The Brearley School

The Brearley School

Founded in 1884, The Brearley School occupies a unique niche among American endowments — a private all-girls K-12 school whose board and investment committee have been built with deliberate ties to institutional asset management. The board president, Sue Meng, is a partner and managing director at Duquesne Family Office. The school's endowment, estimated at $195 million, is overseen by a committee that includes Munib Islam, former partner at Third Point, and Gideon Berger, former co-CIO of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management. The institution itself spans three commercial properties on East 83rd and East 87th Streets, plus a field house and the Kunz Art Collection. The endowment invests across buyout, fund-of-funds, growth, turnaround, and venture strategies. While specific portfolio holdings are not publicly disclosed, the committee's composition — which also includes Joe DiMenna, founder of Zweig-DiMenna Associates, and Olivia Wassenaar, head of sustainable investing at Apollo — suggests an emphasis on alternatives and manager selection. Geographic focus remains unspecified, though the institution's New York location and the Manhattan-heavy profiles of its investment committee imply a domestic, coastal orientation. Brearley operates as part of the New York Interschool Association, an eight-school consortium that includes Collegiate School and The Chapin School, sharing after-school programs and select classes. The endowment's scale is modest by university standards but substantial for a K-12 institution. Recent operational details are not publicly available, reflecting a deliberate low profile consistent with its governance model — a board of trustees staffed by senior finance practitioners who oversee capital allocation alongside educational strategy. The school's structural differentiator lies in its governance: a K-12 endowment whose investment committee is populated by principals from Duquesne, Third Point, Blackstone Alternative, Apollo, and KKR. This construction creates an unusual concentration of allocator expertise for an institution of its size, effectively embedding hedge-fund and private-equity DNA into the oversight of a secondary-school endowment.