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 2004, foundation support amounted to $80.1 million, or 30.7 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.
Why should foundations support large institutions like MIT? Our 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 decision to publish virtually all of its course materials
on the World Wide Web (the OpenCourseWare initiative) would not
have become a reality without the generous support of the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
- Support from 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 Kavli Foundation's gift to establish MIT's Kavli Institute
for Astrophysics and Space Research will jumpstart new studies
of the cosmos.
- Both the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and
James L. Knight Foundation have helped to underwrite the CalTech/MIT
Voting Technology Project that is shaping national discussions
on ways to improve the electoral process.
- Carnegie Corporation is also supporting the iLabs project,
which is bringing access to online laboratories to universities
in three sub-Saharan countries: Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania.
Other innovative projects include the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation's
support of pioneering work on clean water initiatives in Ghana; the
Davis Educational Foundation's extending Technology Enabled Active
Learning (TEAL) to institutions in the New England area; 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 but a few recent examples of how foundations can make a
vital difference in MIT's capacity to share and advance knowledge more
widely. None of the above projects, nor others equally important, would
have become reality without far-reaching foundation support.
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