In times of crisis it helps to have a friend. In the case of Middlebury College, a small liberal arts school in western Vermont, that friend would be Alice Handy, the founder of outsourced endowment investment firm, Investure. Handy, with 29 years of investment experience at the University of Virginia, opened her firm in 2004 to provide full endowment investment management services to 10 institutions that now include Middlebury, Smith College, Barnard and Dickinson College. Unlike other endowment-style funds, Investure is alone in offering what it calls a consortium model, managing each of 10 endowments separately, while acting as the CIO of each institution.
Having Handy to help out, “Almost feels like a CIO on campus,” agrees Rick Fritz, chairman of the Middlebury board of trustees and a 1968 ....