This summer, I worked with the Adirondack Community Foundation (ACF), the primary grant maker in the Adirondack region, on three forecasting projects focused on charitable fund resilience. A community foundation is a nonprofit, tax-exempt, publicly supported philanthropic organization that connects donors with local nonprofits to serve a particular geographic area—in this case, the Adirondacks. Donors can open new funds or contribute to existing ones, and ACF then stewards those assets, distributing grants based on fund type and donor intent to local nonprofits, schools, projects, and initiatives. Since its inception in 1997, ACF has distributed over $83 million in grants supporting basic needs, education, economic vitality, the arts, the environment, and more.
What struck me early on is how much of ACF’s financial work requires balancing long-term sustainability with immediate community needs. Nonprofits across the Adirondacks rely on these grants for vital services, yet the foundation must also ensure funds will continue to serve and generate lasting impact for future generations. My projects all dealt with this tension in different ways.
My first project involved building a financial forecasting model to help the foundation see how, and under what circumstances, permanently endowed funds that are “underwater” (valued below their original principal) might recover over time. Permanent funds are invested with the intention of lasting in perpetuity, ideally spending only a portion of annual returns so they can grow over time. In practice, market downturns and increased community needs create tension between preserving value and fulfilling a fund’s purpose of granting money to the community. To address this, I created a model that lets users adjust key assumptions such as market returns, spending policies, and administrative fees. With these inputs, the model generates a 50-year projection of each fund’s value and shows when recovery is expected. Results revealed that recovery strategies scale with the extent to which a fund is underwater. An approach that works for a fund only slightly underwater can be quite ineffective for one that is deeply underwater. This tool equips the foundation to evaluate each fund in its own context and weigh recovery options accordingly.
My second project focused on legacy gifts, or donations pledged through wills, trusts, retirement accounts, real estate, or other assets that will support the foundation in the future. These gifts are a critical source of support for community foundations, but they are often unpredictable and complex in their terms. I built a centralized database to consolidate all legacy gift information into one place, creating a consistent system for logging new entries, and added a forecasting feature that estimates when gifts might be realized and how they are intended to be used. The database gives the foundation a framework for anticipating future inflows, preparing for their impact, and ensuring donor intentions are honored over time.
Whereas my first two projects entailed building new tools, the third was about learning to apply an existing one: the Economic Scenario Planning (ESP) Model, developed by the Council on Foundations. The ESP model tests how changes in market performance, donor behavior, spending policies, and operating expenses might shape a foundation’s broader financial outlook. I populated it with ACF’s data, created baseline and stress-test scenarios modeled after historical recession returns, and trained the finance team on how I structured the inputs so they could use it to analyze the impact of alternate scenarios going forward.
Across all three projects, I continued to return to the same idea: managing permanent philanthropy requires a trade-off between meeting community needs today and preserving resources for the future. In my first project, the most obvious way to recover an underwater fund was to simply stop spending. While this was an incredibly effective method according to my model, this strategy as a widespread solution for fund recovery exposes a dilemma in practice. If ACF were to hypothetically advise a scholarship fund to stop awarding scholarships altogether for the sake of recovery, it would ultimately undermine the fund’s fundamental purpose to provide a yearly scholarship. So, what becomes an appropriate and effective solution that balances giving with fund recovery simultaneously? My second project highlights the opposite dynamic, where impact is pledged through future gifts but deferred until those gifts are realized.
Donors have already committed gifts that will one day support the community. But is it wise, or even viable, to let this expectation of future inflows inform how the foundation makes decisions today? Lastly, my third project raises broader questions pertaining to the entire foundation: what if markets underperform, what if new donor gifts slow, what if operating expenses rise? What choices remain, and which risks are worth taking? There is no single “right” answer to any of these questions, but by implementing the models and tools I developed this summer, the foundation is now equipped to address them.
Ultimately, what I take away most from working on these projects is the value of thinking in scenarios—of seeing how adjusting even a single assumption can entirely reshape the financial outlook or strategic options available. This summer not only deepened my understanding of the trade-offs involved in permanent philanthropy but also gave me a newfound appreciation for philanthropy itself. Before this fellowship, I did not know community foundations even existed. Now, I see how vital they are in connecting people with the capacity to give with those best positioned to address community needs, and I cannot imagine such an impact in the realm of charitable giving without them. — Anna DiSorbo ’27