Indiana Tax Credit Scholarship Program (SGO)
Did you know that you can receive substantial tax benefits while blessing Heritage?

This is a practical way to protect more of your money from taxation through generous tax credits, allowing you to invest in Heritage students and impact the school’s budget.

• Your gift qualifies for a 50% state tax credit and will be subtracted from your Indiana tax due.
• Your gift may also qualify as a charitable deduction on your federal tax due.
• Appreciated stock gifts receive multiple tax advantages.

Consider discussing this program with your tax advisor.

We are sometimes asked how the SGO program benefits all of the projects in the Heritage Fund since SGO giving is initially earmarked solely for student scholarships through the Indiana choice program.

The way it works is that we have a baseline SGO student scholarship component we fulfill through the Heritage Fund. Additional SGO dollars are then used to meet tuition assistance needs that we would have otherwise fulfilled using our existing internal tuition aid budget.  

Example: If we have a $2 million current aid budget, but $1 million is raised through (unbudgeted) SGO funding, we can repurpose $1 million of aid budget that we no longer need because SGO scholarship funding is filling that aid gap.  We use our internal aid budget that SGO funding replaces, and use that to spend on all of the other things in the Heritage Fund.

Your SGO dollars take a journey from being received by our SGO partner (Sagamore), being applied to qualifying student scholarships (while you receive the 50% tax credit), and then - when that SGO-managed tuition aid money flows into Heritage - we have the equivalent amount freed up from our internal aid budget to apply to Heritage Fund needs. It's a bit of a longer journey for your gift but it's an amazing way to leverage the SGO program to bless the school, and students, and the Heritage Fund (and the donor!)  We've been effectively doing this for the past seven years through our Heritage Fund annual campaign.

From a Donor:
"When I first heard about the opportunity to donate to HCS’s financial assistance program through the Sagamore Institute SGO it sounded too good to be true. After an examination by my advisers, I was very happy to be able to give towards financial assistance at HCS using this vehicle. I am not aware of another giving opportunity that allows you to reallocate such a large percentage of funds away from the federal and state government and to a more deserving cause."

From a Donor:
"The leverage provided by the tax credit has allowed us to easily double what we would otherwise give. As a business leader and member of our community, it feels great to have our local government encourage generosity toward such a critical and strategic area."

From a Scholarship Recipient:
"It has allowed my children the opportunity for greater stability, higher academic standards in their education, and the ability to choose a spiritually grounded school that really focuses on the children's character building as well as intellectual development. These opportunities are absolutely priceless!"

From a Scholarship Recipient:
"The opportunity to have this scholarship allows us to provide our large family with the same opportunities as smaller families. We foster children and appreciate the chance to provide them with experiences that they can only receive at a Christian school."