The text below provides very generic baseline material for you to create a planned giving one-pager or webpage.
This is your community foundation
The community foundation is working hard to help you support your favorite causes, whether you’re passionate about social services, healthcare, education, the environment, animal welfare, religion, arts and culture, or community development.
Addressing our community’s most critical needs
Community foundations operate with a unique structure, bringing together funds established by individuals, businesses, and families all under one roof. It’s easy to organize your charitable giving through donor-advised funds, field of interest funds, and scholarship funds to support the causes you love.
You may already know that a community foundation is a public charity recognized by the IRS, which means contributions are eligible for the most favorable charitable deductions under the tax law. What you might not know is that your community foundation is also dedicated to growing philanthropy to meet the most critical needs of the people in our region, today and tomorrow.
Every day, the team at the community foundation works with members of our board of directors, civic leaders, and nonprofit organizations to deeply understand the areas where the people in our community need the most help. Today, the most pressing needs might be for emergency assistance in response to a disaster. Tomorrow, our community might need scholarships for inner city youth, or investments in research to improve access to healthcare for the underserved. Indeed, the needs of our community are ever-changing. Your community foundation always has its finger on the pulse of the community’s top priorities and the best way to address them. Through its convening power, community knowledge, and perpetual mission, your community foundation is an unparalleled resource to make our community better for everyone.
Many options for giving
We appreciate your support! We are grateful to so many donors who give cash or stock every year to funds they’ve established, or to the community foundation itself.
As we look ahead to growing our mission and serving even more people in our community, we are inviting dedicated donors like you to consider including the community foundation in your long-term charitable giving plans. Whether through a complex gift in the next year or so, or through a legacy gift in your estate plan, you can support your fund at the community foundation—or our mission in general—through a “planned gift.” In particular, when you support the community foundation’s mission, your gift will help sustain our operations and important programs that address critical community needs for many years to come.
A “planned gift” can take many forms, including:
A gift of real estate or private stock
A gift in your will or trust
A charitable remainder trust
A beneficiary designation of your life insurance policy, IRA, or other retirement plan
We welcome the opportunity to work with you and your advisors to structure a planned gift that makes a real difference for people in our region.
Dive into the details
Here are a few examples of specific types of planned gifts.
Leaving a bequest
If you’ve put together an estate plan with the help of an attorney, chances are, you’re familiar with the term “bequest.” A bequest is an instruction for assets or money to transfer to a person or charity following your death.
Here are ways you can leave a bequest to the community foundation.
Will or trust
You can include a bequest to the community foundation in your will or in a revocable living trust (a vehicle you establish to avoid probate). You can leave a specific dollar amount, or a portion of the “remainder” of your estate or trust after distributions to family and other beneficiaries. You can update your will or trust anytime prior to your death.
Beneficiary designation
You can leave a bequest through a beneficiary designation on your IRA or other retirement plan, or even on a life insurance policy. Beneficiary designations can be updated throughout your lifetime as your family and financial situation change. This is one of the most impactful and tax-efficient ways to leave a legacy.
Qualified charitable distributions
If you are aged 70 ½ or older, it is well worth your time to investigate whether a tool known as a Qualified Charitable Distribution might be right for you as a tax-savvy way to support certain types of funds at the community foundation or the community foundation itself. Here is how it works:
You can make a QCD if you have reached the age of 70½, and as such, you can direct up to $111,000 (2026 limit) annually from your traditional IRA to the community foundation.
If you’ve reached the age-73 threshold for IRS-mandated Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from qualified retirement plans, a QCD counts toward your RMD.
QCD transfers are not included in your taxable income.
The $111,000 cap (2026 limit) will be indexed for inflation.
Charitable remainder trust
A “charitable remainder trust” (sometimes referred to as a CRT) is a planned giving technique that allows you to make a future gift to the community foundation and be eligible for an up-front income tax deduction, and retain an income stream for life or for a period of years.
To establish a charitable remainder trust, you will work with your attorney to establish a trust agreement and also work with a person or entity who will serve as the trustee of the charitable remainder trust.
Your tax advisor will help you determine whether you could benefit from establishing a charitable remainder trust. Factors include:
Your plans to leave gifts to charity following your death to meet your charitable goals
Your income requirements while you are living
The types of assets you own and whether there is a particular highly-appreciated asset or assets (such as stock or real estate) that would make an ideal gift to a charitable remainder trust to reduce the capital gains tax exposure
Here’s how it works:
Your charitable remainder trust can name yourself or someone else to receive a potential income stream for a term of years, no more than 20, or for the life of one or more non-charitable beneficiaries (such as you and your spouse).
