Application Guidelines for Colleges and Universities
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The Alden Trust supports independent colleges and universities with enrollments of 1,000 to 3,000 full time traditional undergraduates located in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and the six New England states.
The Trustees focus their grant making on capital needs. Recent funding has included support for classrooms, libraries and laboratories as well as for the acquisition of scientific and technological equipment and infrastructure. The Trustees occasionally support restricted endowment for need-based scholarship aid and faculty development in addition to restricted endowment for the maintenance and replacement of technology. The Trustees primarily make outright grants, but will issue challenge grants with the goal of helping an institution generate increased and broader support from its constituencies. Current policy, absent exceptional circumstances, is not to consider grant requests more frequently than three years from the date of the last grant or from the date of any vote establishing a challenge grant. An institution whose proposal has been rejected may normally be eligible to apply again after one year.
The Trustees consider proposals at four distribution meetings a year. Complete proposals for the March, June, September and December meetings must be received by the fifteenth of the month prior to the meeting (e.g., February 15th for the March meeting).
The proposal should be made in reasonably brief narrative form. A summarizing cover letter, which includes the requested amount, should be signed by the president of the institution. Please provide the name, telephone number, and email address of a contact person.
The Trustees would like to understand the purposes to be achieved through the grant, with an appropriate revenue and expense budget and implementation timetable, and the reasons why the proposing institution is capable of achieving the purposes. In addition, the Trustees want to know how the grant will positively impact the students and/or faculty and help the institution to fulfill its mission.
All applications from colleges and universities should include the following information:
- The institution's mission statement and a summary of its current long-range plan, if available, with progress to date
- Trend information of at least three years for total fulltime traditional undergraduate enrollment, including gender mix and minority representation; retention rates from first to second year; persistence rates to degree (four and six year rates); and percent of students on institutional financial aid, need-based and merit separately reported
- Trend information of at least three years for incoming students, including measures of achievement and preparation for college study, plus applicant, admit and matriculant numbers (chart form preferred)
- Trend information for endowment: three years of amount, investment return and annual draw policies and practices. Capital and annual fund-raising reported separately (with percentage of alumni and board giving with the general expectation of 100% board participation in the annual fund), and tuition-room-board charges
- Summaries of the two prior and the current board approved annual operating budgets (with explanation, if in deficit) and copies of the audited financial statements from the three most recent years (e.g., 2011-2010 and 2010-2009)
- List of trustees and their other affiliations
- Evidence of appropriate tax-exempt status
- Such other information as the applicant feels may give the Trustees a better understanding of the institution, its distinctive value, and its proposal
Applicants are encouraged to contact the Trust by telephone, email, or make a visit, prior to submitting an application. It is often helpful to explore in advance the nature of the project, the need or opportunity that drives it, and the size of an intended request. The Trustees have found that such discussion generally results in the submission of a more effective proposal or forestalls a formal proposal for which there is little or no likelihood of success.
A single copy of the application and attachments is sufficient and should be submitted to:
George I. Alden Trust
370 Main Street, 11th Floor
Worcester, Massachusetts 01608
Phone: (508) 459-8005
Fax : (508) 459-8305
trustees@aldentrust.org
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