Foundations

The Office of Foundation Relations works with MIT’s senior officers, deans, faculty, and administrative staff to secure philanthropic support for educational and research initiatives across the Institute. In fiscal year 2008, foundation support amounted to $128.5M, or 39.9 percent of all new gifts and pledges, and is essential to all five Schools—the arts and humanities as well as science, engineering, and management.

MIT’s mission is education and research, and much of the innovative work that is done here would not be possible without philanthropic support—including the support of foundations. Some examples:

  • MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative, which publishes virtually all of the Institute’s course materials on the World Wide Web, would not have become a reality without the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
  • The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation regularly enables teams of MIT faculty to conduct comprehensive studies of entire industries, and to disseminate these results widely.
  • The Carnegie Corporation of New York is supporting the iLabs project, which brings access to online laboratories to universities in three sub-Saharan countries: Nigeria, Uganda, and Tanzania.
  • A grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will enable the MIT Center for Future Civic Media to study how different forms of media can foster civic engagement and reinforce geographic communities.
  • The Doris Duke Foundation is making it possible for researchers at the MIT Industrial Performance Center to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the energy technology innovation system in the United States.

Other innovative projects include: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s support of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, for a study to measure the effectiveness of school-based strategies to prevent HIV/AIDS among rural youth in Kenya; and the Charles Hayden Foundation’s support for MIT’s STEM summer program, which allows Cambridge and Boston middle school students to become immersed in science and math.

These are a few recent examples of how foundations can make a vital difference in MIT’s capacity to share and advance knowledge more widely. Many of the Institute’s innovative programs and projects would not become reality without far-reaching foundation support.