Community Foundations Report 41% Bump in Grants From Donor-Advised Funds

Spurred by the pandemic, grant making from donor-advised funds managed by community foundations shot up significantly in 2020, according to a new survey from the Community Foundation Public Awareness Initiative.

In all, these donor-advised funds distributed more than $6.7 billion to nonprofits in 2020. That’s roughly 41 percent more than the $4.7 billion they gave out in 2019.

Donor-advised-fund holders at these community foundations contributed $7.7 billion to their funds in 2020, said Peter Panepento, spokesman for the Community Foundation Public Awareness Initiative. In 2019, according to the report, grants from donor-advised funds at these community foundations totaled $6.2 billion.

As a result, for every dollar contributed to a community foundation’s donor-advised fund in 2020, 87 cents went out. That’s up from 2019, when for every dollar contributed, 75 cents went out.
The survey collected data from 84 community foundations that manage donor-advised funds. According to Panepento, those community foundations had a median asset size of $306 million in 2019. The survey pool included data from the 15 largest community foundations in the United States, as well as smaller community foundations from a total of 28 states and the District of Columbia. For a sense of scale, the $4.7 billion in 2019 donor-advised-fund grants from the 84 groups that responded to the survey represents roughly 55 percent of the total $8.4 billion in community-foundation grant making that year as estimated by the Columbus Survey.

Donor-advised-fund account sponsors have faced increasing criticism for not distributing more to charities at a time when assets in those accounts continue to grow rapidly.