Donor Advised Funds
A personal approach to giving.

Establishing a Donor Advised Fund allows you to make a gift to your community foundation, then remain actively involved in suggesting uses for your gift. You can work with the community foundation's professional program staff to suggest ongoing uses for the fund - targeting the issues you care about most. Grant awards are issued to charities in the name of the fund (or anonymously if you prefer). It's a simple, powerful, and highly personal approach to giving.

Donor advised funds provide donors with maximum convenience and flexibility. Donors can make one simple donation – taking a charitable deduction one year - and make distributions over several years. Many of our donors contribute to their funds yearly.

Donor advised funds enable donors to offer recommendations for grant distributions to specific charities. All such recommendations are subject to Board approval; grant recipients must be recognized as tax exempt charities by the Internal Revenue Code.

For a list of donor advised funds at AAACF, click here.

With this fund type, donors have the ability to “spend down” the corpus of their funds. Many of our donors choose to treat their funds as permanently endowed and voluntarily follow the Community Foundation’s Spending Policy guidelines.   Fund minimums and fees charged by AAACF differ based on whether donors have chosen to treat their funds as endowed or non-endowed:

Traditional Donor Advised Fund:

Minimum gift: $20,000
Fund fee: Graduated schedule based on market value of the fund on September 30 computed with a 16-quarter rolling average.

          1.0%     Market value $20,000 – $1,000,000

          0.75%   Market value $1,000,001 - $2,500,000

          0.5%     Market value $2,500,001 - $4,999,999

          0.25%   Market value $5,000,000 and higher

Spend-Down Donor Advised Fund (non-endowed):

Minimum gift: $20,000
Fund fee: Funds not pooled with endowments due to shorter spending horizon.  Annual fees will be charged according to the same schedule as donor advised funds, except that the market value used in the calculation will be the actual market value at 9/30 of the preceding year, without using the 16 quarter average method.

Special Pass-Thru Donor Advised Fund:

Minimum gift: $50,000
Fund fee: Funds with less than one year spending horizon.  1% of original gift amount, assessed at the time of the gift.  In addition, an amount equal to 5% of the original gift will be placed in an Administrative Endowment fund.