Among the problems that critics have with donor-advised funds and supporting foundations is the lack of transparency around individual funds—and the lack of accountability to mission sometimes exhibited by the DAF sponsor.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is giving hundreds of millions to schools, but its layers of secrecy as it inserts itself into our public education system is nothing less than deeply anti-democratic.
Done the right way, reforming DAFs would not only help working charities, but would also allow community foundations to grow in stature and do what they do best.
This Voices from the Field feature from five community foundation leaders speaks to how they view the role of donor-advised funds and urges caution before rushing to regulation.
Remarks by the interim president at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation might make us believe that the board is not yet getting to the essence of what might ail the charity.
NPQ is initiating a new practice of explicitly trying to advance conversations that are stuck. This morning, we advisedly take up the massively contentious topic of donor-advised funds.
This article, by former tax counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance Dean Zerbe, asks what it would look like if donor-advised funds reform focused on, among other things, “getting…dollars out of warm banks and into the hands of working charities.” The result, concludes Zerbe, would be nothing short of astonishing.
“Without a doubt, the most noteworthy story affecting the charitable sector over the past twenty-five years has been the meteoric rise of donor-advised funds,” writes Ray Madoff, cofounder and director of the Boston College Law School Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good. This article lays out three steps to ensure that DAFs work “for everyone.”
There is a highly polarized conversation about whether or not donor-advised funds should be more closely regulated by government. NPQ takes a close look at the basic potential problems identified and the solutions being proposed, and suggests that a both/and approach is called for here.
Today, NPQ starts a four-part series about proposals for regulating donor-advised funds, or DAFs, drawn from the summer 2018 edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly. The growth of these funds and the need for further levels of regulation is a tender subject that’s much debated. Through this series, we intend to examine that need and who ought to do what about it.
