For four and a half years, BPI has focused its fundraising efforts on securing its long-term future through the creation of an endowment. That effort was facilitated by an extraordinary one-to-one matching challenge by George Soros. Through the endowment campaign, BPI has raised, inclusive of the match, over $80 million in endowment gifts and pledges. This fund makes BPI the strongest and most secure institution in the history of college-in-prison.
A College Built to Last
In the prisons, an endowment will support BPI in doing what no other college-in-prison has: creating an endowed core faculty.
By endowing a core of distinguished faculty chairs, BPI will have significant tools to improve, diversify, and better coordinate its faculty. The establishment of the faculty chairs will empower BPI to overcome problems that have been central to the field of college-in-prison for decades — especially the dependence on adjunct labor — and increase the prominence of teaching in prison like no college ever has.
With gratitude to a growing list of donors, BPI’s endowment will support the core operations of all 11 campuses in the prisons and across the Microcolleges. At the Microcollege in Brooklyn, investment will support a multipronged strategy to establish a permanent campus, endow a core faculty position, and, through a leadership gift, endow the Microcollege itself, which would support full scholarship for 70 students annually, in perpetuity.
Through leadership gifts to the campaign, BPI has already established 8 core faculty chairs, which will teach full-time, in prison, across a diverse range of fields, including:
“When we think of cultivating the next generation of advocates and leaders in criminal justice, we often think of BPI. As a funder, as an alumnus, and on behalf of Galaxy Gives, I’m proud to participate in this unprecedented campaign.”
— Alelur "Alex" Duran ’18, Program Director, Criminal Justice Reform at Galaxy Gives
Dive Deeper:
This distinguished faculty chair will make the study of Martin Luther King a core curricular component of advanced study at BPI. Its establishment signals the importance of studying King — not only as a uniquely virtuous doer, galvanizing speaker, or political agitator — but as a preeminent theologian and philosopher in the American tradition.
From what we can tell, this — a chair not named for King, but for the study of King — would be the first of its kind. Through this gift, we invite the board to consider naming the chair The Chair for the Study of the Thought and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.