September 19 is Communities Foundation of Texas' 11th Annual North Texas Giving Day!
Join us for an 18-hour giving extravaganza to benefit our local nonprofits and make a difference here at home.
In ten years, this online event has transformed from an idea to help people give wisely and raise awareness of nonprofits, to a movement that has ignited a broad culture of community-wide giving. Join us for any of the community-wide events like the Family Philanthropy Festival at NorthPark Center on September 14. During North Texas Giving Day, everyone has the opportunity to be a philanthropist to build a stronger and more vibrant community. Please give and tell a friend to give, too!
Communities Foundation of Texas is excited to announce the following distinguished professional advisors who have been newly appointed to our Advisory Council.
Members help advance CFT’s work by fostering an understanding of the foundation as a trusted partner for philanthropic planning and giving, community knowledge and collaboration.
Our team at CFT understands that it sometimes can be hard to know how to start a conversation with a client about charitable planning. As you ask questions about the causes your clients love and how your clients intend to support the community in their estate plans, you’ll need quick access to a few go-to tools to inspire the dialogue. To help you do just that, CFT is offering two fall workshops:
GiveWisely Workshop for Advisors:
1.5-hour interactive presentation includes best practices & tools for your practice to engage clients through values-based planning techniques.
Join Us for a Fall Breakfast Workshop Location: Communities Foundation of Texas,
or a customized date for your office.
Time: 8:00-9:30am
Dates:
1. Wednesday, October 16
2. Thursday, November 14
3. Customize a date for your firm
A Nifty Planning Tool: Qualified Charitable Distributions
Under the now permanent IRA charitable rollover laws, your 70 ½+ clients can direct up to $100,000 annually of required minimum distributions to charitable organizations, avoiding inclusion in taxable income. These distributions are called Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs). Although donor-advised funds can’t receive QCDs, there are still several ways CFT can help your clients take advantage of this tool for lifetime gifts. QCDs can be used to create scholarships or single nonprofit funds, as well as support many initiatives housed at CFT such as The Dallas Morning News Charities and Send a Kid to Camp. Also, your clients can name their donor-advised fund as the beneficiary of a qualified plan, which is still a tax-savvy bequest strategy.
Giving USA 2019: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2018, released in June, showed that total charitable giving, adjusted for inflation, declined 1.7%, with Americans giving $427.71 billion to charities in 2018. Measured in current dollars, that’s an increase of 0.7%. Notable changes included a decrease in giving by individuals from 70% of total giving to 68%.
The message to your clients is that supporting favorite charities is now more important than ever. For an in-depth perspective about the future of individual giving and its impact on the nonprofit sector, we recommend the insightful analysis in this June 21, 2019 blog post published by Americans for the Arts.
At CFT, we did not see a significant change in giving related to the tax law changes and are proud to have had our most successful year in CFT's 66-year history. However, we did note a decrease in stock contributions at the end of the year due to fluctuations in the market at the end of 2018.