The Endowment
An endowment is a permanent, invested pool of assets held by a non-profit, university, or charity to provide ongoing financial support, where the principal remains intact while investment growth is used for operations.
That’s it, the profound, grandiose idea:
Get so much money, that each year the profits pay for and outpace the costs of childhood cancer treatment with enough left over to continuously grow forever.
The Goal:
$9 Billion
Real-Life Examples
Firstly, are there even endowments that large and successful enough?
The short answer is:
Most definitely yes.
From the highly trusted information source, Wikipedia, private institutions have endowments with valuations well over $20 billion and go all the way up to $55 billion. Additionally, there are many public colleges with enormous endowments.
Importantly, both sets of data show substantial positive growth from all institutions around approximately 7-10%. Paramountly, we can see that nearly all institutions earned more than $550 million dollars, our hypothesized target to cover all after-insurance-costs of pediatric cancer.
So, is it true that all we need is $9 billion and we are set?
The Bank
Though called a “bank,” Cheese Bank is not truly a bank. The name’s aim is to make one think: “This sounds like the kinda place that has a lot of money.” As that’s the end goal.
I settled on “Cheese” for some rather personal reasons, however it is also a playful, silly name kids will hopefully like. The acronym was forced into place retroactively, which I’d say has worked out pretty well.
Cheese Bank’s only mission: No family has to pay for their child’s cancer treatment ever again.
And along the way make the world, and the people who live in it, a little bit better.
How could we acquire $9 billion? How would we invest it? How would we distribute the profits? All excellent questions, to be answered later. First, why are we even doing this: