Board Liaison for Foundations
A community foundation governs something most nonprofits don’t: a permanent, pooled endowment held for a community, often across hundreds of donor-advised, designated, field-of-interest and scholarship funds. That makes its board’s job distinctive — investment oversight, a spending policy, prudent management under UPMIFA, and grantmaking that returns the earnings to the community. Board Liaison for Foundations maps to how that actually works, with a governing board, an investment committee, and a grants or distribution committee.
It keeps the board record where the fiduciary work is: investment committee materials, the spending-policy decisions and the numbers behind them, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and the grant approvals — together, versioned, and searchable, instead of scattered across board books, investment reports and email.
A community foundation’s board holds funds meant to last in perpetuity, under a legal standard of prudence (UPMIFA in most states) and a spending policy that balances today’s grants against tomorrow’s purchasing power. Those decisions — the spending rate, how underwater funds are handled, the investment policy — are the board’s to make and to document. Board Liaison for Foundations keeps the investment committee’s materials, the policy decisions, and the record of how they were made in one place, so the stewardship is demonstrable. General information, not legal or investment advice; confirm against your governing documents and counsel.
How a community foundation board oversees its endowment: the prudence standard under UPMIFA, setting a spending policy, handling underwater funds, the investment policy statement, and documenting it all.
4 min readWhat a community foundation board is responsible for: stewarding a permanent endowment, investment and spending oversight, grantmaking, donor-advised funds and variance power, and the fiduciary duties unique to a foundation.