support their research. Travel awards make it possible for these researchers to work in the collections by providing a stipend for travel and living expenses.

Collection or program endowments

Your gift to support a particular collection or program of the center in perpetuity ensures that the center’s work in the areas of collection development, exhibitions and programs, preservation and conservation, book publishing, and digital projects has the resources to thrive now and in the future.

Director’s Circle endowments

Donors who wish to provide dependable, flexible resources to support the director’s initiatives each year in perpetuity can create a named Director’s Circle Endowment to help ensure the center can respond quickly to unique opportunities and produce special projects that enhance awareness and accessibility of the center’s archives.

If you are interested in creating an endowment, the Briscoe Center’s chief development officer, Lisa Avra, can assist you with identifying and documenting your gift intent and determining funding strategies to help you reach your philanthropic goals.