On May 12, the Carleton Responsible Investment Committee (CRIC) held an “Endowment Decoded” scavenger hunt exercise as a part of the committee’s inaugural Endowment Day event. 

According to the American Council on Education, a college endowment is an “an aggregation of donated assets invested by a college or university to support its mission in perpetuity…The vast majority of the donations held in an endowment are restricted by the original donors for specific uses.”

Endowment Day sought to help students understand the purpose, function and structure of Carleton’s endowment. Student participants first gathered in self-selected teams of three or four students in the Multicultural Center (MCC), where they received a brief presentation from faculty co-chair of CRIC Professor Alfred Montero, who provided an overview of Carleton’s endowment and instructions for the event.

 They were then sent off to complete the main activity of the event — a scavenger hunt centered on clues at 12 locations across Carleton’s campus, each representing a specific gift in Carleton’s endowment. Students were given roughly an hour to find all the locations; afterward, they returned to MCC and took a quiz based on the clues they had found. 

Eight teams of three or four students competed in the event. The winning team was awarded $200; the second-place team received $100; and the third-place team received Carleton-branded mugs.

CRIC’s primary goal for the event was to increase student awareness of how Carleton’s endowment is used.

“We did a survey around two years ago, and we noticed that there was a bit of a misunderstanding about what the endowment is and what it does for Carleton,” said Daniel McGovern ’26, student co-chair of CRIC. “I think oftentimes people think of it as this kind of piggy bank that the school has and can pull money from at all times, but it’s really this more complicated, almost living thing that makes it possible for Carleton to exist. So we wanted to tell the stories about the different funds that make up the endowment.”

The scavenger hunt format, in particular, was chosen to strike a balance between being informative and engaging for students. “Once we did our annual report, where we looked at shareholder resolutions for the endowment, and after we met with the investment committee, which is a subcommittee of the Board of Trustees, we immediately started planning the Endowment Day event,” said McGovern. “We wanted it to be fun, so we wanted the event to be gamified […] but we also wanted it to be connected to places on campus, just to make it feel more physical, like what the endowment fund is really doing.”

The locations were spread all over Carleton’s campus, ranging from Hasenstab Hall to the Weitz Center for Creativity to the Cowling Arboretum, among others.

 “There were gifts connected to Residential Life, to CCCE, to the Learning and Teaching Center, to PEAR (Physical Education, Athletics, and Recreation) and sports,” said Montero. “These are some of — when you start thinking about what makes Carleton, Carleton — these are the pillars of Carleton […] so every gift at every place that we thought about was special in a way that was clearly central to being at Carleton.”

The wide range of locations on the scavenger hunt, which required participants to walk or run several miles around campus, did present some logistical challenges and accessibility issues for participants.

 “My only issue about the scavenger hunt was that the places were so far,” said Maboron Sherif ’29. “We had to go behind the Rec Center, and then the farm, and then Weitz […] one of my teammates had a sprained ankle, and we didn’t know [beforehand] that we had to run like that.”

However, Sherif felt that the event was ultimately successful at accomplishing its goal of educating the broader student body on Carleton’s endowment. “I saw a lot of people I am familiar with from different parts of Carleton,” she said. “I feel like it was a good mix of people, which made it really interesting.”

Carleton’s endowment can seem complicated to understand and address because it is both sourced from and used for many different purposes, but Montero emphasizes that it is critical for funding nearly every aspect of Carleton students’ experiences.

“A lot of students on this campus are here because the endowment provides part of their financial aid,” said Montero. “I think understanding that the endowment is in so many ways a blessing when we’re at a place like this where for decades and decades, people — and most of them are long past — gave money to this place because Carleton touched them and touched their lives,” he added. 

Ultimately, Montero hopes students understand that the endowment’s role extends well into the future, sustaining Carleton for years to come.