You plant a tree once
Every year it bears fruit, which you give away. You never cut down the tree. Year after year, the harvest grows.
What is an endowment?
An endowment is a simple but powerful idea: you contribute money once, it is invested permanently, and only the returns are given away, never the original amount. This permanent pool of capital is called the corpus, and protecting it is the foundation of everything the endowment does.
The principal stays intact and keeps growing, so the fund can keep giving indefinitely and distributions increase every year as the fund matures.
This is how the world's great universities and foundations fund themselves sustainably. Harvard's endowment, now over US$50 billion, was built on exactly this model: contributions made over centuries, invested carefully, with distributions funding scholarships and research every single year.
The Serendib Endowment works on the same principle. Our scale is different. Our intent is identical.
How the fund works
Your contribution becomes a permanent part of the corpus. It is never spent. It is the seed that generates giving forever.
Contributions are held in the fund's account until the corpus reaches its A$50,000 founding target. From that point it is invested through an Australian investment platform where the assets are held by independent custodians on trust for the fund. An Australian financial adviser advises and administers the account pro bono, and every investment decision is approved by the directors. We target a real return of CPI plus 4% a year, net of all fees, assessed over rolling five-year periods.
Spent on goods rather than handed over as cash, and on whatever a community actually needs: books for schools, shoes for children, food for families in hardship. Bought locally and delivered through trusted relationships on the ground. Every cent documented. We aim to distribute two to six times per year, increasing as the fund grows.
Distributions are calculated on a rolling three-year average corpus, so giving stays steady through market swings. What is not distributed compounds the fund's value over time, meaning distributions grow as the fund matures.
Photographs from the ground, a note about the communities visited, and a clear record of what was given and to whom. Full transparency, always.
Why an endowment?
There are many ways to give. An endowment is different: it is not a donation that gets spent and is gone. It is a structure that makes your generosity permanent.
Questions people ask
Most people arrive with the same handful of questions, and they are fair ones. An endowment asks you to part with capital permanently, so the things worth asking are about permanence, risk and what happens when nobody involved today is still around.
We have answered seven of them in full, including the ones with uncomfortable answers.
- Can I get my money back if I need it?
- How does the money actually get to Sri Lanka?
- What happens if the investments have a bad year?
- What happens to the fund if something happens to the founders?
Ready to talk it through?
We would rather answer your questions properly than have you guess at the answers.
Ways to give Contact us