How I Help Donors Give to Education

A donor I have worked with for years has been generously supporting scholarships in our marine science department. Recently, in a conversation about how to sustain that giving as part of her legacy, I asked her what actually changed her life when she was a student. She did not say the scholarship. She said the field trips, taking what she learned in the lab outside, working in the field and not in a textbook. That answer reshaped what we built together. Her giving now includes a fund that supports the field courses themselves, including time for faculty to design them, funding for buses to take the students there, and necessary equipment. This approach hits both sides of the student experience in a way that acknowledges that supporting a student can mean more than a scholarship, it can also mean supporting an exceptional hands-on learning environment as well.

That conversation is not unusual. It is the work.

The word “education” does an enormous amount of work in donor conversations, and most of the time it is doing too much. Scholarships, early childhood, career and technical education, teacher development, first generation support, afterschool programming, literacy. All of it lives under the same word, and all of it leads to very different gifts. There is also a part most donors and most advisors miss: we spend a great deal of energy on supporting students directly, which matters, and very little on the teachers who shape what every student experiences in a classroom. Both are education.

The question donors usually arrive with is where to give. An equally useful question is about how. Do you want to support many things at modest levels, or concentrate on a few. Do you want to give directly to students, or upstream to the teachers or programs. Do you want steady annual impact, or are you trying to make something transformative happen. Capacity, preference, impact. Those three questions, asked in that order, reshape almost every plan I build. Most donors have never been asked them.

Two donors say “education.” One has experienced significant success and looks around at the disparity she sees. She remembers that her own education was something she was given, often by people she will never meet, and she feels both inspired and quietly obligated to do the same for the next generation. Her giving lands at scholarships and access programs. Another donor remembers a fourth grade teacher who believed in him before he believed in himself. He can trace the way he sees himself as a learner back to that one classroom. He wants to support teachers, especially the ones doing that kind of transformative work. Same word. Different gifts, and both incredibly impactful.

There is no wrong answer here. The right answer is the one tuned to the donor’s capacity, preferences, and the impact they actually want to see. That is what a philanthropic advisor brings to the conversation.

Strategic philanthropy begins with values. That is the work we do at Jonesing for Good.

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