UC Santa Cruz Foundation

UC Santa Cruz Foundation

The UC Santa Cruz Foundation was formed in 1974 to receive and manage private gifts supporting the University of California's coastal campus. Its assets are not managed in-house; they are pooled with the UC Regents' General Endowment Pool (GEP), an investment vehicle that commingles endowments from across the ten-campus UC system. This arrangement places a sub-$200 million foundation inside the same investment program as UC Berkeley's $7 billion endowment, removing governance and manager-selection burdens from the Santa Cruz board. The GEP allocates across a wide range of asset classes including global public equities, private equity buyout, venture capital, natural resources, real assets, and distressed debt. UC Investments discloses positions in funds managed by Sequoia Capital, Accel, and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as direct co-investments in later-stage private companies. The foundation also holds unique physical assets outside the pooled structure, including conservation land in the Santa Cruz area and several significant photographic and film collections housed at McHenry Library. The foundation is governed by a Board of Trustees chaired by Loren Kinczel, with UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia Larive serving as an ex officio member. The board does not make investment decisions — those rest with the UC Investments office under Chief Investment Officer Jagdeep Singh Bachher, who oversees approximately $180 billion across the UC system's pension, endowment, and working capital portfolios. The foundation's primary operational function is donor stewardship and gift administration rather than portfolio construction. The structural differentiator is pure: a small foundation with zero internal investment staff that nevertheless participates in institutional-quality private-market allocations through its UC system membership. This gives it access to venture funds and buyout partnerships that would be unavailable to an independent endowment of comparable size. The trade-off is zero control over manager selection or tactical asset allocation — a governance model that protects the foundation from litigation while capping its ability to deviate from system-wide investment policy.