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Going Far Together

Posted by Stuart Comstock-Gay

· Wednesday, February 27th, 2019

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It’s long been said that if you want to go quickly, you go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.

Yesterday’s Focus on Wilmington showed the power of going together. It was DCF’s first community engagement session this year, and brought together 14 collaborative programs in the city, with a hundred citizens, leaders and activists – to share innovative work and break down silos.

Dorrell Green, recently named superintendent of the Red Clay School District, spoke about the Dual Generation Center at Stubbs Elementary School, a partnership between the state and Christina School District – a new center that will focus on early education but provide support for a broad range of family issues. Said Green to WDEL. “No one entity can do it alone. I just think this [event] is a good example of folks coming together to support, as a whole.”

From the Stubbs project to the comprehensive plans of REACH Riverside to break the burdens of inter-generational poverty in the Riverside Community, to the work of the Wilmington Leaders Alliance and Generations to reinvent employment pipelines, we heard from many of Wilmington’s most inspiring collaborative efforts. You can read about the programs that were highlighted here.

During the event, participants said things like, “I heard about things I’ve been wanting to do and learned they are already happening, and being done better,” and “This was a great way to learn about how funding aligns with community needs and a great way to connect with leaders.” And “I just didn’t know about this program, and it’s exactly what I’m looking for.” Collaboration is indeed well practiced in Wilmington and Delaware, with leaders like the Wilmington Community Advisory Council and United Way doing heavy lifting.

DCF organized this event as one of many activities to build on the work of our fall 2018 community leadership lecture from Bob Putnam, talking about his book Our Kids and about the opportunity gap in America. During the lead up to that event, and afterward, we heard repeatedly from friends and colleagues that folks wanted to know more about what’s going on and how to plug in. Even those of us most involved keep finding new programs that we didn’t previously know about, and which are great opportunities for partnerships.

There is so much tremendous work going on. And everybody knows that we need to work together. Most of us are working together. This program tried to broaden the connections. And it’s not the end. DCF is committed to helping bring people together to strengthen partnerships up and down the state. Watch for more about future focus conversations.

Charity and your IRA

Posted by Stuart Comstock-Gay

· Thursday, October 18th, 2018

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This is a modified version of a column that was printed in the Oct 16 issue of the Delaware Business Times.

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Being generous with our money is one of the great joys in life. Whether we’re giving to help communities ravaged by natural disasters, local schoolchildren, for environmental cleanup, arts programs or any other passion, giving helps make our live complete.

And it turns out that being generous with our IRAs can be both personally satisfying, and provide tax benefits. This is even more important due to last year’s changes in federal tax law.

Many of us spend years contributing to retirement accounts, without digging into the details until it’s time for that money to come out. Some people even find they don’t end up needing the money as much as they thought they would. And they can be in a fix. Eventually we pay taxes on the money that accumulates in our IRAs.

If you’re fortunate enough that you don’t need all of that money, it’s good to have a plan. Here’s an idea.

When you reach the age – 70½ – where annual withdrawals are mandatory, you can reduce the impact on your taxes and also help worthwhile causes and organizations through a qualified charitable distribution, or QCD.

Best of all, QCDs can be made to almost any 501(c)(3) organization or house of worship, including the Delaware Community Foundation. IRS regulations permit QCDs into most types of nonprofit organizations – from programs serving children, to arts programs, environmental programs, senior centers, and so many more.

At the community foundation, while QCDs cannot be contributed to Donor Advised Funds, they can go into designated funds, which provide grants to specific charitable organizations; field of interest funds, which allow a donor to support a specific passion or interest; scholarship funds; or to the DCF’s Delaware Forever Fund, which was developed to address some of the community’s most pressing needs as they arise.

To read a longer piece, providing details about how this works, click here to read my recent op-ed in the Delaware Business Times.

Field of Interest Funds: Hitting the Target, Now and Forever

Posted by Stuart Comstock-Gay

· Friday, August 10th, 2018

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Here is another post about working with DCF, and why it can be a great way to achieve charitable goals…this one describes the Field of Interest fund.

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We all have passions that drive us, that occupy a space in our heart and motivate us to improve the world. One way to address those passions – and invest in our community’s future – is through the Field of Interest Fund. These funds are designed by the donor to focus gifts in an area that is important to them, such as protecting the environment, supporting educational advances, or expanding access to the arts. And then, instruct the DCF board and staff to make sure good grants are made on that issue now and in the future.

It’s a way to narrow philanthropic giving, but keep your donation flexible enough to meet the changing needs of the community. The fund type allows for long-term community impact on issues that matter, while providing immediate benefit for the donor in the form of a tax deduction at the time the gift is made.

Think of it as hitting the target without having to nail the bullseye.

Here’s how it works:

1. Donors identify an area of personal interest, as broad or narrow as desired. (DCF staff can help narrow the focus if you wish). For example, the Jonathan Moyed CARE Fund, established at the DCF in 2001, is focused on innovative and creative ways to provide/support long term health programs for Delawareans. The DCF researches the organizations doing effective work in this important area and awards grants to make the greatest impact possible. Over the years, Moyed CARE fund has supported the Mary Campbell Center, Ingleside Homes, Nanticoke Health Services and other important organizations.

2. Donors create the endowed fund at DCF with a gift of cash, securities, or other property worth $15,000 or more. That gift becomes a permanent source of community funding, targeting the donor’s area of interest. Donors can add more funds at any time.

3. The DCF board awards grants to community organizations and programs that are making a difference in the selected area of interest. All the while, DCF handles the administrative requirements for the fund, including managing the fund assets and overseeing the fund’s investment.

There’s a lot of great work being done in philanthropy today. A field of interest fund is a great way to not only protect and promote the issues you care about, but also to ensure they get the support they need in the future.

It’s hitting the target — even from far away.

Increasing our Impact

Posted by Stuart Comstock-Gay

· Monday, May 21st, 2018

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How can we maximize our charitable impact?

That’s a question that consumes considerable time in the philanthropic world. Whether it’s an individual donor, a family foundation, corporate giving program, major national foundation, or community foundation, we all want to know. What can we do to ensure that our charitable dollars are put to the best use – and make the biggest difference for the causes that matter to us?

The “impact investing” movement is right in the middle of that discussion. The term impact investing describes a range of investment practices intended to generate social and/or environmental impact AND a financial return. In other words, impact investing actively seeks to make a positive impact by investing not just for financial return, but also in activities that benefit the community, such as in clean technology enterprises, low-income housing, or some other social goal.

For decades, the rule of thumb for foundations that wanted to exist in perpetuity has been to put out 5% in grants, and invest the rest in the market, so that the corpus grows and generates more money for future grants.

Instead of just investing it in traditional ways, what if we invest it with the goal of making a social impact AND generating a financial return?

Last week, I joined 600 or so foundation colleagues at the Mission Investors Exchange Mission Forward conference in Chicago. All of us are engaged in impact investing, or investigating how to do it.

For foundations moving into impact investing, it’s simple. To quote Dana Bezerra, President of the Heron Foundation, “Five percent of the assets doing 100% of the work just isn’t enough.” The Heron Foundation has pledged that 100% of its assets will be directed to impact investing.

This movement has said, let’s take our investment assets and see if we cannot put them to use in a way that helps our mission. Ford Foundation President Darren Walker, which has made a major commitment to impact investing, put it this way: “Philanthropy can no longer be defined by the pursuit of investment alpha. I’m a capitalist but the current market system is delivering too few benefits for the people we serve.”

Over the past 20 years, foundations near and far, and small and large, have committed to expanding the impact of grants by taking some portion of investment dollars – and making sure they too are moving the mission forward, whether by inspiring sustainable agriculture, or local job development, or reduced dependence on fossil fuels.

I’ve been hanging around this world for about 10 years, since my first days at the Vermont Community Foundation. It’s exciting to see how dramatically this field has grown since then. Back then, there were probably a couple dozen community foundations doing any impact investing. Today, it seems there are few community foundations that are not thinking about it.

At the Delaware Community Foundation, our work is under way. Some fundholders have already decided to invest their funds not in our primary investment portfolio, but in our screened, “socially responsible” pool. (The financial returns in that pool have been great, by the way.)

Even more directly, the relatively new DCF Social Impact Fund, funded in significant part by our friends at Discover Bank, has already made two impact investments – one to help bring to market a new chicken-manure bio-digester (you can see the team that worked on the project at the left), which makes use of more of the chicken waste product. The other investment is coming. Watch for an exciting announcement about that in the coming weeks.

There’s more to come. In the coming months, we’ll not only be announcing the exciting impact investment I mentioned above, but we’ll also be hosting fund-holders and others who want to become involved in our impact investing work. It’s part of the future of philanthropy. It’s part of the future of the DCF, too.

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I serve as Chair of the Mission Investors Exchange board. To learn more about impact investing, check their website.

If you’re interested in participating in our efforts around mission investing, I’d love to talk with you. Please drop me a line or give a call (scomstock-gay@delcf.org)

An Investments Upgrade to Benefit Delaware’s Future

Posted by Allison Levine

· Monday, March 13th, 2017

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Our focus at the foundation is Delaware’s quality of life – now and in the future. And to make sure we make a difference, we mind many different aspects of our knitting – critical among them is investment of the charitable funds entrusted to us by generous donors. Returns for our portfolio over the most recent 12 months have been strong, but the long-term performance convinced us to review the entire investment structure.

That’s why we are terribly excited about our just-announced transition to SEI as our new investment partner. Beginning March 1, SEI is now managing DCF’s core investment portfolio, though that simple statement doesn’t do the new partnership justice.

SEI is managing our core portfolio. But SEI is also working with the DCF Investment Committee and staff to develop a set of new investment pools, so that fundholders who wish to pursue a different investment strategy have choices. That process should result in some new options before the middle of the year, with more to come.

We will also begin offering quarterly phone briefings from SEI, as well as occasional in-person meetings, during which fundholders can meet with DCF staff, investment committee, and the SEI team.

Even more significant, SEI joins us not as a traditional investment manager, but as the foundation’s outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO), a relatively new model for investing amongst foundations. This means that SEI will have day-to-day responsibility for ensuring that the DCF investment portfolio is managed most effectively. In other words, our partners at SEI will become an extension of the DCF’s staff, as opposed to a purely outside consultant. The firm will work directly with the staff and the DCF Investment Committee, which will now be free to focus on larger strategic questions, while SEI implements the policies.

The choice of SEI came after a months-long process, which included a review of 13 separate firms, in-person interviews with five firms, and site visits with two. The committee was unanimous in, and excited about, the choice of SEI. SEI, based just up the road in Oaks, Pa., manages more than $281 billion and works with 160+ nonprofit clients, including 25 community foundations. The team at SEI is simply first rate. You can read more about the firm here.

Every day at the foundation, we think about how to make a difference in Delaware. And because we do that through encouraging and supporting philanthropy, we are constantly assessing how to best service our many fundholders. We believe this change will be a big step in ensuring that DCF is the best option for philanthropists who want to make a difference in Delaware.

What’s next for the DCF? What does the Brexit vote say about us?

Posted by Allison Levine

· Monday, June 27th, 2016

· 1 Comment

One hundred days into my job – and it is time to relaunch “What’s Stu-ing?” I’ve been writing this blog for more than five years… [See previous posts here.] I’ve had a hiatus since January, but I’m ready to go again. With this Delaware launch, I want to talk a bit about what I’m seeing and where we are going – but I feel compelled to say a few words first about the Brexit vote last week. Here goes…

Like many others, I find myself deeply troubled by the Brexit vote last week. For much of my life, I’ve been committed to the idea that deep love of local community naturally co-exists alongside passion for inclusion and welcoming others.

But this vote, and what seems to be the reason for it, reminds me that it’s hard to blend these sentiments. It requires not just a recognition of differences, but a celebration of differences. It requires us to step outside of our comfort zones. It requires us to see the yearning all people have to live with safety and opportunity and happiness.

The mix of nationalism, malcontent, anxiety and fear illustrated by the Brexit vote is not isolated to England. People are struggling to find themselves in the world, and are too often lashing out at others in response. We must constantly remind ourselves and each other of our universal humanity.

This love of humanity is why I am passionate about our work at the community foundation. Because at our core, we are about engagement and civic mindedness. The root of the word philanthropy is love of humankind. And what I see in the Delaware Community Foundation is lots of that love.

I see generous Delawareans supporting their communities – their local libraries and community centers, their schools. I also see generous Delawareans reaching outside of their immediate communities – driving greater understanding of Islam, working for more educational resources for low-income children, supporting our rapidly growing Hispanic community (see what the Arsht-Cannon Fund has been doing lately), or reaching out through Friendship House to help families facing particularly tough times.

The DCF is a place where love of local community and the passion for inclusion come together. It’s a place where humanity matters most.

For me, it’s been an exciting four months – meeting with so many folks to understand how this passion and caring manifests here in the First State. It’s been an inspiration to learn about the fabulous work Fred Sears has led to support this community of philanthropists and do-ers. I am so grateful to Fred and everybody else who has built this community foundation over the past 30 years.

Thanks to my predecessors, the DCF is an incredibly strong institution and, over the next several months, our task is to figure out how to leverage that strength to keep making Delaware a better place to live and work. While much is still evolving, we are already getting to work on a few new initiatives. Let me share a few thoughts about those….

First, and most importantly, our focus remains serving individuals and organizations who want to be charitable in Delaware. As we build on the work of Fred Sears and his predecessors, we strive to continuously enhance the donor experience. To help us identify opportunities for improvement, we recently conducted a survey of donor satisfaction and expect to receive results in August.

In the meantime, we are improving our investment strategy. We know that our investments have been disappointing. Our diverse portfolio mirrors the same investment strategy employed by many large institutional investors for long-term growth against inflation. But with the kinds of market volatility we’ve been seeing, that strategy has just not produced the kind of results we and our fundholders want to see. The DCF Investment Committee is studying ways to update the strategy to improve returns, while still preserving capital over time.

The Investment Committee also is developing a series of alternative investment pools to give fundholders choices about how funds are invested and managed. As chair of the Mission Investors Exchange, I’m very excited that one of those funds will be a mission-based investing pool, in which the corpus of the fund will be invested to provide both excellent financial returns and direct community benefit. For more information about this national movement, visit missioninvestors.org.

We are leaning into the new Community Engagement The DCF introduced this initiative in October with the launch of our community indicator project, DelawareFocus.org. Starting with the website and the Delaware Community Focus Council, we are expanding the DCF’s civic leadership role to become a greater source of community knowledge, as well as a convener and facilitator. Over the coming months, we expect to hire a new director to lead this initiative.

Through the Community Engagement initiative, we aspire to: (1) provide new levels of information for donors, to help them achieve their philanthropic goals and maximize the impact of their charitable dollars; (2) provide a high-level dataset about the overall quality of life in Delaware, to be a resource for donors, nonprofits, elected officials and businesses as they pursue their work; and (3) identify opportunities for the DCF to help the community address systemic issues and unmet needs.

So that is what’s on our plates. With donors – and the passions and concerns of donors at the center – we are pushing this community foundation into new areas to help shape Delaware’s future.

It’s my honor to be in this job – working with the incredibly generous folks I meet with every day. Please reach out to me if you have thoughts or suggestions.

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