New Grants Designed to Teach Young People to Be Philanthropists

Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund has announced five $15,000 grants to colleges that will establish charitable funds to be managed and dispersed by student-led groups, reports The Boston Globe.

David Giunta, president of the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, hopes the program will help cultivate a new generation of experienced philanthropic leaders. He said, “Students are going to learn what it means to create thoughtful, workable plans for long-term charitable giving.”

Of the 35 institutions that applied for the program, the winners are Boston University, California State University in Fresno, Portland (Ore.) Community College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Whitworth University in Spokane, Wash.

Students will invest the funds, form boards of directors, create grant-making guidelines, conduct research on prospective grant recipients, choose which organizations should get money and how much they should receive, and may even do fund raising on their own. Fidelity said that recipients of the money must distribute between 50 and 75 percent of it to charity over the school year.

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