Documents

Financial Statements

These have not been audited. The statements cover the Foundation as a whole, our special funds, and our activity committees.  The Foundation uses the June-30 as its fiscal year end. Financial statements for a given year are compiled after the Form 990 for that year is filed. Thus, financial statements for each year will be available during the summer of the following year.

Articles of Incorporation

Sometimes known as the corporate charter, these articles are intentionally general and vague. Changes in the articles must be filed with the California Secretary of State and the IRS. In the case of the Community Foundation, the necessary details of governance were relegated to the bylaws, for which amendments do not have to be filed with the government. The actual addresses of the original trustees appear on the third page; since two of those individuals still live at those addresses, the house numbers were removed in making this copy.

General

Form 990

The Community Foundation files Form 990 with the IRS to provide financial data that verifies our ongoing eligibility for tax-exempt status (which is required for donations to be deductible). We file this annually, with a copy to the California Attorney General’s Registry of Charitable Trusts. We are required to make our three latest Forms 990 publicly available to anyone who requests. Placing this file in our Web site satisfies that requirement.

IRS Publication 526

This details what charitable donations may be itemized on Schedule A of Form 1040, what limitations apply, and what supporting documentation may be required.

Grant Application

Non-Profit Status

California originally classified the Community Foundation as a mutual benefit non-profit corporation, which would make the Foundation ineligible for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. We did not discover this error for over three years. (Fortunately, the IRS did not discover the error at all.) The first page shows the original status, and the second page shows the correction.

The Board of Trustees conducted a self-evaluation of the Community Foundation based on National Standards for U.S. Community Foundations published by the Council on Foundations.

Tax-Exempt Status

Our Tax-Exempt Status describes how to confirm that we remain tax-exempt.

  • The original December 1979 advance ruling letter cannot be found in the Community Foundation’s records.
  • A copy of the Foundation’s application for tax-exempt status cannot be found either in the Community Foundation’s records or by the IRS. A letter from the IRS (102 KB) confirms that our 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as a public charity is not impacted by the lack of a copy of our application. While the IRS generally requires charities to make copies of their applications available for public inspection, charities applying for tax-exempt status before 15 July 1987 and not possessing a copy of the application on that date are exempt from that requirement (see “Public Inspection of Exemption Applications …” in Chapter 2 of Tax-Exempt Status for Your Organization, IRS Publication 557 (1.3 MB). The Community Foundation meets the criteria for that exemption.
  • Tax-Exempt Status – 1982 (79 KB) 
    The statement that the Foundation is not a private foundation means that we depend on donations from the general public and that certain restrictions on donations to private foundations do not apply to donations to the Community Foundation.
  • Tax-Exempt Status – 2000 (191 KB) 
    Two IRS databases contained conflicting information about the Community Foundation: One database confirmed our tax-exempt status, and the other asserted our status had expired. When the IRS corrected the latter database, the Community foundation received a new notice confirming our 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.