Our Endowment Is Our Future

Make Your Gift Permanent

Any planned gift can be endowed. Here is what that means, and why donors choose it.

Most charitable gifts are given once and spent once. They do good, and then they are gone.

An endowed gift is not spent. It is invested and kept. Each year a portion of what it earns goes to work, and the gift itself remains — whole, and ready to give again.

So it gives this year. And next year. And in a year you will not see.

Endowment is not a different kind of gift

This is the part most donors miss.

Endowment is not an alternative to a bequest, a beneficiary designation, or a gift that pays you income. It is an instruction about how your gift is held once it arrives. You are not choosing between a bequest and an endowment. You are choosing whether your gift is spent or kept.

It isn't a reserve fund either. A rainy day fund is meant to be spent when the weather turns. This isn't saving for a rainy day — it's saving for the future, rain or shine.

Which means the decision is simpler than it sounds. Whatever gift you were already considering to United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley, you can ask that it be endowed.

You do not need to be wealthy

Endowments have a reputation as something for the very rich. That reputation is mostly wrong.

Organizations set their own guidelines, and we at United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley can explain ours. But the principle does not change with the size of the gift. A modest gift, invested and preserved, gives year after year in the same way a large one does. The amount decides how much it gives. It does not decide how long.

The question worth asking

Most donors ask how much to give.

An endowed gift asks something better: how long should it last? Not how much can you spare this year, but what do you want still standing when you are not here to stand behind it.

That is a harder question.

If you would like your gift to United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley to outlast you, we would be glad to talk through how. Contact us so we can walk you through the options, or you can explore several options here.