• Community Foundations help build healthy communities
  • Develop permanent charitable funds
  • Connect donors to programs they care about
  • Provide community leadership
  • Donors, who want to ensure that their gifts will do the most good in the community and support organizations over the long term, find that community foundations offer them the expertise, flexibility and financial resources to give more to the community while gaining the maximum tax advantages for each contribution. Some donors also prefer to be shielded from fundraisers by giving through the auspices of a community foundation.
  • Community foundations can channel donor distributions anywhere in the country, and even in some cases outside the U.S., as long as recipients are nonprofit organizations qualified as 501(c)(3).
  • Community foundations are public charities under tax laws. This offers some advantages to donors over private foundations. For example, gifts of cash and ordinary property to a community foundation are deductible up to 50% of adjusted gross income (AGI). Gifts to private or family foundations are deductible only to 30% of AGI. Similarly, gifts of appreciated property to community foundations can be credited for 30% compared with 20% for a private foundation. There are no excise taxes on community foundations as there are on private foundations and community foundations do not have a requirement that a certain percentage must be distributed each year.