New Canaan Country School

New Canaan Country School

Founded in 1916, New Canaan Country School delivers a co-educational program for students from Beginners through Grade 9, drawing families primarily from Fairfield and Westchester counties. The school's financial engine is its endowment, governed by a board whose investment committee includes senior figures from hedge fund and private equity firms in the New York metro area. The endowment's investment strategy spans a deliberately broad mandate. Asset-class coverage includes buyout, distressed debt, venture capital across seed and early-stage, growth equity, secondaries, and fund-of-funds commitments. Board leaders F. Tucker Golden (Goldentree Asset Management) and William J. Laverack (Laverack Capital Partners) operate firms specializing in credit and special-situations investing, while endowed scholarship donor Brett Jefferson (Hildene Capital Management) brings additional structured-credit expertise. The geographic focus remains predominantly US, consistent with the school's regional base and the board's domestic fund-management orientation. Adjacent structures include Horizons at New Canaan Country School, a locally rooted program that became the founding model for the national Horizons National organization — arguably one of the school's most significant non-investment legacy projects. The endowment remains modest at an estimated $57M, but the concentration of general partner talent on its board creates an unusual sourcing advantage typically associated with far larger pools of capital. No dedicated investment staff beyond board-level oversight has been publicly identified. The structural differentiator is the board's composition: it functions as an embedded investment committee drawn from active, principal-level alternative-asset managers. Rather than outsourcing investment decisions to an OCIO or relying on a conventional endowment-model approach, the board's members themselves manage billions of dollars at their own firms — giving the endowment a direct line into deal flow and manager selection that most K-8 institutional investors cannot replicate.