Planned Giving: Getting Started
A Planned or Legacy Gift is designed to come into effect after your lifetime. It is a thoughtful and intentional way to continue to support the causes and organizations you care about and has the potential to impact generations to come. Your gift should align with your values and vision for the future but respond to an ever-changing world.
There are several ways The Cape Cod Foundation team can help you create a powerful Legacy Gift: through the creation of or addition to your own charitable fund or by leaving a bequest to directly benefit the Foundation or one of our existing funds.
Charitable Endowed Funds
Existing Funds
If you have already established an endowment fund with the Foundation, it will continue to benefit Cape Cod in perpetuity, and The Cape Cod Foundation will steward the Fund according to your charitable intentions. If you have a Donor-Advised Fund, you can appoint the Foundation or another person, such as a trusted family member, as successor advisor to carry on your legacy.
Future Funds
If you don’t want to create a fund for your current giving, you can create a named Future Fund, designed to come into effect after your lifetime. The Foundation will steward the Fund according to your charitable intentions. You determine the fund’s beneficiaries. You can name multiple nonprofit beneficiaries, specify fields-of-interest you would like The Cape Cod Foundation to support, or make an unrestricted gift to The Foundation to support the most pressing current community needs as they change over time.
Future Funds are an ideal way to simplify giving for donors. In 2020, The Foundation received a $6.4 million bequest from an anonymous donor who wanted to allocate a portion of the gift to endowment funds to support two specific local nonprofit organizations, the visual arts, and other aspects of community life on Cape Cod. Through one simple gift to the Foundation, all three of the donor’s different intentions could be honored.
An Amazing Finnish Legacy
A Finnish Man, Onni Nurmi, left his native village of Pukkila an astounding 760 shares in a small company that produced rubber boots. His instructions were: (1) Don’t sell the shares; and (2) spend the annual dividends on entertaining the residents in the village’s nursing home. Well, that company was Nokia, which would one day diversify into a multinational tele-communications and consumer electronics giant. From 1997-1998, the share’s worth inflated, and the Pukilla Town Council was sitting on a goldmine to support the nursing home. A Guardian article from November 2000 stated that the aged care home in Pukkila had “long been the envy of old people for miles around, and there (was) a long waiting list to get in. In the dining room, a portrait of Onni Nurmi Takes a pride of place.”
Direct Gifts to The Cape Cod Foundation
You can also make a restricted or unrestricted Legacy Gift to The Cape Cod Foundation in your will or trust to help meet the immediate needs of the community as they change over time, to support areas you are passionate about, or to help and sustain the Foundation.
Unrestricted Gifts give the Foundation the flexibility to allocate your gift where the current needs are greatest as they change over time.
Restricted Gifts: Field-of-Interest Funds. If you want your bequest to support a specific area of community life, the Foundation has many field-of-interest funds. You can direct your gift to strengthen everything from arts & culture and education to housing and healthcare.
Restricted Gifts: Community Partners Fund. You can also make a bequest to the Foundation’s Community Partners Fund. Like most nonprofits, a percentage of our annual operating budget is supported by donations from individuals who want to ensure we can not only sustain the Foundation but also continually build capacity to service the region. Gifts to this fund support our very existence. They allow us to maintain and expand the infrastructure required to serve our philanthropic network and to assume a civic leadership role in the community:
building and deploying resources to support all aspects of community life and investing in strategic partnerships with broad regional impact, nonprofit leadership development, and shared resources.
Making a Bequest
No other planned gift is as simple to implement or as easy to change as a bequest. Your attorney can add a simple sentence to a new will or trust or draft a simple amendment to an existing will or trust. If your circumstances change, you can change your designations at any time. We will work with you or your professional advisor to help craft language and minimize extensive and expensive changes to your estate documents.
Sample Language for a Bequest
I give (the sum of $ or a percentage of my estate) to Cape Cod Foundation, Inc., a not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) public charity to support (give a broad description to respond to an ever-changing-world). Their Federal Tax ID number is 51-0140462.
Together, we have invested more than $106 million in grants and scholarships in the Cape Cod Community. For good.
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Cape Cod Foundation
508.790.3040
261 Whites Path, Unit 2
South Yarmouth, MA 02664
info@capecodfoundation.org
