“MIT was a very humbling experience for me,” says Alan Henricks, who was the first in his Midwestern family to attend college. “But at the end of four years, it also gave me self-confidence to go forward in the world.” Alan, who went on to a successful career of leadership roles at several technology companies, and his wife, Joan, have supported a range of Institute initiatives, but their primary focus is the MIT Edgerton Center, founded in 1992 to honor the late Harold “Doc” Edgerton SM 1927, ScD 1931, inventor, entrepreneur, and MIT professor. The center is a hands-on laboratory resource for undergraduate and graduate students and also conducts educational outreach programs for K–12 students. “It combines a set of programs that we believe in deeply,” says Alan.

“Doc” Edgerton’s legacy.

Alan worked at several part-time jobs to make ends meet during college, but the one he liked best was conducting campus tours. The Strobe Lab, where he invariably found the “retired” Edgerton working with first-year students, was his favorite tour stop. “In my college years, everything was about computers and software,” recalls Alan, a strong believer in MIT’s “mens et manus” ethos. “Things were much more about the mind and not the hand. But the Edgerton Center is more of a maker center; it’s combining those two. I appreciate the value of that.” 

Joan Henricks, who holds a doctorate in behavioral sciences and has served as a children’s school docent at a San Francisco art museum for many years, was impressed by the center’s outreach to community schools. “I had always believed in informal learning,” she says, “but I became deeply interested in seeing this kind of learning in action.” 

Lessons of philanthropy.

“Bequests are important—and we have one in our will for MIT.”

 

Joan and Alan have reached some meaningful conclusions in their years of philanthropy to MIT and elsewhere. “Bequests are important—and we have one in our will for MIT,” says Alan. “Giving to something while you’re alive and can experience it is also a great thing to do.” Joan adds, “It’s all about giving to your passion.” 

With that in mind, the couple established the Edgerton Center Director’s Fund. “Funds that are focused on a purpose and not a person are much more likely to be leveraged,” says Alan. “It’s a discretionary fund to give the center’s director some flexibility, and we also wanted to make this a fundraising tool so that others might contribute to it.” 

The couple’s goal is for the Edgerton Center to continue as a thriving entity. MIT students, says Alan, “are incredible and so enthusiastic about the center. They’re literally sending rockets to the edge of space. It’s a self-perpetuating system of achievement and accomplishment.” 

Those students, the Henrickses point out, will soon be the next generation of alumni at MIT. For those who find that the Edgerton Center helped launch their careers, says Alan, “they’ll have a way to give back through this endowed fund.”