Endowments and Foundations Editing and Proofreading Services

An endowment is meant to exist forever, which imposes a strange discipline on the documents that govern it. Trustees are deciding how much to spend this year on behalf of beneficiaries who have not been born, and every one of those decisions is written down and inherited by a board that will not remember the reasoning. Institutions that write these documents well can be understood by their successors a decade later; institutions that write them poorly find themselves relitigating the same arguments every time markets move, with no record of why the current policy was chosen.

We edit what endowments, foundations and their advisers produce — investment policy statements and spending policies, trustee and investment committee papers, annual reports and accounts for donors and regulators, grant-making strategies and guidelines for applicants, grant agreements and reporting requirements, donor communications and stewardship reports, gift agreements and restricted fund documentation, responsible and mission-aligned investment policies, manager selection and monitoring documentation, conflict of interest and governance policies, impact and outcome reports, and case-for-support material for fundraising campaigns. Our editors check that restricted and unrestricted funds are described consistently, and that what the investment policy permits matches what the mission statement implies.

The spending policy is the provision that determines whether an endowment actually lasts, and it is often reduced to a single number with no reasoning attached. Four per cent of the portfolio, or a rate the board reviews annually — which in practice means a rate that rises after good years and gets argued about after bad ones. We write these so the rule is stated as a formula a successor board can apply without discretion, typically smoothed across a trailing average of several years so that spending does not track markets directly; so the intergenerational principle behind it is explained explicitly, since that is the reasoning most likely to be lost; so the inflation assumption and the real return required to sustain the rate are stated and can be tested; and so the circumstances in which the board may deviate are named, with the record required when it does. A spending policy written this way ends the annual argument, which is the point of writing it down.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including trustee papers, donor information and unpublished accounts. We are editors rather than investment or legal advisers and offer no view on your policy's substance — that remains with your trustees and their professional advisers. What we can do is make the documents clear, internally consistent and comprehensible to the trustees who inherit them.