Community Foundations Editing and Proofreading Services

A community foundation holds other people's money and its own judgement, and the tension between those is permanent. A donor gives to support a place they care about; the foundation knows the place, the organisations in it and where need actually sits. Where those diverge — and they do — the answer depends entirely on what was agreed in writing when the fund was set up, usually years earlier, often with someone who has since died. Documents drafted warmly and imprecisely at that moment cause problems for decades.

We edit what community foundations produce — donor-advised fund agreements and fund establishment documents, field-of-interest and designated fund terms, donor guidance on how funds operate, grant guidelines and application material for local applicants, decline and award correspondence, community needs assessments and local research, vital signs and state-of-the-area reports, endowment and legacy giving material, donor stewardship and reporting, board and committee papers, and material for professional advisers who introduce donors. Our editors check that a fund agreement will still be workable when neither the donor nor the current staff are available to explain it.

The fund agreement is the document that determines whether a foundation can do its job in thirty years, and its weak point is always the description of the donor's role. Warm language about working in partnership and honouring the donor's wishes reads well at signing and settles nothing later: whether recommendations are advisory or binding, who may make them after the donor dies, what happens when a recommended organisation ceases to exist or falls short of the foundation's standards, and what the foundation does if the fund's stated purpose becomes impossible or irrelevant. We write these so the advisory nature of a donor recommendation is stated plainly, since the foundation's legal control is not negotiable and pretending otherwise creates a false expectation; so successor advisers are named or the process for appointing them is defined, with an end point rather than an indefinite chain; so a variation power exists with the test for using it; and so the purpose is described at a level of generality that can survive the disappearance of a named organisation or a named condition.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including donor information, fund agreements and board papers. We are editors rather than legal, tax or philanthropic advisers, and we offer no view on fund structure, tax treatment or any grant decision — those require your own professional advisers. What we can do is make agreements durable and donor material honest about how the arrangement actually works.