Types of Endowment Funds offered by Lebanon Area Foundation
You can choose or combine any of our four funds to express your charitable intentions.
UNRESTRICTED FUND
Many generous persons have stated, “I just want to help my community.”
Rather than select certain charities in order to simplify your magnanimity, we might suggest an unrestricted fund in the Lebanon Area Foundation.
At the Lebanon Area Foundation, we specialize in figuring out just what will help most. Under the guidance of our distinguished Board, we investigate, define, and design solutions to our community’s pressing problems. We confer with regional experts, with community leaders, and with local non-profit agencies. If no one is addressing the issue, then we find someone who will.
The income earned by unrestricted funds provides the venture capital to address one-term solutions to problems like hunger and homelessness; to respond new and emerging needs; to build families; to promote the arts; and to educate, inform, and uplift. As conditions change, so do our grants.
Our Distribution Committee has experience in applying philanthropy at the community level. By creating an unrestricted fund, your client can be assured that the gift will always be used to meet vital needs, improve the Lebanon area quality of life and respond quickly as times and needs change.
SCHOLARSHIP FUND
Establishing a scholarship fund is a common charitable goal for many individuals and organizations. It’s a wonderful way for donors to give back to the community in recognition of their appreciation for their education.
Endowed scholarships are frequently funded by gifts of cash, but they may also be funded by transfers of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, and other types of property. Gifts toward endowed scholarships may also be made by bequest.
Download the Scholarship Fund Agreement Contract by clicking the link below:
Fully-endowed scholarship
By establishing a fully-endowed, uniquely-named scholarship, you have the ability to designate eligibility requirements including education level, field of study, geographic area, etc.
- Minimum initial balance of $10,000. This amount can be accumulated over time and come from more than one donor.
- Permanent endowment fund allowing you to award 5 percent annually through scholarships.
- Earns investment returns.
FIELD-OF-INTEREST FUND
Perhaps you are 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 could.”
You can, by creating a field-of-interest fund name the cause closest to your hearts. 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 in poor neighborhoods.
We will go to work; researching and preparing a state-of-the-art grant-spending plan for the field-of-interest. Our board evaluates 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 field-of-interest funds is that they keep up with the times. We will always have young people to be concerned about. But today’s youth problems weren’t around thirty years ago and neither were the charities that address them. Many of tomorrow’s issues can’t even be guessed at today. Rather than locking your fund into a few specific charities that may be good today (but gone tomorrow), the Lebanon Area Foundation places your client’s field-of-interest fund grants in the best hands at the right times, in perpetuity.
DESIGNATED FUND
Others prefer to have certain charities benefit from their fund. Some donors choose to leave a complicated series of bequests, which we can easily administer. Or you may wish to support a fledgling charity but aren’t quite sure it’s ready to manage an endowment fund. Sometimes you wonder what will happen to a direct gift if the charity goes out of business.
A designated fund in the Lebanon Area Foundation can solve all these worries. We take care of the investments and regularly pay the fund’s income to the charities named by the donor. We make sure the charities stay legitimate and stay open.
If the unexpected should occur, and a charity ceases operation or significantly changes its focus, or the purpose it serves becomes obsolete, we will be able to redirect the donor’s funds to a similar charity without losing time or depleting the fund by going to court. Our Board will carefully review the facts before making such a change.
DONOR-ADVISED FUND
Wealthy families face a myriad of charitable requests. Just managing the correspondence and check-writing can overwhelm the charitable impulse. Plus, there’s no place to hide from all those well-intentioned solicitors.
That’s why we created the donor-advised fund. You can refer requests to us, or give anonymously or suggest we make payments to any charity you choose, so long as proposed grants fit with the charitable purposes of our organization. Then we take care of all the clerical chores.
While your recommendations cannot be legally binding (our Board must have final say under Internal Revenue Service rules), we take these suggestions very seriously. Our Board has worked out a procedure which includes staff scrutiny of basic information furnished by the recommended charity. We protect the donor by making sure the charity is above-board and actively serving the public.
Advised funds allow living donors to professionalize their charitable giving without the annoyances entailed in running a private foundation. You may call upon the staff at the Lebanon Area Foundation to help with any aspect of grant making. Donors may ask us to create challenge grant programs, identify worthy charities in a given field, locate information about out-of-town groups and evaluate the results of their gifts.