Perpetual Education Fund

The Perpetual Education Fund (PEF) is a program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), first announced by church president Gordon B. Hinckley on March 31, 2001. The mission of the PEF, as stated in that address, is to provide educational opportunity [not welfare support] to members living in areas with widespread poverty, enabling and empowering them to lift themselves and establish their future lives on the foundation of self-reliance that can come from training in marketable skills. This program reflects the values and stated aims of the church around the importance of education and the duty to help and assist the poor. Anyone may donate.

The LDS Church has made similar efforts in the past to provide for the temporal needs of its members. The program is modeled after the Perpetual Emigration Fund, which provided loans to more than 40,000 19th century Latter-day Saint immigrants looking to settle in the Salt Lake Valley, but lacking the funds to do so. In 1903, the church established a fund to provide aspiring school teachers with loans for school expenses. A related effort, not specifically targeting education, began in 1936, when church president Heber J. Grant set up a welfare system in order to provide a means for people to earn a living during the Great Depression.

The Perpetual Education Fund functions as an endowment, meaning that all loans are made from interest, while the (or body of the fund) remains intact. All donations made to the fund go to the fund corpus. Anyone may donate to the PEF, regardless of affiliation with the LDS Church and donations have been made by members and non-members alike. Because the program is administered through the LDS Church, all donations go directly toward the loans. The executive director of the PEF from its inception through September 2012 was former general authority and Church Historian John K. Carmack; with Richard E. Cook, another former general authority, as the managing director. In September 2012, the church's First Presidency announced Robert C. Gay, of the First Quorum of the Seventy, as the new chairman of the fund.

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