When members of the Bullard Rotary Club identified an opportunity in 2012 to create a new children’s playground, they were faced with a dilemma. They wanted to en-courage the public to make contributions to the project, but their status as a civic club prevented them from providing tax re-ceipts to donors. The playground would belong to the city of Bullard, but the city was not equipped to accept a high volume of gifts and provide tax receipts either. Some civic clubs have formed a public charitable foundation to receive contributions which are used to support various charitable projects. The Bullard Rotary Club did not have such a foundation, and was looking for a simple alternative to starting one.

East Texas Communities Foundation was able to meet the needs of the Bullard Rotary Club by quickly establishing a donor-advised fund known as the Bullard Rotary Charitable Fund. The club named several club members as co-advisers for the fund. They were responsible for making recommendations to the foundation regarding distributions to public charities. For this particular project, the city of Bullard was the recipient of grants from the fund, designated for the construction of the park.

With the Bullard Rotary Club Charitable Fund in place, the club set about promoting the development of the new playground. Students at Bullard Elementary School were enlisted to help plan the various elements of the park with the help of Leathers and Associates, an architectural firm that has successfully completed more than 3,000 community playground projects. Bullard students included trains, a rocket, a castle, a race car and an octopus in their wish list, and the final design for the project incorporated all of these elements and more. The majority of the construction took place in just five days with more than 1,000 hours of volunteer labor. The park was opened to the children of the community with a ribbon-cutting on Jan. 20, 2013.

On the philanthropy front, the foundation processed 343 gifts totaling more than $148,000 for the project and made a handful of grants to the city of Bullard as needed to pay for planning and construction costs. The first contributions were made to the fund in July 2012, and the fundraising continued through the construction period as the community rallied with both financial resources and physical labor.

The Bullard Rotary Char-itable Fund at East Texas Communities Foundation was a beneficial tool for the local Rotary Club to use for this project for several reasons.

First, the foundation had the infrastructure in place to process charitable contributions. Being able to efficiently process each gift and provide the necessary acknowledgment to donors was a burden the volunteer organization would find difficult to replicate.

Secondly, the foundation’s tax status as a public charity offered each donor the maximum possible tax deductibility for their contribution. Certainly, donors don’t give primarily for the tax deduction, but the fact that the gift was being made to a qualifying public charity was an additional incentive for donors. It was certainly a selling point for those working to raise the funds, and it may have encouraged donors to give, or give more than they otherwise would have given without the deductibility of the contribution.

Third, creating a fund at the foundation was a simple process requiring no attorney fees and bearing no additional fiduciary responsibility on behalf of the club. Conversely, without a community foundation, the club would have incurred additional costs and created an ongoing fiduciary responsibility to establish and maintain a public foundation to carry out their charitable objectives. The Bullard Rotary Charitable Fund still exists to this day. Though all the money contributed to the fund was used to support construction of the park, the fund still exists, awaiting the next community project.

Funds with similar purposes have been created to support the development of hiking and biking trails, the renovation of Bergfeld Park, the long-term maintenance of The Children’s Park, and even the creation of Faulkner Park. Perhaps establishing a charitable fund at the foundation to enable your favorite civic club to accomplish a community project is the next best opportunity for you to Give Well.

 

Guest columnist, Kyle Penney is president of East Texas Communi-ties Foundation. The mission of ETCF is to support philanthropy by providing simple ways for donors to achieve their long-term charitable goals. To learn more about ETCF or to discuss your charitable giving, contact Kyle at 866-533-3823 or email questions or comments to etcf@etcf.org. More information is available at www.etcf.org.