This Fall a significant funding opportunity will be available to local area charitable (501(c)(3)) organizations. Students at the University of Mary Washington will be able to take a course entitled ECON 324-Economics of Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector. The aspect of the course of most interest to you is the semester-long class project. Thanks to the generosity of Doris Buffett’s Sunshine Lady Foundation, the class has been given $10,000 which it will use to make grants to local charitable organizations.

My students will simulate the activities of a foundation. They will write a mission statement, solicit applications for funds, and select recipients. The class starts on August 26. The mission statement and application form should be available on or about October 1. The application deadline will be on or about November 1. The grant (or grants) will be announced at a public ceremony on Tuesday, December 2.

This is the fourth year the course has been offered. Previous recipients of grants have included Hope House, the Fredericksburg Regional Boys and Girls Club, Rebuilding Together, Homes for America: Heritage Park Academic Achievement Program, National Housing Trust/Enterprise Preservation Corporation and Fredericksburg Counseling Services. Based on the names of the recipients, you can tell what has interested my students in the past. Whether this year’s students will want to continue funding these types of organizations or something entirely different remains to be seen. New students bring new ideas. To maximize the educational value of the project, the project will be student-directed as much as possible. Neither Doris Buffett nor I will have much say in the class mission statement.

We anticipate this course to be an annual offering at UMW for quite some time in the future.

Please feel free to circulate this message among your associates.

I will be happy to answer your questions about the project. Please contact me by e-mail at rrycroft@umw.edu or by phone at 540-654-1500.

Yours truly,

Robert S Rycroft

Professor of Economics

Department of Economics

University of Mary Washington

Fredericksburg, VA 22401

540-654-1500

rrycroft@umw.edu