Translation. Region: Russian Federal
Source: Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University – Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University –
The Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation held a strategic session at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University dedicated to endowment funds in science and higher education.
The event was attended by over three hundred participants: heads of universities and research organizations supervising the creation and development of endowment funds, representatives of government bodies and alumni associations. The plenary session was opened by the first vice-rector of SPbPU Vitaly Sergeev.
“Working with endowment capital today is a new mentality, the formation of which requires both time and constant interaction with business and government bodies,” Vitaly Vladimirovich said in his welcoming speech. “Therefore, today’s strategic session is important and useful, and the exchange of experience, I am sure, will lead to the fact that we will be able to build a systematic work with endowment funds, especially since much has already been done in this direction. I hope that the Polytechnic University is a good platform with strong energy, and we are also very interested in this topic.”
Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education of Russia Andrey Omelchuk recorded a video message for the participants of the strategy session, in which, in particular, he noted: Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Government of the Russian Federation pay special attention to the development of endowment funds for universities and scientific organizations. Important changes have already been made to the legislation, concepts and methodological recommendations for the development of endowment funds for universities have been developed. The session plans to discuss the formation of endowment funds, the structure of fundraising and its relationship with the strategy of the university. We hope that the participants will gain an understanding of the need to create funds and new ideas for their development.
Director of the Department of Economic Policy of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation Aslan Kanukoev thanked the Polytechnic University for organizing the event and spoke about the results and prospects of the activities of the interdepartmental working group of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia on the development of endowment funds in the field of higher education and science.
Aslan Sultanovich noted that the topic of endowment capital has become significantly more relevant and popular in recent years. A specially created interdepartmental working group of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia, the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Finance developed and approved concepts for the development of endowment funds in universities and research organizations until 2035 in 2023–2024, the main areas of which are defined as: interaction with graduates, with the business community, formation of a pool of partners, information support, increasing the efficiency of capital management and the formation of transparency standards. An educational course has also been created and is planned to be launched in the near future, which will provide a complete understanding of the creation, formation, development and management of endowment capital, including the legal aspects of working with this topic, and will also introduce fundraising technologies and building relationships with endowment donors.
According to monitoring data from the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia, as of January 1, 2024, 94 endowment funds were created in subordinate universities.
The Russian Ministry of Education and Science believes that endowment funds are a long-term strategic instrument for the sustainable development of educational, scientific, healthcare and cultural organizations, emphasized Aslan Kanukoev.
Chairperson of the Board of the National Endowment Association Svetlana Lavrova presented a report entitled “Understanding and Culture of Endowment Themes: History, Modernity, and Focus on Eternity.”
Svetlana Nikolaevna explained what an endowment is, what are the origins of this phenomenon, why it has been so important in the world for many centuries, and what place Russia occupies in it. By the way, the Russian Empire had its own history of endowments, only before 1918 they were called “eternal contribution”, “eternal capital” or “untouchable capital”, and the entire social sphere was based on them.
According to Svetlana Lavrova, the educational organization has several sources of funding: state (in the future, not direct, but aimed at supporting individual programs), tuition fees, research orders, contracts, short-term projects, and an endowment fund.
The purpose of the existence of science and the university goes into eternity, and the sources of funding on which this activity relies are usually short-lived. The endowment fund is a super-stable source that gives the university independence. It is long-term, and it is the university’s money that ensures sustainability, – Svetlana Lavrova believes.
An endowment consists of three components: fundraising, or seeking donations, investing funds through a management company, and finally receiving and using income from investments.
The university is interested in the income from the endowment, and the Ministry of Finance is interested in it, because endowments are the largest institutional investors worldwide. This is a unique system that works simultaneously to develop different aspects of the state, so the state is extremely interested in them, Svetlana Lavrova emphasized.
First Vice-Rector for Economics and Strategic Development of the Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin Daniil Sandler shared an interesting experience of the university in the formation of endowments. As of May 1, 277 million had been collected for the UrFU endowment — these are funds from 18 endowments created by more than 12 thousand donors. Each of the funds, according to Daniil Sandler, “has its own face.” The endowment for the 100th anniversary of the Ural Federal University in the amount of 75 million rubles was created on the initiative of the Students’ Union. If you ask artificial intelligence what to do with the fact that in Russia there is no tradition of forming and donating endowments, it will write: “Start with the students,” and in practice it is clear that it was the Students’ Union that took the initiative, and now this is our largest endowment. Although they say that a student has no money, he has time, energy and desire, says Daniil Sandler.
The second endowment — “Sports Programming at UrFU” — was created by a group of enthusiasts who wanted sports programming to develop in the Urals. They got a serious business interested in their idea and collected 51 million rubles. There is a personal endowment of Maslakov — a graduate of the history department, who donated 16 million rubles so that the interest from this endowment would be used to pay financial assistance to elderly teachers of the history department every year. The endowment of the Institute of New Materials and Technologies in the amount of 11.6 million rubles was created to establish a scholarship named after a respected university professor who passed away to perpetuate his memory.
The speech by the executive director of the MGIMO Development Fund (over 2 billion rubles) Marina Petrova was devoted to the Russian and international experience of financing science through the endowment mechanism.
Oksana Oracheva, CEO of the Vladimir Potanin Charitable Foundation, spoke about the role of transparency and accountability in working with stakeholders.
Irina Tolmacheva, Deputy Director of the Foundation for the Formation of Endowment Capital of the Foundation for the Development of Social and Economic Sciences and Education, highlighted the legal aspects of the activities of endowment funds.
Thus, the speakers at the plenary session outlined the main problems of endowment development: insufficient awareness of the funds’ activities among businesses and university graduates, the need to increase motivation among philanthropists, a decrease in the funds’ profitability during periods of high economic volatility, the need to provide additional tax preferences and other benefits. How to interest donors, how to popularize endowment funds and make them socially significant, how to fulfill and exceed the “Priority-2030” program indicator in terms of endowment – these and many other issues were to be discussed in more detail by the participants of the strategy session in sections, mechanisms for their solution were to be developed and discussed at the final joint session.
As a result, representatives of all five sections identified problems and proposed approaches to solving them, which demonstrated deep immersion in the topic, mutual understanding and interaction in the community. Participants of the strategy session came to the conclusion that it is necessary to concentrate efforts on developing fundraising as a specific work on finding donations, to conduct educational work so that the endowment becomes a socially approved mechanism and an indicator of the effectiveness of universities, to expand opportunities for investment and to legislatively enshrine incentive measures – tax preferences and motivating co-financing.
The results of the strategic session were summed up by the Director of the Department of Economic Policy of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Russia Aslan Kanukoev: Today there are more like-minded people among us. Visiting all the sections, I was convinced that, despite the differences in issues and challenges, the mechanisms for solving them were close. Today we had the first introductory strategic session. It is important that you feel each other, feel the shoulder of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia. We will develop endowment funds, we believe in this tool and promise that we will not abandon anyone on this path and will help everyone.
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