Your charitable remainder trust will name the community foundation to receive the remainder of the donated assets following the term of years or death of the income beneficiary or beneficiaries.
Your charitable remainder trust will establish the terms of the income stream received by the income beneficiary or beneficiaries.
A “charitable remainder annuity trust” (CRAT) distributes a fixed annuity amount each year. You cannot make additional contributions to a CRAT.
A “charitable remainder unitrust” (CRUT), on the other hand, distributes a fixed percentage (at least 5%) based on the balance of the trust assets (revalued annually), and you can make additional contributions to the trust during your lifetime.
At the end of the income beneficiary’s lifetime, or at the end of the term for the income interest, the remaining trust assets are distributed to the community foundation.
Charitable gift annuity
A charitable gift annuity is a planned giving vehicle that is a good fit if you like the idea of an up-front tax deduction, a steady lifetime income stream, and a remainder gift to charity. A charitable gift annuity (also referred to as a “CGA”) is similar to a charitable remainder trust, but often easier to establish, especially if you plan to set up a planned gift to the community foundation with $50,000 or less.
A CGA, like any other annuity, is a contract. You agree to make an irrevocable transfer of cash or assets to the community foundation. In return, our organization agrees to pay you (or a designated beneficiary such as a spouse) a fixed payment for life. You are eligible for an immediate income tax deduction for the present value of the future amount passing to charity.
How much income can you receive from a charitable gift annuity? That amount is determined according to national standards and is based on “rate of return” assumptions that are revised from time to time in response to changes in interest rates. Talk with our team to learn more about payout rates and what you might expect if you establish a charitable gift annuity to support the community foundation.
If you are over 70 ½, a charitable gift annuity might be particularly attractive. This is because a “Legacy IRA” rule allows for a once-in-a-lifetime, $55,000 (2026 limit) distribution from an IRA to a charitable gift annuity or charitable remainder trust. Your tax advisor can help you understand the taxability of your income payments from a charitable gift annuity, whether you establish the charitable gift annuity through a QCD, stock, or other assets.
Gifts of closely held stock
While not a legacy gift, giving closely held stock to the community foundation requires careful planning, so it is definitely a “planned gift”! It’s well worth exploring because these gifts of “complex assets” frequently result in strong tax benefits to you, as well as providing strong support to the community foundation and other organizations you care about.
In general, making a gift of highly-appreciated assets is a strong planning technique. When you contribute highly-appreciated stock in a public company, for example, to the community foundation, you are typically eligible for an income tax deduction at the stock’s fair market value on the date of the gift. When the community foundation sells the stock, our organization pays no capital gains tax. By contrast, you would have paid capital gains tax on the sale of the stock if you had sold it first and then transferred the proceeds to charity. The same is true for gifts of highly appreciated real estate and closely held stock; frequently, these assets have large unrealized capital gains.
If you are considering giving part (or all) of a closely-held business to charitable causes, please reach out. These transactions carry layers of complexity, largely concerning the timing of charitable gifts relative to the sale transaction. The best outcomes are achieved through a thoughtful, multi-step process. The team at the community foundation is happy to work with you and your tax and legal advisors to develop a plan to donate your business to charity. Many successful closely held exit transactions occur only after several years of planning—and most of that planning takes place well before potential buyers are even engaged. With the help of your tax and legal advisors, we can work with you and your advisors to ensure that your charitable intentions–as well as your tax intentions–are met through your gifts of closely held stock.
Gifts of real estate
If you own highly-appreciated residential, commercial, or undeveloped real estate, you may have reached the point where you no longer want to manage or maintain it. This is a perfect opportunity to discuss the option of giving real estate to the community foundation.
As with gifts of other long-term appreciated assets, your gift of real estate may be treated as a “current” gift, meaning you are transferring it in the near term. But it is still a gift that requires a lot of planning, and therefore belongs in the list of “planned gifts.”
Your gift of highly-appreciated real estate can help you avoid capital gains taxes and generate more money for the community foundation and other favorite charitable causes than you would have by selling the property first and donating the proceeds.
At the community foundation, we understand that, unlike cash or even stock, real estate is often tied to strong emotions that might surprise you when you start discussing disposition. We can help you structure a gift of real estate so that you can extend the emotionally important, family-related dynamics that may have been linked to the property for generations, even after our organization sells the property and invests the proceeds or deploys the proceeds to fund our programs and mission.
Life insurance
You may want to consider giving a life insurance policy to the community foundation. Giving a life insurance policy to a charitable organization, such as the community foundation, including through a beneficiary designation, is useful because the proceeds of that policy will not be included in your taxable estate for Federal estate tax purposes if that is a concern in your situation.