Supporting alumni of Fairfield Elementary School
This site was created by The Neu Family to promote the Barbara Neu Memorial Scholarship Fund.
The fund has received $10,640 and continues to grow. Thank you for your support!
If you would like to add to the fund, please click the donate button, which will take you to the Sacramento Region Community Foundation online donation form. Select the YCF-Barbara Neu Memorial Scholarship Fund from the "Please use my donation for:" drop down list. Every bit helps.
Now the fund is at $6,545 with another $1,500 in the pipeline. Thanks for your support!
As the Barbara Neu Memorial Scholarship is to be an Endowed Scholarship Fund, meant to exist in perpetuity to carry out its stated purpose, it is important to get the donated funds invested appropriately. The Sacramento Region Community Foundation will for its affiliate, the Yolo Community Foundation, invest the money designated to the fund via its selected investment advisor, Colonial Consulting LLC.
Like all endowed funds, the market value of the fund will help us establish an appropriate scholarship amount (or scholarships, if we deem fit) to ensure that the Fund retains enough money to award scholarships every year into the future without tapping the principal (or fund corpus). To accomplish this, the money donated to the fund is invested in a portfolio of stocks and bonds, much like a 401 K, and the return on this invested capital is what is used to pay the scholarship recipients and the fees associated with running a fund with a community foundation.
To get a better idea of what the financial side looks like, we refer to the Sacramento Region Community Foundation's Investment Overview.
This is the indicative asset allocation for an endowed fund.
Source: Sacramento Region Community Foundation Investment Overview
With endowment fund investments, the investment goal are as follows:
“Investment Goals
• To earn a sufficient long term return to preserve the purchasing power of the assets, after annual grants of 4% and annual support fees averaging 1.3%, plus cost of living increases; and
• To earn this return with as little volatility as possible.”
The key goal is to have the fund's return on investments meet the desired scholarship amount with an annual distribution of 4% of the fund’s balance. Of course, the YCF/SacRegCF charges a fee for its services as does their investment advisor, and these fees must be factored into how much the fund pays out each year. Each Community Foundation has its own guidelines for this, set in accordance with the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA).
Unfortunately, investment results of late have not been what they once were (see below). If this continues, we may be required to raise additional funds to make up for the lack of investment returns, or reduce or pause the scholarship payouts, in order to ensure the longevity of the scholarship.
Investment results, lately, have not been what they once were - hope we get back to a 10% return.
Thank you to all who donated and left comments on the Donationto site. Thanks to you, we raised $4,750 at post time.
Mrs. Neu would thank you, too
As a next step, we are happy to confirm that the Barbara Neu Memorial Scholarship Fund of Yolo Community Foundation is now set up and ready to accept tax-deductible donations with 501(c)(3) status. We will be donating all the funds collected (so far, and going forward) to this newly-established endowment scholarship fund and work with the Yolo Community Foundation to set up the scholarship particulars later in the year (we still need to reach the $25,000 goal to finalize the endowed fund).
If you would like to make a donation to the fund directly (and get the tax deductibility), the fund has been added as an option to the online-giving page of the Sacramento Region Community Foundation (of which the Yolo Community Foundation is an affiliate), for donors who wish to gift by credit card. If you go to their website at www.sacregcf.org and click on GIVE NOW in the upper right-hand corner, it will take you to their donation page (https://ssl.charityweb.net/sacregcf/). Under “Please use my donation for,” there is a pull-down menu, and you may select the Barbara Neu Memorial Scholarship (it's the second option on the list). Donors who wish to donate by check can make their checks out to YCF-Barbara Neu Memorial Scholarship and mail them to:
Barbara Neu Memorial Scholarship Fund of Yolo Community Foundation
c/o Sacramento Region Community Foundation
955 University Avenue, Suite A
Sacramento, CA 95825
How to select Barbara Neu Memorial Scholarship on the SacReg Community Foundation web form
We'd like to thank Raphael Moore for his help in introducing us to the local community foundations, as well as Babs Sandeen, Executive Director of the Yolo Community Foundation and Fran Baxter-Guigli, Donor Services Officer, with the Sacramento Region Community Foundation. But, most of all, we thank all of you for your support and donating to an idea that we fortunately stumbled upon to memorialize my mother, Barbara Neu, that just seems right.