What is a Foundation Fund?
Overview
Anyone, including individuals, corporations, partnerships and other forms of business entities, can make donations to a fund established with a community foundation. These donors come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, each with a common commitment and dedication to promoting and preserving the well-being of their community. Whether their interest is in establishing a new, specially named fund, contributing to an existing fund, making a gift in memory of a friend or loved one, or making an unrestricted gift to an expendable, endowment or unrestricted fund of the Valley Falls Community Foundation, every citizen in the Valley Falls community and surrounding area should know that by caring through giving they can make a lasting difference.
What is a Foundation Fund?
Like other trust funds, an endowment fund created with the Valley Falls Community Foundation is deemed to be a separate trust characterized by having its own, segregated and identifiable assets, its own donors and its own charitable cause or philanthropic purpose to fulfill as its mission and the reason for its creation and existence. Those funds created with and held by the Greater Manhattan Community Foundation, the Valley Falls Community Foundation and other affiliate community foundations are invested and overseen by Foundation Investment Committees, each of whose memberships include responsible professional institutional and investment fund advisors and managers who live and work in local communities associated and identified with specific community foundations. Solid and responsible investment strategies and policies have also been adopted and implemented by the Greater Manhattan Community Foundation and the Valley Falls Community Foundation, thus providing assurance to fund donors that their donated gifts are invested wisely and are secure.
the Valley Falls Community Foundation has six major types of fund options for donors to consider in deciding which fund type they choose to establish. These fund types include Donor Advised Funds, Designated Funds, Agency Funds, Field of Interest Funds, Scholarship Funds and Unrestricted Funds, a brief description of each type of fund being provided below. Each one of these six major fund types may be further structured and designated to constitute one of the following:
Permanent Endowment Funds. If a particular fund type is also designated to be an endowment fund, then only the investment earnings from the investment of assets in the fund are eligible for distribution for the support of the organization for which the endowment was established, as well as for grants made by that organization to various charitable causes and projects. Maintaining the donated principal assets (often referred to as the fund corpus) of the endowment intact and inviolate provides assurances to the donor that the endowment will continue to exist and make charitable distributions for many years in the future and, theoretically, even in perpetuity, in accordance with the wishes of the endowment’s donor or donors.
Expendable Funds. For a variety of reasons. a particular fund type may also be structured as an expendable fund, meaning all of assets donated to the fund and all of the investment earnings derived from the investment of those assets may be distributed and expended at any time for one or more charitable causes until the fund is depleted.