Elizabethtown College Endowment

Elizabethtown College Endowment

Elizabethtown College was chartered in 1899 by members of the Church of the Brethren, a historic peace church, and the endowment remains the permanent capital base underpinning its educational mission in central Pennsylvania. The fund is structured as a traditional college pool, drawing annual interest to support student scholarships, academic programs, and campus operations. Board Treasurer Bradley D. Rhoads — a managing director at Chatham Asset Advisors — anchors the investment committee, which also includes Anchorage Capital Group President Natalie Birrell and High Associates Senior Vice President Michael J. Lorelli. The portfolio is deployed across a deliberately heterogeneous set of asset classes. Confirmed allocations touch private equity, real estate, commodities, and infrastructure, with an opportunistic overlay that reaches into distressed debt, venture capital, and mezzanine financing. The strategy document suggests the committee can write tickets from seed-stage startups through late-stage expansion and buyouts, alongside fund-of-funds commitments and secondaries purchases. Two themes the fund has publicly associated with are the energy transition and climate technology. The geographic footprint remains concentrated in the United States, with campus real estate holdings in Elizabethtown and a Harrisburg satellite location. The endowment reported a value of $106.9 million in 2024 (Altss estimate), a figure that places it among NACUBO's participating institutions in the annual endowment study. Governance draws from a network of relationships that includes Hershey Company director Leanna Whetstone serving as board secretary and the decade-spanning philanthropic partnership with alumnus S. Dale High's High Foundation. The campus itself houses a student-managed Trostle Investment Portfolio operating within the college's finance lab, creating an unusual pipeline where undergraduates engage with the institutional investment discipline directly. The structural differentiator is the endowment's explicit connection to the Church of the Brethren's peace-church tradition and the governance DNA that brings distressed-credit and alternative-asset practitioners onto the board — Rhoads at Chatham, Birrell at Anchorage Capital — rather than relying solely on a retained OCIO or consultant-led model. That embedded committee expertise shapes a portfolio that reaches into distressed debt and private markets while the underlying institution remains a small, values-rooted liberal arts college.