Making An Impact With Your Philanthropy

The fundamental mission of Brooklyn Law School is to provide its students with the knowledge, skills, and ethical values needed for a career in law. Realizing this vision would be impossible without the generosity of friends and supporters like you, who make a positive difference in the lives of our students and ensure the success of Brooklyn Law School. Your gifts help to fund scholarships, academic programs, and life-changing clinics, and they enable the Law School to recruit and retain top-tier faculty. Below are some examples of the ways donors choose to make an impact on some of the Law School’s highest funding priorities. Thank you for considering how you can make a difference with your philanthropic investment in Brooklyn Law School.

Opportunity Scholarships make an immediate impact on diversity recruiting efforts by providing critical funds, over and above what is offered in financial aid and scholarship packages. These additional recruiting funds are often what make the financial difference between a student’s decision to pursue their legal education at Brooklyn Law School versus attending another school. Funds donated for Opportunity Scholarships are used entirely for student support until they are exhausted or renewed by additional gifts.

A minimum commitment of $15,000 is required to establish an Opportunity Scholarship, which can be paid in annual installments over a period of up to three years.

Impact Scholarships create an opportunity to target scholarship support in a variety of ways, including on the basis of financial need, academic merit, or both, or for students focusing on a particular area of law, or graduating in a particular class year. Impact scholarships can also provide support either for an increased number of students each year or to provide a larger scholarship award to a single student, depending on the donor’s preferred impact. All funds donated are used entirely for scholarship support until they are exhausted or renewed by additional gifts.

A minimum commitment of $100,000 is required to establish an Impact Scholarship, which can be paid in annual installments over a period up to five years.

Endowed Scholarships are an exceptional way to provide an enduring and reliable source of scholarship support, which is invested strategically to grow over time. Because these scholarships exist in perpetuity, they are a wonderful approach to creating a meaningful legacy of support in your own name, or to honor a loved one. As with Impact Scholarships, Endowed Scholarships can be created to target your support on the basis of academic merit, financial need, or both, for a particular class year, or for a recipient with interest in a particular legal field.

A minimum commitment of $250,000 is required to establish an Endowed Scholarship, which can be paid in annual installments over a period up to five years.

By establishing a named professorship, alumni and friends can help ensure that Brooklyn Law School has the resources to continue to recruit and retain top-tier faculty, either in their own name or to honor a loved one. Named professorships can be directed either to support up-and-coming faculty, for a visiting or term chair, or to recognize and retain world-class faculty who are exceptional researchers, educators, and leaders in their field.

At Brooklyn Law School, numerous spaces are available to be named at a broad range of gift levels. Some examples of available spaces include moot court seats, study carrels, classrooms, conference rooms, libraries, and lecture halls. Naming gifts for these spaces provide an opportunity to create a legacy for yourself or for a loved one, while also providing an important source of flexible funding for the Law School.

Often, donors choose to support the mission of Brooklyn Law School by making a planned gift—which can be an excellent solution for those wishing to achieve certain philanthropic goals, as well as personal, financial, and estate-planning objectives.

There are various ways to make a planned gift that may be customized to suit different situations, including some commitments that cost nothing to make today, and others that may provide significant tax benefits during your lifetime, provide an income to you, or offer estate tax benefits. These include gifts through your will; making the Law School a beneficiary of your tax-deferred retirement account; and making transfer-on-death gifts from your savings account or brokerage account. In many cases, taking advantage of one of these gift-planning vehicles also maximizes the impact of your philanthropy at Brooklyn Law School by increasing the size of your gift.

To explore how you may make a difference with a planned gift, visit our website, legacy.brooklaw.edu