Reuters: Small Business News: U.S. small private foundations grow by 10 percent in 2012

Reuters: Small Business News Reuters.com is your source for breaking news, business, financial and investing news, including personal finance and stocks. Reuters is the leading global provider of news, financial information and technology solutions to the world's media, financial institutions, businesses and individuals. // via fulltextrssfeed.com

U.S. small private foundations grow by 10 percent in 2012 May 29th 2013, 04:03 By Manuela Badawy NEW YORK | Wed May 29, 2013 12:03am EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Endowments of private foundations with assets of less than $50 million grew by 10 percent in 2012 as donors dramatically increased their contributions and investment performance improved, a firm that tracks the foundations reported on Wednesday. Foundation Source, the largest U.S. service provider for small private foundations, said in a report that assets held by a sample group of foundations grew to $2.1 billion in 2012 from $1.9 billion in 2011, owing to a recovery in financial markets that allowed donors to increase their contributions. The findings were based on transactions of 732 Foundation Source clients between January 1 and December 31, 2012. The study group increased their grants and charitable donations by 9.2 percent in 2012, from the year before. In 2012, they gave $215.7 million in the aggregate, compared with $197.5 million in 2011. The foundations were able to replenish their coffers by adding $1.06 for every dollar they spent on grants and charitable expenses, up from 93 cents for every dollar spent in 2011. The report is a snapshot of the activity of 98 percent of the 86,000 private foundations in the United States that have assets of less than $50 million. The 86,000 altogether hold roughly $550 billion. "The information, on what they are spending, how much new money is coming in, and what their allocations are, is very helpful to me in creating a strategy to help foundations manage their money," said Phil Shaffer, managing director of wealth management and institutional consulting director at Graystone Consulting, a division of Morgan Stanley. "That information has been available for the big size foundations for a long time but not for this size of foundations until now," said Shaffer, who was part of a panel enlisted by Foundation Source to review its findings. Shaffer said that the allocations data gives him and other financial advisers a chance to educate foundations as to why they might want to have a more diversified asset portfolio. "These results could differ appreciably from those recorded by the country's largest foundations, yet year-after-year it's the mega-foundations that influence overall perceptions about foundation performance. It's a distorting perspective," said King McGlaughon, chief executive of Foundation Source. For the small foundations surveyed by Foundation Source, investment returns rose by 9.3 percent last year, up from a 1.5 percent loss in the previous year and a 4.3 percent loss from 2008 to 2011. "The actual amount of grant-making increased in dollars on top of significant portfolio growth of those foundations," McGlaughon told Reuters, adding that despite a sharp drop in foundations' endowments after the 2008 financial crisis, foundations have been rebuilding their assets at a fast pace. (Reporting by Manuela Badawy; Editing by Jennifer Ablan and Steve Orlofsky) Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at blogtrottr.com. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, or manage all your subscriptions