Total assets held by donor advised funds across the country rose to $234.06 billion in 2021, an increase of 39.5% over the prior year, and continuing a steady annual increase in values from a total of $112.8 billion in 2017, according to the latest annual report from the National Philanthropic Trust issued in late November.
The Women’s Nonprofit Leadership Initiative and the Nonprofit Center of La Salle University have published an updated report focused on the boardrooms of the Philadelphia area’s largest nonprofit medical and educational institutions (“meds” and “eds”). The report reveals that many have made significant progress in the last three years in increasing the gender and racial diversity of their governing bodies.
The Superior Court of Pennsylvania, an intermediate appellate court, has affirmed a trial court decision and denied a request of the Virginia Military Institute to terminate a $2 million trust for its benefit and transfer the assets to its affiliated foundation outright. In what it called a case of first impression, the Court upheld the position of the trustee bank and the state attorney general that the donor had intended to keep the assets separate from the institution and a difference in cost was not sufficient to deviate from that intent.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a trial court decision dismissing a suit by the creator of a donor advised fund who sought reputational and other damages on the ground that the sponsor of the DAF paid excessive fees for managing the investments and deprived him of funds to distribute to other charities. (See Nonprofit Issues® Vol. XXXI No.
In 1850 noted Harvard University professor Louis Agassiz arranged to have four daguerreotypes made of Renty Taylor and Delia Taylor, who were enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina. Renty was ordered to disrobe. His daughter was striped to the waist. Their images were used by Agassiz in an academic publication and various lectures “to support polygenism, a pseudoscientific racist theory for which Aggasiz, a prominent scientist, was a vocal proponent,” according to the highest court of Massachusetts.
A federal District Court in Texas has upheld an IRS denial of a $1.257 million charitable contribution deduction claim for a gift to a donor advised fund because, it said, the contemporary written acknowledgment of the gift did not say the money was held under the “exclusive legal control” of the recipient charity. The Court said that the Contemporaneous Written Acknowledgment could not be combined with the gift agreement, which provided for ultimate authority and control of the assets, to meet the requirements of the Treasury regulations.
