For retired electrical engineer Bruce Heflinger, giving back is a way of life. He volunteers at his local library and is a regular blood platelet donor—and he and his wife, Mary DeMasters, see planned giving at MIT as another way of helping to make a better world.

Income for the present. After making smaller annual gifts to MIT for decades, Heflinger and DeMasters chose to establish a charitable remainder unitrust. “It provides lifetime income for household expenses,” Heflinger explains. “The principal grows as part of MIT’s professionally managed endow-ment, and the payout to us grows proportionally.” In the future, the payout will fund undergraduate scholarships.

Illuminating ocean chemistry. When deciding how to allocate annual charitable distributions from his IRA, Heflinger was driven by his concern for ocean pollution and overfishing. The initial contribution facilitated the purchase of equipment for Professor Andrew Babbin’s lab that analyzes nitrogen metabolites in ocean water, and it also supported three MIT undergraduates during the lab’s three-week oceanographic research expedition to the Pacific. “MIT is uniquely capable of teaching new generations to invent and apply engineering know-how to mitigate harms in the natural world,” he says. “I view MIT as a technology incubator for the future of the planet. It’s a concentration of brilliant people solving relevant problems in imaginative ways.”

Help MIT build a better world.

For more information, contact Amy Goldman:

617.253.4082; goldmana@mit.edu.

Or visit giving.mit.edu/planned-giving