What I gave a nonprofit, and what it gave back.

I volunteered to write a financial document for a nonprofit. I left thinking about permanence.

I run Value Alpha, an AI platform that prices private companies the public markets never touch. Most days I point it at deals. This is the story of the four months I pointed it at something that was not a deal at all, and what that built.

I want to tell you about the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, LMCC, because it deserves more attention than it gets.

LMCC is Manhattan's arts council. It was founded in 1973, the year the World Trade Center was dedicated, to bring art and culture to a district that emptied out after the closing bell. Five decades later, it is still here. Lower Manhattan has taken shock after shock, the 1987 crash, 9/11, the 2008 collapse, the pandemic, and come back each time. LMCC has been part of that resilience the whole way: residencies that give artists room to experiment, grants that reach neighborhood projects, public art, the River To River Festival now in its twenty-fifth year, and a stubborn belief that culture belongs downtown.

Then there is Governors Island. I will come back to that.

A familiar face

When I came across the opportunity to help LMCC, I recognized the name at the top of it. Moe Yousuf was a classmate from my Columbia program. He is now LMCC's President and CEO.

That is the part of business school nobody puts in the brochure. You spend two years next to people who are sharp, curious, and quietly building things. Then one day the network stops being a LinkedIn abstraction and becomes a specific person, running a specific institution, that needs a specific thing you happen to know how to do.

Columbia sold me on a lot of things. The one that has compounded most is the people, the quality of the questions they ask, and the fact that years later you still want to show up for them. Knowing Moe gave me the confidence to step in and offer something I could actually deliver.

The question nobody had answered

Here is what I found: LMCC had never built a formal Investment Reserve Policy. No documented philosophy for how its reserves should be invested. No framework for risk tolerance. No endowment. No plan for outliving its current funding. The last time anyone had set any of this down was roughly two decades earlier.

This sounds dry. It is not.

A reserve policy is the quiet answer to a very large question: how does an organization make sure it is still standing for the next generation? How does it move from living grant to grant toward something more durable?

For most arts nonprofits, this is the central tension of their existence. Their funding is some mix of grants, government support, and donations, sources that move with election cycles, economic moods, and the priorities of a handful of large funders. A great program can be one budget cut away from disappearing. Money held in reserve, and eventually a long-term fund, is how an institution buys independence from that volatility. It is the difference between reacting to the world and outlasting it.

I volunteered to build the policy, alongside a team of three.

Four months of unglamorous work

I started where I always start, with the data. The financial information existed, but it had never been consolidated. Using Value Alpha, I gave it a structure we could reason from, surfacing the trends, the concentrations, and the risks the organization had been carrying without quite seeing them. You cannot price what you cannot see, and you cannot govern what you have never measured.

On that foundation, over four months, we wrote the policy from the ground up: investment philosophy, risk tolerance, liquidity needs, governance. Who decides how the reserves are invested. What the organization will and will not own. How much has to stay liquid so a hard year never forces a fire sale. Who stays accountable once the people who wrote the policy are long gone.

We were not managing money. We were building the architecture that decides how the money behaves, the rules that hold when no one is watching. It is the kind of work that never makes a headline and ultimately determines whether an organization gets to have a fiftieth anniversary, and then a hundredth.

We presented it to the board, whose members come from firms including Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, CBRE, and JPMorgan. They approved it. It became the framework for something LMCC had never had: a quasi-endowment, the long-term capital the institution is now raising millions to seed, governed by the policy we wrote.

The part I did not plan for

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I visited LMCC's space on Governors Island.

It stopped me cold.

The Arts Center is a 40,000-square-foot building from the 1870s, opened in 2019 as a place for artists to make work at a scale almost nothing else in the city allows. Standing inside it, you feel the thing a spreadsheet cannot capture: the room, the light, the half-finished work, the community that has formed around it.

I had come to help with a financial document. I left convinced that what they have built out there deserves to outlast all of us, and with a clearer sense of why the dry policy work mattered in the first place. The reserve policy and that room are the same project seen from two ends. One is the architecture of permanence. The other is what permanence is for.

What this is really about

This is what staying connected to your cohort actually looks like. Not swapping job updates over coffee. Showing up. Doing the actual work an institution needs.

It is also a reminder I would offer any graduate: your skills are not only for your career. The same discipline I built Value Alpha around, pricing risk and value where no market will tell you the answer, is the discipline that lets a cultural institution decide how much of its future it can afford to put at risk. Valuation looks like paperwork. It is actually how permanence gets decided.

So here is the measurable version, for anyone keeping score: a first investment reserve policy in twenty years, authored pro bono, approved by a board that prices risk for a living, now the foundation for a quasi-endowment raising millions. That is what the toolkit did when I pointed it somewhere it had never been pointed.

I gave LMCC four months. It gave me back a sharper sense of what the work is for.

If you live or work in New York and have not encountered LMCC, look them up. And if you are in a position to support them, as a donor, a partner, or simply an audience, do.

Permanence is never an accident. Someone has to decide it is worth building.

Common questions

What is an investment reserve policy, and why does a nonprofit need one?

An investment reserve policy is the documented framework that governs how an organization invests the money it holds in reserve: its investment philosophy, risk tolerance, liquidity needs, and governance. Most arts and cultural organizations live grant to grant, on funding that moves with election cycles and donor priorities. A reserve policy, and eventually a long-term fund or quasi-endowment, is how an institution buys independence from that volatility and moves from reacting to the world toward outlasting it.

What is the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council?

Founded in 1973, LMCC is Manhattan's arts council. It brings art and culture to Lower Manhattan through artist residencies, Manhattan Arts Grants, public art, and the River To River Festival, including the Arts Center at Governors Island, the first permanent home for arts and culture on the island, opened to artists in 2019.

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Go deeper

The same discipline that builds an investment policy is the one I bring to pricing a private company or pressure-testing a deal.

Tomasz Felpel is an investor, founder, and advisor in private markets and healthcare, based in New York. He founded Value Alpha, an AI-powered private-markets valuation platform, and Sonnerie VC, an early-stage healthcare venture firm. Previously he led corporate development and M&A at Fortune 500 scale. Columbia Business School EMBA. Read the full story.