Philanthropy
Built into the structure, not added to it.
ITQAN is built to donate a portion of the management team's carried interest to Above The Best Foundation, which runs the National Military Helicopter Museum & STEM Learning Center in Arizona. The commitment is made as the fund is formed, rather than later, out of a budget.
The commitment
A portion of carry, committed at formation.
A portion of the management team's carried interest — the managers' share of investment gains — is donated to the foundation. The commitment is written into how the fund is structured, not attached to it once the fund is running.
Carry is what the management team earns after investors have their capital back. Donating a portion of it means the giving comes out of what the people running the fund take home, not out of what the fund returns to the investors who backed it. That distinction is why it sits in the structure rather than in a policy.
The partner
Above The Best Foundation.
National Military Helicopter Museum & STEM Learning Center, Arizona.
The foundation preserves military aircraft and the firsthand stories around them, and turns both into immersive learning for students, families and veterans. The fund's giving is directed there.
The foundation's work
Service, education, legacy and innovation.
The collection is a working one rather than a parked one: aircraft under restoration, and the people who flew and maintained them standing next to the students who came to see them. Four strands run through everything the foundation does.
Service
Veterans share their stories and their skills, working on aircraft restoration alongside the visitors who come to see it. The fund invests in defense and dual-use technology, and the people who operated that technology in service understand better than most what it has to survive.
Education
Hands-on STEM workshops that use helicopters as the learning tool, so lift, load, power and failure are explained on an airframe a student can stand under rather than in a diagram.
Legacy
Seventy years of rotary-wing history, kept as aircraft and as firsthand accounts from the people who operated them, for an audience that would otherwise meet it only in a photograph.
Innovation
The future of vertical flight, set beside its history, for students deciding what to build next. It is the same engineering the fund backs, two decades earlier in a person's life.
Why it is structured this way
Tied to performance, not to a budget.
Most corporate giving is a line in a marketing budget, and it behaves like one. It is spent whether or not the business did anything worth marking, sized to what the brand needs rather than to what the work earned, and among the first things cut when the year goes badly.
Carry behaves differently, because carry only exists if the fund performs. Tying giving to it puts the charitable portion and the management team's own compensation in the same pool, realized at the same moment, on the same condition. It cannot be quietly trimmed in a weak year or inflated for a photograph in a strong one, because the commitment is settled before anyone knows which kind of year it will be.
Giving structured this way is variable and arrives late: carry is realized toward the end of a fund's life, so this is not an annual budget and should not be read as one. What it buys instead is a commitment that cannot be renegotiated once the outcome is known.
One of three partners around the fund.
The other two cover technology and research. Each is named, with what it means for a company the fund backs.