Hillsborough Community College Foundation

Hillsborough Community College Foundation

The Hillsborough Community College Foundation operates as the primary philanthropic and asset-management vehicle for Hillsborough Community College, a multi-campus institution serving the Tampa Bay region. Executive Director L. Garrett Weddle leads the foundation, with oversight from a board that includes HCC President Dr. Ken Atwater and representatives from GTE Financial and KPMG. The foundation's endowment corpus is not publicly disclosed, and its structure reflects the narrower, mission-aligned posture common to community-college foundations: channeling gifts into scholarships and direct campus infrastructure rather than diversified multi-asset portfolios. The foundation's deployment is concentrated in real estate and mission-adjacent physical assets held across HCC's campuses. Holdings include the Hawks Landing Student Housing facility and the HCC Tennis Complex, both located on the Dale Mabry Campus in Tampa, as well as the English Creek Environmental Studies Center in Plant City. This asset base supports student life programming and environmental education initiatives. A small cultural allocation appears in the form of the Rick Sanders Art Collection, housed in Gallery 221 on the Dale Mabry Campus. The foundation does not publicly report venture capital commitments, fund investments, or co-investment activity, positioning it as a steward of tangible, college-serving assets rather than a financial allocator in the endowment-model sense. Board governance ties the foundation directly to the college's administration and to regional corporate leaders. Dr. Atwater's dual role as college president and board member ensures tight alignment between the foundation's priorities and HCC's strategic plan. Board Chair Scott Goldbach represents GTE Financial, while Development Chair Nadine Fahim brings a KPMG lens to fundraising operations. Major donor Pradip C. Patel has funded scholarships specifically for first-generation students, signaling a philanthropic pattern oriented toward direct student aid rather than endowment-building at scale. The foundation's office sits at 4115 N Lois Avenue in Tampa, physically separate from the main campus but within the same zip code. The foundation's structural differentiator is its embedded-campus-asset model. Unlike large university endowments that operate as quasi-institutional asset managers, HCCF functions as a direct owner and steward of college-tied real property. This blurs the line between a foundation and a campus auxiliary services corporation, a governance architecture that keeps all assets physically and legally tethered to the educational mission they serve. Succession risk remains undefined in publicly available materials, as does any long-term policy for portfolio diversification beyond the current real-estate-heavy footprint.