Revitilising Trusts

Transferring An Existing Fund

Are you a trustee of an existing Charitable Trust that is considering its options for the future?

The Community Foundation is experienced in working with trustees of charitable trusts to find a solution that works for you. It may be that your trust is finding it more and more difficult to meet its charitable objectives, or the income in the trust is no longer sufficient to support effective grant making or simply that trustees wish to retire and hand over the responsibility for grant making.

An existing charitable trust fund can be reinvigorated through the Community Foundation simply and easily. We will work with your trustees to develop a solution that enables the original trust’s work to continue and for the trustees to continue to have the degree of control and involvement they require.

We offer a comprehensive management and grant making service that can be ‘tailored’ to meet your trust’s precise needs and requirements.

Should I transfer a trust?

The Charity Commission for Northern Ireland encourages all charities to ask themselves whether they should work with the Community Foundation as an alternative to continuing, particularly if they can answer yes to one or more of the following questions:

We find it difficult to identify beneficiaries
We cannot spend the income of the charity
We find ourselves providing money to the same people or groups every year
We find it difficult to attract trustees
We would like to be involved in how the money is spent but we do not want the legal responsibility of being a trustee
The work of administering the charity and its investment is becoming onerous or disproportionate to the level of funding
We wish that we knew more about local issues and opportunities and who else was funding what

Why should I transfer a trust to the Community Foundation?

The Process of Transferring a Trust

Find out more about why trust transfers are in safe hands with the Community Foundation and what to do next

Community Foundations across the UK have worked closely with their relevant Charity Commission in recent years to ensure that trustees seeking to revitalise dormant or ineffective trust funds and who are looking for an effective way of carrying on their good work in future years can release their funds to their local Community Foundation as part of their appraisal of options. Over the past 10 years Community Foundations have provided a safe have for over 3,400 trust funds with asset transfers totalling in excess of £60 million.

The Charity Commission for Northern Ireland acknowledges that the Community Foundation has a reputation for the effective management of charitable funds in order to maximise their impact at local level.

Trust transfers through the Community Foundation

The Turkington Fund

The Turkington Fund was established as an endowment fund following a trust transfer. It makes grants to organisations across Northern Ireland that support older people at risk of social and economic exclusion, enabling them to play a full and active role in their local communities and improving their quality of life. The value of the original trust transfer to the Community Foundation was £430,000 in 2006. The fund value now stands at £1.1 million thanks to investments and because we have been able to encourage other donors with similar interests to contribute to the fund.

The Dungannon Community Trust Fund

The Dungannon Community Trust Fund was transferred via a trust transfer to the Community Foundation in 2011. The former Trustees of the Dungannon Community Trust requested that £156,000 of the trust funds be allocated as a grant to a local special school, with the remainder allocated as grants to local groups in the Dungannon area.

The Karen Mortlock Trust

The Karen Mortlock Trust was established by Mike Mortlock in support of his daughter Karen. The purpose of the fund was to support groups and organisations with charitable purposes focusing on the relief of those in need by reason of ill-health and/or disability and to support an improved quality of life. When the Trustees of Karen Mortlock found it difficult to recruit new trustees and administer the fund on an annual basis, they approached the Community Foundation and we helped them to distribute the fund to appropriate beneficiaries and spend down the fund value of £120,000.

Who to speak to

If you are a trustee and would like to know more about how your local Community Foundation can be of benefit to rejuvenate the assets of a moribund or ineffective trust fund or take over trusteeship of your active trust fund with a view to continuing to deliver the current objects of the trust get in touch