William & Mary Investment Trust

William & Mary Investment Trust

The 1693 Management Company was formed to centralize investment operations for the charitable organizations that sustain the College of William & Mary. Rather than managing dozens of separate small endowments, the firm runs the 1693 Partners Fund, a single pooled vehicle through which the William & Mary Foundation, the Marshall-Wythe School of Law Foundation, the VIMS Foundation, and the Business School Foundation collectively invest. Brian Hiestand leads the effort as both chief executive and chief investment officer. The portfolio is explicitly multi-asset, with known allocations to direct commercial real estate, a global real assets portfolio, and a sleeve designated as diversifying strategies. Real estate holdings include 327 Richmond Road and Tribe Square in Williamsburg, as well as Discovery II in James City County. The fund operates with a long-duration, mission-aligned mandate, meaning liquidity demands are lower than a typical institutional pool of comparable size. The investment committee and board draw on external governance expertise, with members such as Louis Dudney of AlixPartners and John Cole of CEF Advisors. Publicly available detail on team size is thin, but the leadership bench includes Catherine Mountjoy as Managing Director of Investments and Elizabeth Jennings as chair of the 1693 Partners Fund Board. The structure effectively functions as a single co-mingled vehicle overlaying multiple university-related foundations, an architecture that reduces administrative friction and may improve fee leverage on external manager commitments. In September 2023, the William & Mary Foundation continued to guide the multi-asset portfolio through its Investments Committee, maintaining the formal link between the university's development arm and the pooled fund board (per the William & Mary Foundation, 2023). The structural differentiator is the co-mingled model itself. Most large public universities run a unified endowment; smaller affiliated foundations often self-manage or outsource independently. The 1693 Partners Fund sits between those poles, combining the assets of several charitable entities supporting a single university under one investment program. That governance choice concentrates investment authority in the management company while preserving separate foundation identities and beneficiaries — a design that may attract attention from other university systems weighing consolidation.