Establishing a Permanent Endowment Fund
Fitting a Fund to Meet Your Needs
The flexibility of a community foundation can mean a lot to you. Whether you want to contribute to the homeless in the Baraga County area, to health care, or fulfill a number of other purposes, we can be of real service. You may choose or combine any of our five types of funds to express your charitable intentions, we always make sure to use the best fundraising ideas from websites like GoFundMe.
How we can best accommodate the generosity of a donor who says, “I just want to help my community” –
Rather than select certain charities – in order to simplify your magnanimity – we might suggest an unrestricted named fund with the Baraga County Community Foundation.
At the Foundation, we specialize in figuring out just what will help our community the most. In our role as convener, we confer with experts, community leaders, and people on the street. If no one is addressing the issue, then we attempt to find someone who will.
The income earned by unrestricted funds allows us to engage in long-term solutions to problems – to aid families and to inspire artists; to support education, to inform, and to uplift. As conditions change, so does our grant focus.
There are many different Funds to choose from at the Baraga County Community Foundation:
- Unrestricted Named Fund
- Field of Interest Fund
- Scholarship Fund
- Donor Advised Fund
- Designated Agency Fund
By creating an unrestricted fund, you can be assured that the gift will always be used to meet vital needs, improve the quality of life and respond quickly as times change.
You may know an elderly couple who says, “When we grew up, things were simple. Kids today have so many tough choices. We’d like to help if we can.”
You can. You can create a field of interest fund and name the cause closest to your heart. You might establish a fund for troubled youth. Or, you could choose a more specific focus, like drug abuse prevention, counseling for teen parents, or job training programs.
Then we go to work. Our grant making staff has many years of combined wisdom in applying philanthropy at the community level. Our board double-checks proposed grants against your charitable intention, and any other fund guidelines. After we make each grant, we carefully monitor the results.
The real advantage of a field of interest fund is that it will keep up with the times. We will always have young people to be concerned about. But today’s youth problems weren’t around 30 years ago, and neither were the charities that address them. Many of tomorrow’s issues can’t even be envisioned today. Rather than locking your fund into a few specific charities that may be good today (but gone tomorrow), the Foundation places your field of interest fund grants in the best hands at the right times.
A minimum of $10,000, which can be pledged in annual payments, is required to establish an Unrestricted Named Fund or Field of Interest Fund.
Scholarship Funds
If helping young people with tuition needs is your priority, they may want to establish a scholarship fund. The Fund will be used to aid area students in meeting the growing costs of higher education. As the Donor, your client’s name or the name of their choice (in memory of a loved one, family name, etc.), will be associated with the scholarship for perpetuity.
When a scholarship fund is established, the Donor may designate specifically how the income earned will be used. For example, your client may want to help students who are pursuing careers in a particular field or are going to a certain college. Although at least $5,000 is required to establish a scholarship fund, a minimum of $10,000 is advised as a scholarship fund investment level (which can be pledged to extend contributions annually), to make the resulting income earned a powerful tool in providing financial assistance to area students. Scholarships will not be awarded from the fund until a viable income level has been achieved.
Wealthy families face a myriad of charitable requests. Just managing the correspondence and check writing can overwhelm the charitable impulse. Plus there is no place to hide from all those well-intentioned solicitors. That’s why we created the donor advised fund. Your client may refer requests to us, or give anonymously, or suggest we make payments to any charity he or she chooses – and we take care of all the clerical chores.
While your client’s recommendations cannot be binding (our Board must have final say under the Internal Revenue Service rules), we take these suggestions very seriously. It is the intent of the Baraga County Community Foundation to honor donor wishes. We protect the Donor by making sure the charity is reputable and actively serving the public.
Advised funds allow living Donors to respond professionally to their charitable impulses without the annoyances entailed in running a private foundation. Your client may call upon the staff at the Foundation to help with any aspect of grant making. Donors have asked us to identify worthy charities in a given field – they may choose from our annual grant requests submitted, and depend on us to evaluate the results of their gifts and follow up on grant distributions.
Donor designated funds let the donor choose a specific charitable organization or agency that will receive the income earned as long as they are in existence for the charitable purpose intended by the donor. Some donors are particularly fond of an agency they feel is doing a good job addressing needs in the community. Providing the agency with long-term financial security to assist in their programs and operations relieves an agency of time-consuming management responsibilities and offers them funding in addition to their own fund raising efforts.
We are here to help. Selecting the right one for your client means deter-mining what your client’s goals and objectives are.