Various options to make an impact

Your charitably minded clients certainly have no shortage of options for their philanthropic dollars. Indeed, your clients can use their donor-advised funds at the Community Foundation to support favorite charities across the country, including alma maters, organizations in the communities where they’ve lived in the past or have a second home, or charities in communities where their grown children are now living.  

But even clients whose charitable priorities extend far and wide have a lot of passion for local causes and improving the quality of life right here in our own community. Here are planning considerations for helping clients support local needs: 

• The Foundation can help your clients achieve their goals for local support by establishing a field-of-interest fund designated for broad-reaching causes such as disaster recovery efforts, families in need, critical workforce development initiatives, or historic preservation.  

• For clients with strong ties to a specific nonprofit organization, they may want to put their annual support on autopilot with a designated fund that will make a grant to a chosen org every year or for a period of years. The predictable support helps to stabilize their finances, and the donor knows their gift will be made without any effort on their part. 

• An unrestricted fund is an excellent tool to help a client deploy charitable dollars toward whatever challenges our region may face at any given point in time across generations. It is not uncommon for a family to establish an unrestricted fund alongside other types of funds at the Foundation as part of a diversified charitable giving “portfolio.”  

• Many clients support the Foundation’s operating endowment to ensure that the organization can continue its focus on increasing charitable giving and improving local quality of life far into the future. 

• And of course, a client’s donor-advised fund at the Foundation makes it easy to support specific local charities.  

Indeed, intentional local giving is a powerful force across generations:  

• Emerging research points to a trend toward local giving among younger people. It’s therefore important for advisors to be aware of these clients’ deep commitment to the local community where they’re living now, raising children, or building businesses. Establishing a field-of-interest fund, designated fund or unrestricted fund might be particularly appealing.  

• At the other end of the generational spectrum, giving to a fund dedicated to local needs may be particularly compelling to your clients who are 70 ½ or older. That’s because these clients may be eligible to make annual distributions up to $108,000 (in 2025) per spouse from IRAs directly to an unrestricted or field-of-interest fund at the Foundation. This transfer is called a “Qualified Charitable Distribution,” or “QCD.” Not only do QCD transfers count toward satisfying Required Minimum Distributions, but your client also avoids the income tax on those funds. Furthermore, those assets are no longer part of the client’s estate upon death, so the client can avoid estate taxes, too.   

Please encourage your clients to reach out to the Foundation to learn more about how a variety of fund types and unrestricted gifts can help make the biggest difference possible, right here in our community. The team at the Community Foundation is a resource to help your clients support both current and future local needs while meeting their own financial, tax, and generational legacy goals. We look forward to working together!