EVENTS OF NOTE

The American Textile History Museum will present GMA Foundations’ founder Newell Flather with its 2012 Community Service Award  at a Gala on Friday, November 2nd.

The Community Service Award honors an individual or individuals who  have shown outstanding community service through their good works, exemplary  volunteer service, compassion, and involvement with the American Textile  History Museum (ATHM) and the community.   Past honorees include Nancy and Richard Donahue, John H. Pearson Jr., George and Carol Duncan, Michael Creasey and the Lowell National Historical Park and Brenda Costello.

Newell Flather has been an originator and leader in the field of philanthropy for over 40 years. He was Second Marshal of his Harvard class, chaired his Class Alumni Committee since 1971, and served three terms as Director of the Harvard Alumni Association. He taught high school in Ghana from 1961-63 as a member of the first Peace Corps volunteers. “By being first, we got to break everything that became the Peace Corps rules.”

In 1974, he was a founding trustee of Oxfam America, which today raises over $75 million annually for projects in the developing world. While Chair of Oxfam, in 1980, he visited the massive refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, where he had his first contact with many courageous Cambodians who are citizens of Lowell today. Continue Reading »

The Tanne Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2012 awards, given in furtherance of the foundation’s mission to underscore the importance of supporting individual artists with unrestricted funding.

Over fourteen years, the foundation has recognized sixty-eight artists and nine organizations for their outstanding achievements in a variety of fields in the visual and performing arts, including performance art, painting, poetry, music, acting, and dance.

The 2012 awards, totaling $39,000, honor six artists in recognition of their artistic achievements as well as one artist-run organization which has presented exceptional work for over 35 years.  The 2012 recipients are: Continue Reading »

CLIENT ADVISORY

Keeping an eye on what matters most

Summary:   Managing the federal excise tax rate on investment income should not detract from what usually matters most to philanthropic organizations – effective grantmaking.   However, simply monitoring the payout figure that qualifies a foundation for a 1 percent, rather than a 2 percent, excise tax rate may facilitate the decision to make some spending decisions before the end of the fiscal year, or not.

Overview:  Ideally, foundation trustees would reserve the highest possible percentage of a foundation’s investment income for doing good. Planning to pay less in excise taxes may mean a slight increase in funds available for grants.   But the thought of tracking and planning expenditures to qualify the foundation to pay a 1 percent, rather than 2 percent, excise tax can seem like an added management burden and certainly not as interesting to most trustees as strategic thinking and site visits with interesting grantees.

At GMA Foundations, our finance staff actually enjoys the challenge of strategic tax planning.  In this client advisory, Pamela Labonte Maksy describes how the GMA finance team monitors the numbers and helps clients think about the timing of expenditures Continue Reading »