Howard University Retirement Trust

Howard University Retirement Trust

The Howard University Retirement Trust operates as the pension arm of Howard University's investment office, responsible for the retirement plan assets of eligible university employees. Frank Bello, who serves as Associate Vice President, Chief Investment Officer and Treasurer, manages both the university's endowment and its retirement plan pools. The trust is a non-contributory, single-employer defined-contribution plan, meaning the university, not the employee, funds the benefit — a rare structure that makes the trust's allocation decisions a direct reflection of institutional liability management rather than individual participant direction. The trust administers 403(b) and 457(b) tax-advantaged retirement savings vehicles. Investment oversight mirrors the endowment's governance: the Board of Trustees, chaired by Leslie D. Hale (CEO of RLJ Lodging Trust) and vice-chaired by Mark A. L. Mason (CFO of Citi), sets policy. Day-to-day allocation rests with the investment office under Bello. While specific asset-class weights are not public, university pension trusts of this scale typically deploy across public equities, fixed income, private equity, real assets, and hedge fund strategies, often through commingled vehicles and separate accounts managed by external managers. The trust does not publish individual manager rosters or direct co-investment activity. Team scale is not disclosed. The investment office operates from the university's Washington, D.C. campus. In a governance shift, Rebecca Vazquez-Skillings joins as Senior VP and CFO effective July 1, 2025, replacing Interim CFO Karol Kain Gray. Separately, Wayne A. I. Frederick transitioned from President to President Emeritus and Interim President, signaling leadership flux that institutional allocators track for its potential to reshuffle board-level investment committee composition. Howard participates in the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area, a professional network that occasionally serves as a soft pipeline for manager introductions, though the trust itself does not market itself as sourcing through networks. The trust's structural differentiator is its position inside Howard University — a private, federally chartered HBCU whose $1 billion-plus endowment (per Howard University, 2024) places it among the largest HBCU asset pools in the United States. The dual CIO-plus-Treasurer mandate held by Bello means asset allocation and liquidity management sit under one roof, a concentration rare among similarly sized university pension trusts where treasury functions typically report through a separate CFO-controlled silo. This unified structure allows the investment office to treat the pension trust's liquidity profile as part of a holistic university balance-sheet view, rather than as an isolated participant-directed plan, giving Bello latitude to lean into illiquid alternatives in ways that pure defined-contribution plans carved out of university treasuries often cannot.