Supporting the legacy of the HKIS Mission makes your child’s education eternal.
At its core, HKIS’s mission is to empower children to learn how to analyze and reason, to persist toward goals and dreams, and serve the global community—to be part of a legacy of servant leadership. Endowed Giving makes this legacy possible because it ensures that an HKIS education will impact future generations of students. Support the legacy your HKIS Dragon is building with an Endowed Gift.
How Endowed Giving Works
Endowed gifts provide a critical revenue source to enable teaching and learning. They achieve this through carefully and conservatively investing gifts of great magnitude to produce an annual return. This annual return is used to supplement tuition revenue and Annual Giving each year. As these invested gifts grow in value, the impact of endowed gifts grows as well.
Giving to an HKIS Endowed Fund helps ensure that the traditions and legacy of an American style of education, grounded in the Christian faith and respecting the spiritual lives of all, thrives not just today, but well into the future.
Other Endowed Giving Opportunities
Think of the unique characteristics of an HKIS education today. What do you value most? Is it the professionalism and creativity of the teachers at HKIS? Is it the importance of arts, music, or the theatre program? Is it the powerful experiential learning program, such as the PEAK or Interim enrichment trips and experiences? Maybe it’s how the challenging academic program prepares students to not only thrive in college, but to become leaders and innovators?
Now imagine that quality has vanished from the HKIS educational experience. What would that mean to you?
Many parents and alumni care deeply about ensuring the HKIS educational experience gets better and better as time passes while protecting the qualities that make HKIS one of the best schools in the world. You can support and sustain what you value the most with an endowed gift. Contact Heath K. Hignight, Chief Advancement Officer, to discuss what you value the most and how your endowed gift can protect and strengthen HKIS for educating future generations of servant leaders.
Endowed Giving FAQs
An endowed fund is a carefully and conservatively invested gift of great magnitude. This gift, similar to a long-term investment, is managed to produce an annual return. This annual return is used to supplement tuition revenue and Annual Fund giving each year.
Endowed funds grow in value over long periods of time because only the annual return is spent, not the corpus of the gift. In this way, the impact of an endowed gift grows over time as well.
Endowed funds are a legacy of guaranteed support for the school. They ensure that the traditions and legacy of an American style of education, grounded in the Christian faith and respecting the spiritual lives of all, thrive not just today, but well into the future.
Information on HKIS’s endowment and endowed funds can be found in the Impact Report.
Literally, anyone! Over the years, endowed gifts have been made by parents and past parents, alumni, current and former faculty, members of the Board of Managers, and many others. Quite a few parents and alumni choose to make an endowed gift through a family office or family foundation.
Most people who make an endowed gift do so through bank or wire transfer, or a bank cheque. Before making an endowed gift, please contact Heath K. Hignight, Chief Advancement Officer for more specific information.
Endowed gifts may include the invitation for the donor or donors to recommend a “name” for the endowed fund. The Board of Managers has the exclusive responsibility of offering and approving naming opportunities as part of an endowed gift. Not all endowed gift opportunities include a naming opportunity.
Naming an endowed fund can take many forms, and certain requirements must be met including conforming to the school’s history and existing practices. To learn more about naming opportunities, contact Heath K. Hignight, Chief Advancement Officer.
The HKIS Endowment was established in the 1980s through the foresight of past school leaders and board members. The purpose of the HKIS Endowment is to support the general operating expenses of the school. In other words, the “main” endowment is unrestricted.
Endowed funds operate exactly like the HKIS Endowment, but with one important distinction: endowed funds include restrictions on how the fund’s income may be used by the school. Typically, an endowed fund may be restricted to supporting the expenses related to a specific position at the school, a specific program, or another purpose like the Black Kite Program.
Donors who wish to help the school have a permanent fund to cover operations are encouraged to give to the HKIS Endowment. We welcome such gifts, because the endowment helps ensure the school will always have the unrestricted resources it needs to operate.
In 2021, the HKIS Board of Managers approved adopting one of the practices of the most successful universities and international schools: creating endowed funds for specific or special purposes. Similar to the first modern endowed funds established at Oxford University and Cambridge University in the sixteenth century, these new endowed funds at HKIS enable donors to have a long-term—and strategic—impact.
In the 2025-26 school year, HKIS seeks donors who wish to support the following endowed funds:
Contact Heath K. Hignight, Chief Advancement Officer, to learn more about any of the current projects and other ways you can support HKIS with an endowed gift.
