With Healthy Endowment Funds, Why are we Fundraising?
Our successful bidder from our 2023 Harvest Dinner, holding her Live Auction item – a wire hair fox terrier puppy!
With 40,985 acres conserved, the Northern California Regional Land Trust has amassed restricted, stewardship endowment funds of around $4 million. Conservatively managed, these funds are intended to financially support NCRLT in fulfilling our legal obligations to manage conservation easements in perpetuity. And forever is a long time!
Until the stewardship endowment corpus and income grows to an amount that will fund all requisite activities, additional support is needed to fund outreach programs, and developmental activities, including grant writing, events, and due diligence as we prepare new applications for funding conservation easements and fee title acquisitions.
Our endowments are spread among 21 separate accounts. While that is a lot to keep track of, specific grants direct separated accounts in their funding agreement. For modern conservation easements, all completed projects direct a stewardship endowment and a legal endowment to the Land Trust at the close of escrow. These are deposited into two separate, aggregated funds – a legal fund and our master stewardship fund.
Some funding agreements include special instructions to separate endowment funds into specific accounts. For example, for Stewardship Council projects, completed in 2023, include three separate accounts: legal, stewardship management, and core. The legal fund is restricted to legal fees of enforcing terms outlined in the conservation easement. The stewardship management fund is restricted to annual stewardship monitoring of each property. The core fund, intended to provide perpetual financial stability for the managing organization, is most highly restricted.
There are legal restrictions on what the funds can be used for and how much of the income generated through the invested funds may be directed to operations annually. For example, invested funds can never be withdrawn below the amount of the initial investment, referred to as the “corpus.”
In short, endowment investments build capacity to fund stewardship operations.
So, with these healthy endowments partially funding stewardship activities, what are we fundraising for? Our recent success with capacity grants partially funded additional staff-time to prepare grant applications for conserving prospective properties.
With each conserved property, the corpus grows, and the income generated funds certain activities. However, an endowment can grow to sustain perpetual stewardship without reaching an amount that would legally fund additional Land Trust operations. It’s comparable to ‘water, water, everywhere, yet not a drop to drink.’
We fill those gaps in operations funding with fundraising, including our Salt-of-the-Earth sustained giving – where you choose any amount that works for you to contribute monthly or annually, our Annual Campaigns, and “asks” for specific needs, like our Deer Creek Preserve outreach.
We also host memorable events like our much anticipated Harvest Dinner and Benefit Auction.
We hope to see you there!
