UMHB reports 80 people on nine mission teams; three of the nine locations are inside the United States

The University of Mary Hardin-Baylor published an account this summer of where its Global Outreach program had been. Eighty students, faculty, staff and alumni; nine teams; nine locations, named in the release as Alaska, Belize, Canada, Indonesia, Kenya, Montana, Nepal, the Rio Grande Valley and the United Kingdom. Three of the nine sit inside the United States.

The setting is worth stating before the claim is weighed. This is a Baptist university in Belton, Texas, writing in its own newsroom about its own program, in the register an institution uses when it is describing formation rather than filing anything. The argument the release makes is about what the travel does to the traveller. "These experiences give our students the opportunity to see what it means to live out their faith beyond the walls of the university," said Tiffany Horton, UMHB's Director of Global Outreach, in that release, which adds that participants return home with "a deeper understanding of God's heart for the world", a greater willingness to serve, and "stories of how God worked in ways they could never have planned".

The specifics follow. In Belize, the team served in schools and ran pop-up medical clinics; in Kenya, clinics, a hospital and a visit to a local school, with the release recording more than 500 patients seen and 157 girls making professions of faith. A four-person team in Nepal worked alongside the International Mission Board and local translators and trekked nearly 50 miles through the Himalayas to reach remote villages.

A regional newspaper described the same program in much the same terms, in an account that carries no date in the capture; its counts differ from the release's, which points to a different season without establishing one. The Killeen Daily Herald page, which carries no line naming where the story first ran, reported seven teams of 53 students sent to Belize, Kenya and the Dominican Republic. It separately reports Horton saying that, beyond the medical work, UMHB teams have carried supplies into Nepal's mountains, worked with Spanish safe homes and run youth ministry in Montana and Alaska. Horton, identified there as Director of Global Outreach, described the medical side of it: "In our medical missions, students have the opportunity to put on pop-up clinics in the locations they visit," she said, adding that the students work with local providers to take vitals and assess what a community needs.

For a tax-exempt organization, the place where activity outside the United States has to be accounted for is the annual Form 990. UMHB's, filed under EIN 74-1161940, is posted in ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer as document 202601049349301005. The captured page puts four questions to the filer: whether it maintained an office, employees or agents outside the United States; whether it had "aggregate revenues or expenses of more than $10,000" from grantmaking, fundraising, business, investment and program service activities outside the country, or foreign investments valued at $100,000 or more; whether it reported more than $5,000 of grants or other assistance to a foreign organization; and whether it reported more than $5,000 of aggregate grants or assistance to foreign individuals.

What the capture does not carry is the answer column. The questions are legible; the boxes beside them are not in the text this piece was able to take, and nothing here should be read as reporting how any one of them was answered.

The companion schedule is a statement of activities outside the United States, and its own instruction states that it is completed when the filer has answered Yes on Form 990, Part IV, line 14b, 15 or 16. Those line numbers come from the schedule's instruction. The captured checklist page prints its four questions without their Part IV line numbers, so which question corresponds to which line is not something these captures establish. The schedule's first section is the region-by-region table, with columns for the region, the number of offices there, the number of employees, agents and independent contractors, the type of activity conducted, a description of any program service and the total expenditures for and investments in the region. In the captured text those headings stand over nothing: no region appears beneath them.

The section on grants and other assistance to individuals outside the United States is present, and what it carries is brief. The captured text gives the type of assistance as "FINANCIAL AID LOANS, GRANTS OR SCHOLARSHIPS" and the method of disbursement as "APPLY AGAINST STUDENT ACCOUNT CHARGES", with no row count and no amount. Read plainly, that is money applied to a student's account rather than spent in a region abroad, though the captured text gives no amount, no recipient and no location for those accounts.

The form and the release are pointed at different objects, and the honest reading holds both. A 990 measures what the organization itself books: its offices, its staff, its expenditure, its grants. A mission team is people travelling, and neither the release nor the newspaper story says who pays for the ticket, the clinic supplies or the translator. So the filing does not rebut the account of what 80 people did in Kenya and Nepal; on the evidence captured here it simply does not reach it. A reader wanting to know what the university itself maintains abroad is looking at the right document. A reader wanting to know what happened in the Himalayas is not.

Scale is the other thing the filing supplies. The same document describes an institution that provides an education for approximately 3,200 students annually, and the Nonprofit Explorer organization record for EIN 74-1161940 lists total revenue of $135,987,428, total expenses of $130,882,639 and total assets of $413,154,550. Eighty travellers is about one traveller for every forty of the approximately 3,200 students the filing describes.

One formulation recurs across three of the documents here, with small changes. The release says the program reflects the university's mission to "prepare students for leadership, service, and faith-informed discernment in a global society". The newspaper says the program is designed to "prepare students for leadership, service and faith-informed discernment in a global society" - the same words, comma and all but one. And the filing's capitalised text has the university "PREPARES STUDENTS FOR LEADERSHIP, SERVICE, AND FAITH-INFORMED DISCERNMENT IN A GLOBAL SOCIETY". The same formulation is doing duty as press copy, as newspaper summary and as the description a tax form carries.

The program's own page lists a different set of destinations again: anti-trafficking ministry in Amarillo, medical missions in Ecuador and Thailand, community outreach in Kenya, refugee ministry in Moldova, student ministry in Romania, sports ministry in Costa Rica, children's ministry in the Rio Grande Valley. Only Kenya and the Rio Grande Valley also appear among the nine locations in the release. The two lists barely overlap, which fits a program built on partnerships rather than a standing presence abroad; the captures are undated and do not show the page changing from one year to the next.

The institution around them is old. UMHB says it was chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas, making it "the oldest continuously operating college in the state", and that 90% of freshmen receive some form of financial aid. An institution whose ordinary business is moving aid into student accounts is also the institution whose foreign-facing money, in the only part of the schedule the capture shows carrying entries, moves into student accounts.

Two things resolve on their own timetable. Nonprofit Explorer will eventually post UMHB's next annual filing, the one following document 202601049349301005. The analysis above yields a prediction a reader can hold this piece to: that filing's region table will again carry no region rows, and its individual-grants section will again describe the money as financial aid applied against student account charges. Pull EIN 74-1161940 on Nonprofit Explorer by 30 June 2027 and the prediction is either right or it is not. Before that, the Global Outreach page can be read again to see whether Ecuador, Moldova, Thailand, Romania and Costa Rica are still among the destinations it lists.