Gifts to The Mount Holyoke Fund support the College’s annual operating budget and impact every aspect of campus life. Through the Mount Holyoke Fund, you can direct your gift to any of the areas listed.
Your Gift. Your Choice. Your opportunity to make a difference where it matters most to you.
Your gift to this destination allows the College to meet emerging needs and challenges by providing the flexibility to direct funds to parts of the budget that need critical, immediate support. Such flexible gifts have a significant impact and are an essential component of every student’s Mount Holyoke experience.
Mount Holyoke empowers students to freely explore new ideas and vigorously debate and examine any topic or issue — no matter how controversial or polarizing. Students from across the country and around the world bring divergent beliefs and worldviews to the table, and our dynamic faculty push them to think critically and advocate fearlessly for what they believe in.
Your gift to Academic Enrichment supports:
Mount Holyoke College is dedicated to ensuring that all students are equal and full participants in the college experience by working to identify and remove barriers to accessing our curriculum and activities. Your gift helps provide appropriate, effective, and progressive accommodations for students while shaping campus conversation around the concepts of accessibility, ability and disability through the work of Disability Services.
From the beginning, Mount Holyoke has recognized the benefits of physical activity: for personal growth, for a balanced life, for camaraderie. Founder Mary Lyon was one of the country’s earliest advocates of physical education classes for women, and in the College’s first days, all students were required to walk a mile each day after breakfast. Today, our athletics and recreational programs and facilities offer students invaluable opportunities to build connections, develop crucial leadership skills and sustain a healthy and active lifestyle.
Your gift to Athletics supports:
Mount Holyoke’s spectacular campus — the Gothic brick buildings, the majestic trees, the serene lakes, our iconic waterfalls — creates the perfect setting for our students’ rigorous academic study and personal growth and development. Rooted in the legacy of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s designs, Mount Holyoke’s campus is consistently recognized as one of the most beautiful in the country.
Your gift to Campus Preservation helps the College:
Mount Holyoke students are passionate about issues of social justice. In and beyond the classroom, Mount Holyoke is a community of individuals — each with their own perspectives, beliefs and experiences — who are here because they want to engage with and celebrate what’s exceptional about each of us. Here, community is about belonging. From cultural affinity centers and student groups to dialogue across differences, students engage with new perspectives and advocate for what matters most to them, making change for all.
Your gift to Community and Belonging supports:
Mount Holyoke College strives to build and maintain a campus environment that is inclusive, pluralistic and free of discrimination. Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts extend beyond specific departments and are embedded in all areas of the College.
Your gift to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion helps the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to:
Mount Holyoke faculty win Pulitzer and Guggenheim awards, NASA grants and Carnegie Fellowships. They engage in cutting-edge research and collaborations and publish widely — often with undergraduate coauthors. And they inform and celebrate the career trajectories of their mentees, who, as graduates, shine on the campaign trail, before audiences, among investigative journalists, behind scanning electron microscopes and so much more.
Your gift to Faculty helps Mount Holyoke:
Renowned as one of the most beautiful campus libraries in the country, the Williston Library houses the humanities, social sciences and science collections, which include newspaper, periodical and microfilm collections. Our Archives and Special Collections includes more than 9,000 linear feet of unpublished manuscript materials and 11,000 published volumes. Wherever a student chooses to study — in the MEWS area, the lovely Stimson Room, the main floor or in one of the hideaway rooms — every aspect of the library is central to their Mount Holyoke education.
Your gift to the Library and Archives supports:
The Lynk — a combination of rigorous coursework, enhanced advising, alum mentoring, professional development and experiential learning on and off campus — equips students to navigate a lifetime of career opportunities and trajectories. Centered around reflection and assessment, The Lynk challenges students to connect high-impact experiences with career exploration throughout their time at Mount Holyoke. Graduates are prepared to apply intellectual flexibility and critical thinking in workplace and community settings.
Your gift to The Lynk supports:
College is a transformative — and sometimes challenging — time for students as they learn, grow and prepare for life beyond the gates.
Your gift to Mental Health and Well-Being helps:
The MHC Forward Fund is a vital priority within The Mount Holyoke Fund that empowers President Holley and College leadership to respond with strength and agility to the most pressing challenges facing higher education today. In a rapidly shifting political and financial landscape, gifts to this fund provide critical, flexible resources to defend academic freedom, support students affected by global and domestic pressures, and sustain Mount Holyoke’s bold, inclusive mission.
Mount Holyoke offers a full residential experience for students across more than 18 residence halls that vary in design from neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque to modern architectural design. Within each residence hall, we aim to foster a sense of community, belonging and connection across classes or among affinity groups.
