UNO Foundation

UNO Foundation

The University of New Orleans Foundation was chartered in 1984 as a private fundraising and asset-management arm for the city's primary public research university. Founding board member Henry Bernstein — whose name now anchors the College of Business Administration — helped shape its early donor base alongside a network of local business figures. The Foundation's principal beneficiary remains UNO, but its holdings stretch well beyond a traditional university portfolio into a set of real assets that few endowments of comparable size control. The endowment pool itself is modest — Altss estimates roughly $97M — yet the Foundation's economic footprint is amplified by direct ownership of commercial real estate including the Lee Circle parcels, the UNO President's residence, and the Patrick F. Taylor Library at 925 Camp Street. It also holds the primary collection of Southern art installed at the Ogden Museum and owns that museum's physical site. Two subsidiary entities, UNO Foundation Working Interest, L.L.C. and UNO Foundation Royalty Company, L.L.C., manage legacy oil and gas interests that generate a separate royalty stream — a structure more common among land-grant endowments in Texas and the Dakotas than for a metropolitan Gulf Coast foundation. Board leadership mixes university administration with corporate New Orleans. Second Vice Chair Kimberly S. Cook-Nelson is an executive VP at Entergy, tying the Foundation to the region's dominant utility. Campaign co-chair Gary Solomon Sr., a past president of YPO Louisiana, has co-chaired the 'Next is Now' fundraising push alongside engineering benefactor Robert A. Savoie. In May 2024, the Foundation partnered with the UNO Research and Technology Foundation, an affiliated support organization, to strengthen the university's applied-research commercial pipeline at the UNO Research and Technology Park (public record). UNO Foundation's structural distinction is its hybrid asset base — it operates simultaneously as a traditional endowment manager, a commercial landlord, a mineral-rights holder, and an art-collection steward. That combination of cash-flow streams gives it a cushion against enrollment-driven revenue swings that peer urban universities lack, though it also concentrates risk in downtown New Orleans real estate and the volatility of energy royalties.