The Jefferson Trust will be announcing this year’s grant recipients April 15 to coincide with the week of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday.
This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the trust, which provides funding for projects pertaining to the University community that align with Jeffersonian ideals.
Wayne Cozart, executive director of the Jefferson Trust, which is run through the Alumni Association, said the trust will award $775,000 in grants — more money than it has ever been given out before.
Cozart said it is important for a state university to have money outside of its state-funded operating budget to fund student-initiated projects and programs.
“For many state universities — including the University of Virginia — the decrease in support from the state has left little opportunity for new ideas to get off the ground because we are essentially at subsistence level in term of our finances,” Cozart said. “[The trust] gives the opportunity for the University through grants to start programs that might not be able to start without that help.”
Among other things, the Jefferson Trust has helped fund the social entrepreneurship curriculum at the Batten School, small Pavilion seminars on the Lawn, Greens to Grounds and an overnight retreat called PULSE, which is associated with the Sustained Dialogue Institute.
The most successful student grant was made to Student Entrepreneurs for Economic Development, “which brought together a group of students to look at how social entrepreneurship might be able to grow at the University of Virginia,” Cozart said.
That grant led to the addition of social entrepreneurship to the Batten School curriculum.
“Ultimately, we gave a second grant to the Batten School itself to initiate that. That was by far the most successful and had the huge impact,” Cozart said. “That one was student-initiated, which was very, very important [to us].”
Second-year College student Haden Parrish attended PULSE over Spring Break and said he enjoyed the weekend, which was made possible by the Jefferson Trust.
“PULSE allowed a safe and confidential place for its fellowship to share, and it allowed us to feel unique but united in our experiences,” Parrish said in an email statement. “My small ‘hand group’ got incredibly close, and many of us shared personal stories that we had never shared with anyone else before.”
Cozart said trustees play an important role in giving out the grants and are engaged both in giving and in selecting the winners.
“For me, I see [the Jefferson Trust] as alumni self-government in the same way [that] student-self government rules when they are undergraduates,” Cozart said. “I’m particularly excited that it is a program where the decisions are made by alumni and parents.”
Correction: This article previously had the headline "Jefferson Trust to award $7 million in grants" and misquoted Wayne Cozart as saying the Jefferson Trust will be awarding over $7 million in grants in 2016. The headline and article have been updated to reflect an accurate figure of the grants issued by the Jefferson Trust for 2016, which have a total value of $775,000.
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