This couple’s planned gift is an act of trust

Sharon and Michael McQuade P’11 have been associated with Miss Porter’s School since their daughter, Maura Cline ’11, was a student. “From the minute we first stepped on the campus, it was obvious it was someplace special and someplace very different,” said Sharon. “We feel it was life-changing for our daughter and her classmates.”

The McQuades, who live in Arlington, Virginia, plunged fully into the life of the School after Maura started at Farmington. They represented parents on the board of trustees from 2009 to 2011 and then served on the International Advisory Committee from 2016 to 2018. Michael was a trustee from 2011 to 2020—serving as treasurer for three years and vice chair for two. Sharon and Michael helped chair the School’s capital campaign that ran from 2016 to 2020. 

“Porter’s has made such a profound impact in the lives of my daughter and the girls that she met there. It was just a huge turning point in our family’s life,” said Sharon. In recognition of the School’s life-changing impact on its students, the couple has made provisions for it in their estate plan. 

The pair has also made significant gifts to the School in the past, including funding to help start the original InterMission travel program that has now evolved to provide every 11th-grader an overseas experience as part of the School’s integrated junior year global citizenship program. "But a planned gift is different because it is an act of trust in the future leaders of the School," said Michael, a retired vice president for research at Carnegie Mellon University who is engaged in research and national security policy work in Washington, D.C. 

“When you invest in something when you’re alive, you often invest in a program or a specific thing,” he continued. “When investing as part of a planned giving program, you’re counting on people and the continuity of the organization they steward. Kate Windsor has created a team that I think are the finest single-sex prep school educators in the country. That’s a supremely investable thing. We’ve not made a planned giving commitment because at some point a specific program will need money, we’re making a planned gift because we have confidence in the continuity of vision whenever our contribution is actually realized.”