Empowering residents with the ability to make the best choices for our town with fewer fiscal constraints in order to preserve the character of our community that makes Hopkinton so unique.

What is an endowment?

Colleges have endowments, so why not a community? Ordinary revenues collected by our town are sufficient to pay for essential expenses. The kind of infrastructure investment that is essential to maintaining and enhancing the level and quality of government services, however, don’t get funded through ordinary revenues. As a town, we must either borrow or find other ways to pay for these investments.

Income generated by an endowment fund can pay for some or all of these projects. The larger the fund, the more we can assure essential projects are undertaken when they need to be undertaken without having to sacrifice the breadth or level of services for which our regular income sources barely provide.

Our town’s population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, and over 50% of our residents have lived here for less than 6 years. This has resulted in a significant change from our historic demographics. It has also resulted in both larger operating expenses and the need to make major capital improvements (such as schools and public safety buildings). The Endowment was created as a tool for our community to help preserve its essential character while we navigate major changes such as what we’ve experienced over the past decade.