Leave a bequest that stays in your hometown
A gift in your will costs you nothing today and can be changed at any time. You can direct it to the town you live in, so the grants it funds go to the food pantry, the library, and the ball field you already know by name.
It takes one paragraph in your will and a conversation with us. Start with the conversation.
What a bequest is
A bequest is a gift you leave through your will or trust. You name the Community Foundation of Southern Wisconsin, state an amount, percentage or residual/remainder, and your estate carries it out when the time comes.
Nothing leaves your hands while you’re living. You keep full control of your assets and you can revise or revoke the gift if your circumstances change.
For most families, this is the largest charitable gift they will ever make.
Your Gift. Your Town. Your Legacy.
This is the part worth understanding before anything else. A bequest to CFSW does not disappear into a regional pool.
You name the place. Milton, Evansville, Darlington, Richland Center, the township you farm in. We write that into your plan, and every year the grants continue your legacy. Your gift stays where you spent your life.
Why this matters right now
We commissioned a transfer of wealth study covering 11 counties in and around our service area. It measured how much in household assets will pass from one generation to the next over the coming decades.
The finding that should concern anyone who cares about their hometown: most of that money leaves. Adult children move to Madison, Minneapolis, Denver, Phoenix. The wealth built here follows them out. Small towns spend a century accumulating something and then watch it relocate in a single generation.
The five percent ask
We ask people to consider leaving at least 5 percent of their estate to their community. With a gift of at least 5%, 95% still goes to your heirs, and for most households that difference is small enough that the people you love will never feel it.
What 5 percent does is grow. Invested as an endowment, your gift is never spent down. We grant a portion of the earnings each year and the principal keeps working, which means the fund gives again in year two, and year twenty, and long after that. Over a few decades, a modest gift can grant out more than its original value and still be there.
Whatever 5 percent of your estate turns out to be, it becomes a permanent source of funding for the town you’re leaving it to. Think of the impact if you and all your neighbors all agreed to leave 5% and the opportunities we could create across southern Wisconsin.
What your gift does after it gets here
It survives the organizations you name. This is the quiet risk in leaving money directly to a specific charity decades in advance. Nonprofits merge, close, or drift from the mission that drew you to them, and a direct bequest can fail or land somewhere you never intended. CFSW holds variance power, which allows our board to redirect your gift to the closest available charitable purpose in the same community. Your intent outlives the organization.
Somebody is minding it. We handle investment oversight, due diligence on grantees, reporting, and the annual grantmaking. That work matters most for a gift built to outlive everyone who remembers making it.
What is does for you and your family
You don’t write a check now. There’s no cost to plan the gift with us, and our staff time is free to donors.
Here’s the part most people don’t expect. The charitable details don’t have to live in your will. Your attorney writes one line naming CFSW. Everything else, the town, the purpose, the fund name, the organizations you want supported, goes into a separate fund agreement between you and the Foundation.
Change your mind in five years? You amend the fund agreement with us. A phone call and a signature. No codicil, no trust restatement, no attorney’s bill for re-executing documents. For anyone who revisits their giving every few years, that difference adds up.
Retirement accounts deserve a look. IRAs and qualified plans are often the most heavily taxed assets a family can inherit. A tax-exempt recipient doesn’t pay income tax on those distributions the way an individual beneficiary does, which is why many donors leave retirement assets to charity and other assets to family. Your attorney or tax advisor should run the numbers for your situation.
Assets we can accept: cash, appreciated securities, real estate, farmland, closely held business interests, and beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance.
Three Steps
- Call us before you sign anything. A short conversation, free and with no obligation, tells us your interests and the causes you care about most.
- Sign a CFSW plan. We put your wishes in writing, including the town or organizations you’re naming, outside your will where it can be updated as life changes.
- Give your attorney the language. Your will needs one sentence. We’ll provide the exact wording, our legal name, and our tax ID so your attorney has what they need.
Example language:
Residuary bequest (a percentage, or residual, of what’s left after other gifts/debts):
“I give, devise, and bequeath ____% of the residue of my estate to the Community Foundation of Southern Wisconsin, Inc., a nonprofit organization, for its general charitable purposes as detailed in the notification of charitable bequests with the Foundation.”
General bequest (a fixed dollar amount):
“I give, devise, and bequeath the sum of $______ to the Community Foundation of Southern Wisconsin, Inc., a nonprofit organization, for its general charitable purposes as detailed in the notification of charitable bequests with the Foundation.”
Full Legal Name: Community Foundation of Southern Wisconsin, Inc, EIN: 39-1711388
Start with a conversation, not a document
No cost, no obligation. Tell us which community you want your gift to serve, and we’ll tell you plainly whether we’re the right home for it.
Attorneys and financial advisors are welcome to call for sample language and our advisor materials or visit review our Professional Advisor Handbook.
608-758-0883 | [email protected]