DAFs and Philanthropy in the News
Telling tidbits from recent news. If you see something, send something!
This month's stories:
JUMP TO ► Schwab Charitable switches brand to “DAFgiving360” – Why?
JUMP TO ► USAID crisis triggers calls for DAF disbursements
JUMP TO ► Trump’s replacement feeler for university endowments
Schwab Charitable is one of the big three Wall Street investment firms that have donor-advised fund arms (along with Fidelity and Vanguard) – now with 90,000 accounts/DAFs and more than $26 billion in stored assets. Something to wonder about: why change their well established signature Schwab identity to DAFgiving360? Perhaps they believe that "DAF" is now the marketing power word and brand of the future; perhaps they've also been influenced by the cool influencer names of new DAF sponsors from the fintech world, including Daffy, Classy, DAFDay and DAFPay? The Charles Schwab Investing Community channel at Reddit has not warmed to the name, feeling the new name sounds "small" and “introduces a real risk of undermining initial donor consideration and donor confidence.”
"Trump and Musk Created a Crisis — Donor-Advised Funds Must Act”
“Billions in charitable donations sit idle as women and children suffer the consequences"
Another sign of increasing prominence and hopes/expectations for resources held by DAFs appeared in a February opinion piece by Amy Marks Dornbusch, posted at Katie Couric Media.
Dornbusch is a trustee of the Marks Family Foundations, and argues that the urgent moment for action has arrived for people sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in these funds, while “ the financial institutions who host these funds are incentivized to keep the assets on their balance sheet.”
Read the full opinion piece here: https://katiecouric.com/news/usaid-funding-freeze-trump-musk-opinion/
What would Trump do with university endowment funds?
Conservatives have frequently criticized universities for being "woke," but the Stanford Times recently reminded us of the Trump promise to create an "American Academy" using monies from endowments. His campaign pledged to “take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments” to create the American Academy."
University endowments are an area of concern in the arena of philanthropic reform. Although the median university endowment is the millions, some are much larger:
- Harvard: $52 billion
- Yale: $41 billion
- Stanford: $38 billion
Like private foundations and donor-advised funds, university endowments can be important and positive ways of supporting higher education and other causes. But they can also become repositories where tax-advantaged dollars flourish in accounts while universities raise tuition, cut jobs, and reduce research.
As for what the American Academy will do?
Its mission will be to make a truly world-class education available to every American, free of charge, and do it without adding a single dime to the federal debt. This institution will gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content, covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills, and make that material available to every American citizen online for free.
Wikipedia move over!
