# Seattle Pacific University Endowment

Seattle Pacific University Endowment is an Endowment / Foundation based in Seattle, United States.

## Overview

- **Organization type:** Endowment / Foundation
- **Headquarters:** Seattle, United States
- **Region:** North America
- **Address:** Seattle, WA, United States
- **Founded:** 1891
- **Assets under management:** $122M (Altss estimate)
- **Website:** spu.edu
- **LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/school/seattle-pacific-university/

## Regulatory record

- **Reports private funds:** No

## About

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.

## Sectors

- Hedge Funds
- Private Credit
- Venture Capital
- Real Estate
- Natural Resources
- Distressed Debt

## People

- Alissa Mahar — CFO and Vice President for Business and Finance
- Marlon Sandlin — Interim Director of Endowments and Gift Planning

## Questions

### Who makes investment decisions for the Seattle Pacific University Endowment?

CFO and Vice President for Business and Finance Alissa Mahar holds top-level responsibility, with day-to-day oversight sitting with the Interim Director of Endowments and Gift Planning, a role Marlon Sandlin stepped into in 2024. The team operates within SPU's business and finance division, and the university's affiliation with the Free Methodist Church shapes its governance environment.

### Does the endowment invest directly or through funds?

It does both. The investment policy authorizes buyout, venture, distressed debt, mezzanine, natural resources, and special-situations strategies, executed through commingled-fund commitments. At the same time, the endowment directly owns and manages commercial properties at 2/4/6 Nickerson Street and a South Lake Union office building, and holds real-estate loan positions.

### What is the endowment's connection to Seattle real estate?

The endowment acts as a direct commercial landlord in Seattle's Queen Anne and South Lake Union neighborhoods. Its real-estate holdings include the Nickerson Street portfolio, a South Lake Union office building, and the Stearns Building mixed-use property, giving it an unusually concentrated physical footprint for an endowment of its reported size.

### Is the Seattle Pacific University Endowment required to disclose its holdings publicly?

No. As a private university endowment, it is not subject to FOIA-style public-records requests. It does not voluntarily publish an AUM figure; the Altss estimate of roughly $122M is derived from benchmarking and available signals, and the university participates in the NACUBO-TIAA study under that benchmarking umbrella.

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Last updated: 2026-06-03T20:00:00.000Z

Canonical page: https://altss.com/profile/seattle-pacific-university-endowment

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