At the Adams County Community Foundation, our Giving Spree, Scholarships and Adams County Grants program get a lot of accolades, but our Designated Endowment Program is equally awesome.  

This year, designated endowments awarded $161,600 and benefited 36 local nonprofits. These funds, supported by many donors, provide unrestricted operating grants to individual nonprofits.

The Community Foundation manages these endowments on behalf of donors in perpetuity. The funds’ assets are pooled for investment, and a specific amount is distributed each year, providing an annual gift to the designated nonprofit for years and decades to come. The amount of the annual distribution is determined by a spending rate, currently 4.5%, set by the Community Foundation’s board. The spending rate is based on a five-year trailing average to mitigate the effects of market fluctuations.

Donors have created 126 designated endowments, naming one or more specific nonprofits to receive the annual distribution once the fund’s assets reach a threshold of $10,000. Currently half of these designated endowments are growing toward that threshold; and at least ten are projected to cross the threshold soon and receive their first distribution in 2023.

Designated endowments have benefitted from “forever gifts” during the annual Giving Spree. The option to direct Giving Spree gifts to endowment, dubbed “forever gifts,” was introduced in 2020 and has grown in popularity each year. In fact, while donors can give to these endowments at any time, more than a dozen designated endowments have been built primarily through Giving Spree gifts. At this year’s event, donors pushed SCCAP, Adams Rescue Mission, and the Land Conservancy of Adams County to the top of the “forever gift” list making them the top Giving Spree endowment builders.

Endowment giving demonstrates to nonprofits that their donors care about the work they do today and want that work to continue. Donors who create and contribute to endowments express confidence in a nonprofit’s mission and a passion for its values. For the nonprofit, an endowment can be a crucial piece of infrastructure, a dependable source of annual income to carry them through bad times as well as good.

The Community Foundation is working to build that kind of lasting resource for all of Adams County by supporting a variety of endowments that benefit this region: designated funds, scholarship funds, our Fund for Adams County, an endowment designed to meet changing needs all across our community and donor-advised funds, which may make distributions anywhere in Pennsylvania or across the country.

Which organizations do you think need a designated endowment at the Community Foundation to help sustain their on-going operations? I’d like to know. Contact me at 717-337-0060 or rserpe@adamscountycf.org