Help renew these historic halls, ensuring they remain vibrant, welcoming and inclusive spaces for current and future students. Your gift will support essential renovations and maintenance, including accessibility and sustainability updates. These infrastructure improvements are a key component of the MHC Forward strategic plan and ensure our residence halls meet the evolving needs of our diverse community while honoring the College’s architectural legacy.
Mount Holyoke’s core mission has remained steadfast since the College’s founding in 1837: to offer students from all backgrounds an unparalleled opportunity to learn and shape their own futures. The exceptional diversity of experiences that students bring — to the classroom, the campus and the alum network — ensures that our graduates enter the world as global citizens. By directing your gift to one of our five scholarship aid destinations, you are investing in remarkable students from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
Ways to support scholarship aid:
General Scholarship Aid
Each year, more than 70% of Mount Holyoke students receive need-based aid, totaling nearly $50 million. Your gift to the general scholarship aid destination will go to providing access to the dynamic, rigorous Mount Holyoke education to students from all backgrounds.
First-generation Student Scholarship Aid
First-generation students — those who are the first in their families to attend college and did or do not have parents, guardians or family systems to assist them in navigating the college process — face unique challenges throughout their time at Mount Holyoke. Your gift to this destination will provide scholarship aid specifically for first-generation students.
Frances Perkins Scholarship Aid
Each year approximately 90 diverse and intellectually curious Frances Perkins scholars (FPs) are enrolled at Mount Holyoke. These students of nontraditional age who have not yet earned an undergraduate degree have followed an unconventional path to MHC but have varied lived experiences that create an unparalleled opportunity for our entire community to learn, grow and evolve. Your gift to this destination will provide scholarship aid specifically for Frances Perkins scholars.
International Student Scholarship Aid
Each year, over 25% of the student body (400+ students) is made up of international students from over 70 countries. The undergraduate experience for these students is complicated by being farther away from their homes/support systems than most domestic students and having extra hurdles to navigate such as visas and other regulations. Your gift to this destination will provide scholarship aid specifically for international students.
The Mount Holyoke Fund Scholars Program is a unique opportunity for you to support need-based financial aid at the College. Your one-time gift of $10,000 or multiyear commitment of $5,000 for four or five years will establish a scholarship that will carry your name and class year (unless otherwise requested). MHF Scholar donors will receive a report in May or June with details about a student’s studies and activities.
Options for funding a Mount Holyoke Fund Scholar:
Please note that donors who make MHF Scholar gifts after March 31 will receive student information in May or June of the next academic year.
Mount Holyoke Fund Scholars are active and engaged students and community members. We look forward to sharing their stories with you.
Mount Holyoke students are challenged in class to develop their intellect, hone the power of their voices and cultivate courage. But what happens outside of class is just as important and instructive. It’s where they learn not just how to think in this world but how to be. With more than 100 student organizations and myriad activities that enrich life outside of the classroom, Mount Holyoke is a place to nurture existing passions and discover new talents, friends and goals.
Your gift to Student Life supports:
First-generation and low-income (FGLI) students bring unique strengths, skills and perspectives to Mount Holyoke's diverse learning community, and the College is invested in their success. As a nationally recognized First-gen Forward Institution, Mount Holyoke works diligently to help FGLI students navigate any academic, social, financial and career challenges they may face during their college experience.
Your gift to the Student Safety Net Fund provides assistance to currently enrolled FGLI students whose personal circumstances may require urgent additional financial help in order to access living necessities, technology or other items to support their academic experience, helping to offset costs for essential needs such as food, shelter or internet access.
Since its inception, Mount Holyoke has helped shape and define the field of higher education. We bring the same leadership and resolve to advancing a culture of sustainability on campus and beyond — by preparing students to tackle issues as environmental leaders, committing to environmentally sound practices and shaping a sustainable legacy for future generations. The College is committed to carbon neutrality by our 2037 bicentennial.
By directing your gift to Sustainability Initiatives, you support efforts to:
Mount Holyoke is a leader in integrating technology throughout academic and cocurricular life. In science facilities ranked among the best in the U.S., students access everything from scanning and transmission electron microscopes and DNA sequencing equipment to a custom-built Mössbauer spectrometer and an atomic force microscope. Students across all disciplines have the opportunity to combine technology with their specific areas of study via the College's Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab. Wireless hotpoints are located throughout the campus, and our Information Commons features a staffed Diagnostic Center, collaborative workstations with large-format plasma screens and peer support for web and multimedia applications.
Your gift to Technology and Teaching Tools helps provide and maintain:
Follow your creative spirit to reveal a fuller understanding of yourself and the world around you — it’s what the arts at Mount Holyoke are all about. Your gift supports music ensembles, dance companies, theater productions, art classes and more, all of which provide opportunities for learning, expression and leadership for students from all backgrounds.
Your gift to Visual and Performing Arts supports:
