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Types of Fund Options for Giving
At the Community Foundation for South Central New York our giving
options include several different types of charitable funds. As a donor,
you can select the type of fund that matches your charitable intent most
closely, then either establish a new, personalized fund of that type to
be housed within the Foundation’s overall endowment (gift minimums are
required to establish new funds), or contribute to an already-existing
fund of that type that aligns with your intent and charitable goals, as
well as with your personal financial situation. (There are no gift
minimums for contributions to already-established funds, including the
CommuniFund™.)
Types of Funds:
Donor Advised Funds
Donor Advised funds allow individuals,
families, businesses or other entities to establish a fund where they
may periodically direct that grants be issued to the nonprofits of their
choice. (Please note that such directives are legally considered to
be ‘recommendations’ of the donors; by law, the Community Foundation’s
Board of Directors is required to approve all grants issued by the
Foundation.)
- You may make one or more sizeable contributions to your Donor
Advised fund, receiving a tax deduction for the year in which you
made the gift, but defer making decisions regarding grantee
organizations to a later time – even to a different year, if you
wish.
- Donor Advised funds are convenient: You don’t have to worry
about chasing down tax letters for each grant made from your fund.
You receive your tax deduction when you make your contribution to
the fund itself; the Foundation will automatically send you any
documentation required for tax purposes.
Please note: The IRS does not permit grants
from Donor Advised funds to satisfy personal pledges of the donor(s) or
any other party.
Donor Advised funds bear the name of the donors
(the John and Mary Smith Donor Advised Fund); other donors have chosen
to memorialize loved ones; still other options are possible.
For more information about Donor Advised funds
at the Community Foundation, contact
Diane Brown
at (607) 772-6773.
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Types of Funds
Field of Interest Funds
Field of Interest funds allow a donor or group
of donors to establish or contribute to a fund that addresses issues of
specific interest to them. One example at the Community Foundation is
The Women’s Fund, which was
established by an initial group of donors to empower and assist women
and girls in our region through grantmaking, and to encourage
collective, engaged philanthropy among women. The Women’s Fund, through
its Leadership Committee comprising donors to the Fund, continues to
work to engage new donors in its philanthropic efforts and to grow its
endowment.
A new Field of Interest fund could also be
established by a single donor or family which fully funds it on its own,
sets the grantmaking parameters in place (i.e., chooses the areas of
interest the fund should address in its grantmaking), and then allows
the Foundation’s Special Grants Committee to make grant decisions. (If
you, as the donor, would wish to choose on an ongoing basis the agencies
to receive grants from the fund you establish, then this type of fund is
not for you; you should consider establishing a Donor Advised fund.)
For more information about Field of Interest
funds, contact the Community
Foundation at (607) 772-6773.
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Types of Funds
Designated Funds
As their name implies, Designated funds are
established by donors to achieve a designated purpose among a designated
population. For example, such funds might be set up to make periodic
grants to a list of charities pre-determined by you, as the original
donor. They could also be established to issue grants to nonprofits in a
specific geographic area – a county or a municipality. Or they could be
set up to do both; it all depends on what you want to achieve through
the fund. Unlike a Donor Advised fund, however, the complete parameters
for grantmaking for the fund must be established through the fund
agreement at the time the fund is established, and after that point,
donor involvement is limited. For many donors this is exactly what they
want: They like the idea that they can set in motion a meaningful,
personal charitable legacy and be confident that it will operate without
their having to devote precious time and attention to it, even after
their deaths.
Designated funds may be set up by others
besides individuals or families. They can be an excellent option for a
private foundation that is considering dissolution – perhaps because its
board members or trustees are aging and there is no one to take their
place – but that wants to ensure that the foundation’s charitable legacy
continues even without their future involvement.
Designated funds are also a good option for
businesses that have been engaged in a community for a long time but
that are now ceasing operations or moving their base of operations to
another region. Such businesses often like to establish perpetual
charitable funds with a “farewell” or ultimate gift to benefit the
community that was so good to them for so many years.
For more information about Designated funds,
contact the Community Foundation at
(607) 772-6773.
Return to Types of
Funds
Agency Funds
Agency funds are a type of Designated fund, but
instead of making grants to a pre-determined list of multiple nonprofit
organizations, their purpose is to support one particular nonprofit.
Agency funds may be established by individual
donors or families, by another organization, or by the nonprofit itself.
They are often established to house a nonprofit organization’s
endowment, thereby saving the organization the considerable expense of
having to pay an investment firm to manage it for them.
An agency endowment housed at a community
foundation can also be attractive to the donors to such a fund, who may
be reluctant to give a large gift directly to the nonprofit for fear
that if for some reason the organization ceases operations, the gift
will be lost. However, should the nonprofit cease operations after
placing their endowment at the Community Foundation, the Foundation’s
Board of Directors would either direct that the endowment be used to
benefit another organization with a similar mission or it would be
placed in the CommuniFund™, the Foundation’s general unrestricted
endowment fund, to address immediate community needs.
For more information about Agency funds, please
contact
Diane Brown at (607) 772-6773.
Return to Types of
Funds
Scholarship Funds.jpg)
Scholarship funds are established as a way to
support promising students by assisting them with the costs of their
education. Oftentimes donors see such funds as a meaningful way to honor
or memorialize friends, teachers, co-workers or family members – and
they will name the Scholarship fund after the person being honored or
remembered. Other scenarios may be possible, and we invite you to
contact us to see if what you have
in mind is a good fit for a Community Foundation Scholarship fund.
You should keep in mind that:
- All Scholarship funds at the Community Foundation require a
minimum gift of $25,000 to establish the fund. Donors may take up to
four years to reach the $25,000 minimum.
- The total amount available for scholarships from the fund in a
given year is determined by the Foundation’s spending policy
(currently 4% of the assets in the fund based on a rolling average
of the previous twelve fiscal quarters). The minimum amount per
scholarship award is $250.
- The Community Foundation accepts only those scholarship funds
where the donor wishes to award scholarships to a student or
students at a particular school. The Foundation relies on selection
committees at each school to choose the student to receive the
scholarship award. The Foundation will not take on the
responsibility of selecting students to receive scholarships.
- Per IRS regulations, individual donors may not choose the
students to receive scholarships from their fund. The donor may,
however, establish the criteria for student selection.
- Scholarship awards can be paid only to the educational
institution where the student is incurring costs. Awards will not be
paid directly to the student or to his family members.
For more information about Scholarship funds,
contact the Community Foundation at
(607) 772-6773.
Return to Types of
Funds
The CommuniFund™
The CommuniFund™ is the Community Foundation’s
unrestricted general fund. It supports a vital component of the
Foundation’s mission: responding to pressing needs in our communities in
a broad-based, flexible, yet timely way. It consists of generous and
thoughtful gifts of all sizes, from one dollar to hundreds of thousands
of dollars.
Grants from the CommuniFund™ are awarded in a
twice-yearly competitive grants process in which nonprofits from
throughout our six-county service area submit proposals for projects per
grant criteria established annually by the Foundation’s Board of
Directors. All proposals are reviewed by panels of volunteer reviewers
drawn from the community (each panel is chaired by a Board member), then
those proposals that are not eliminated at the panel level are reviewed
by the Grants Committee of the Board. Lastly, the full Board of
Directors reviews the proposals sent forward by the Grants Committee and
makes the final decisions regarding grant funding. Since the
Foundation’s inception in 1997 more than 240 grants have been awarded
from the CommuniFund™, totaling more than $1.8 million.
In considering a gift to the CommuniFund™ you
can be assured that your contribution will achieve positive local
impact, benefiting the residents of our region. The gift will keep on
giving, as well; as an endowed fund, the CommuniFund™ will endure into
the future. And of course, a gift to the CommuniFund™ (as to all funds
at the Foundation) is tax deductible to the fullest extent permitted by
law.
If you know that you’d like to “do something to
give back to the community,” but simply aren’t sure what form your gift
should take, a gift to the CommuniFund™ could be the ideal solution.
A gift to the CommuniFund™ can be as simple as
putting a check in the mail to the Foundation. Non-cash gifts, however,
may be more complicated and the Foundation recommends that you or your
professional advisor contact us at
(607) 772-6773 prior to initiating the gift.
Return to Types of
Funds
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