The Burlington Community Foundation manages more than 130 donor advised funds, which have been established by individuals, businesses and charities in the community.
These funds are invested through BCF to produce an annual income, enabling charitable grants to then be made from the funds across the community to registered charities.
Funds can be established by individuals in their lifetime or as part of estate planning, by families to engage multiple generations, by community groups, and by charities to help produce sustainable funding for their operations.
Donor advised funds help make giving easy and more impactful.
Funds can be established to honour the life of a loved one, or established in your own name, or as a reflection of the purpose of the fund such as investing in mental health, supporting children youth, funding access to arts and culture, and more.
We offer several types of funds to address your current giving goals and future generosity planning. The majority of our funds are endowed, meaning they are permanently invested with the Foundation to generate income. Once established, you can have as much, or as little, involvement as you wish.
A modest, but necessary, administration fee is charged to your fund to support the fund’s operation through the dedicated expertise of BCF’s team.
You have ongoing involvement with your gift. Working with our team, you can identify ways to use available earned income from your Fund to address the issues and needs you care about most. This is our most common type of fund.
You can direct your gift to a specific charity or charities. Our staff manages the distribution of funds.
You can target your gift to address needs in an area of community life that’s important to you. When making a gift, you identify an area of personal interest and we will award grants to charitable organizations that are making a difference in the area you select.
These funds are not tied to any specific charity or area of interest by the donor; instead, donors enable the Board of Directors to determine, through research and consultation, where grants should be directed to meet the community’s pressing needs. Donations of any amount are welcome. A donation to this fund gives the Foundation the greatest flexibility. The earnings are used for our annual Burlington Community Fund Granting Program.
Your fund goes to work in our community today. Term funds allow donors to do more frequent granting from a non-endowed contribution. The capital and income must be used in less than 10 years.
Scholarship funds can be established to provide an annual award
to students. These can be in a specific area, designated to a
specific school, or provided as a general scholarship. Fundholders
can work with BCF to establish criteria for the award in
accordance with best practices.
Establishing an endowment fund is like opening an investment account for our community. Your contributions are permanently invested and a portion of the fund is distributed annually to registered charities. You can choose how the money will be directed to the community, or you can let our expert BCF team determine where it will do the most good.
There are three ways to support our funds:
To discuss your options about setting up a fund with the Burlington Community Foundation, please contact our team.
