Seattle Pacific University Endowment

Seattle Pacific University Endowment

Seattle Pacific University launched in 1891 as a Free Methodist institution, and its endowment has since accumulated the gifts and bequests that fund scholarships, faculty chairs, and campus operations. Alissa Mahar, Vice President for Business and Finance, oversees the pool alongside Marlon Sandlin, who stepped in as Interim Director of Endowments and Gift Planning in 2024. The endowment feeds into the Seattle Pacific Foundation, which serves as a parallel philanthropic vehicle. The strategy leans heavily on opportunistic allocations, with an investment-policy tag list that includes buyout, venture capital spanning seed to late-stage, distressed debt, mezzanine, and natural resources. The endowment owns a direct commercial-real-estate trio on Nickerson Street and a South Lake Union office building, and it also holds real-estate loan positions. Geographic attention stays concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, particularly Seattle's immediate university-adjacent corridors, though its commingled-fund commitments place capital nationally. Total assets under management sit at an Altss-estimated $122M, with no public voluntary disclosure from the university. The investment team is lean — two named stewards operate within the business and finance division — and the university participates in the NACUBO-TIAA Study of Endowments, a benchmarking collaborative that gives it comparative line-of-sight against national peers. In 2024, the office moved Marlon Sandlin into the Interim Director of Endowments role, signaling a refresh of the gift-planning and investment oversight function. What distinguishes the SPU pool from similarly-sized university endowments is its embedded direct real-estate footprint: it acts as both a passive allocator and a tangible commercial landlord in a supply-constrained Seattle submarket. That dual posture — marketable securities held alongside wholly-owned neighborhood property — creates a structural liquidity tier that smaller endowments rarely engineer deliberately.