My name is Nancy. I'm a client of Schwab Charitable and we have a donor-advised fund there that has helped our family significantly support Catchlight which is an organization that I founded. Catchlight and all the work that I do is based on the idea that we are primarily visual people. Visual language is our most accessible and most universal language and it's this powerful medium to help us see and understand each other differently. Catchlight exists to expand and nurture the visual storytelling ecosystem and so we do that through a local storytelling program, we do that through recognizing leadership so where we scan the world, and we identify people who are doing remarkably good and very innovative work and visual storytelling and then we run community programs. Catchlight wouldn't exist without philanthropic contributions. We had some key seed funders who came in at the very beginning to help us get the idea off the ground and then we continue to benefit with the relationship with Schwab Charitable who is helping donors begin to find us to help support the work that we do. Contributing to a Schwab Charitable donor-advised fund is so easy because you can give appreciated assets, or you can give cash so it's not like you can only give in one particular way. And then you can also distribute it either a little bit at a time or in one fowl swoop, you can do it within the month, or you can do it within 10 years. There's incredible flexibility about how you give in to the donor-advised fund and how you take money out. It's also just super easy to access it's a couple of clicks and you can actually make the decisions that you want of who you want to support. Our family supports a wide variety of philanthropies both in the immediate area and across the country and some global philanthropy, so we really appreciate that that it's sort of a one stop shop for the way we can get grants out the door. There are so many problems in this world, and I think one of the most hopeful things is that there's remarkable talent out there really focused on addressing some of these problems and the thing they often need is financial support. What I'm excited about is identifying causes that we care about and if we can bring assets to the table to help them go out and solve big problems it's such a rewarding thing for us to be able to do and that's what we get out of this relationship with our donor-advised fund.

My name is Robin and I am the founder and chairman of the Bluefield Project for frontotemporal dementia. My mother, my aunt, my grandfather died of this. Frontotemporal dementia or FTD for short is a demise of the frontal lobes of the brain. People who have the genetic aspects of frontotemporal dementia they stop producing progranulin. That is what we're trying to do is through a treatment increase progranulin and be able for those who have it in their family to take a pill every day so that they never have this disease. So, we are very hopeful that this might be the first neurological disease that actually has a cure. So, as my husband and I were thinking about how to give back to our community we started a foundation and after a couple of years of doing that foundation it was quite onerous and when I heard about a donor-advised fund from my financial advisor it sounded like we could take away all the onerous parts of the joy of giving and the donor-advised fund through Schwab Charitable has been exactly that. They set me up like within 20 minutes. I was then that afternoon introduced to a whole new world of charity the way you might imagine it without any of the burden. The beauty of the donor-advised fund is you make that contribution, you get the tax deduction, and then you have the joy of giving that money away over the years. It's already set aside for philanthropy and so now you get the kid in the candy store experience of where do I want to create good in the world and then it's so easy just with a few clicks to send that money and I just think my heart grows you know every time that I do something for someone else so it's a heart multiplier for me. So, thanks to this donor-advised fund through Schwab charitable I am working on trying to leave a legacy in my life.

Increase your giving power with Schwab Charitable.™ 

"My name's Alex. My late wife, Isse, was diagnosed with colon cancer in November of 2017. Isse was an incredible human being. She was an executive at a healthcare company but that was the last thing you would know about her if you met her. Through the course of her treatments, she was always thinking about others, so it's always been, you know, at her core to be very thoughtful and giving. We had some additional income from the sale of Isse's company and so we wanted to make sure that we could maximize the benefit both to us and then from a charitable perspective. The Schwab Charitable donor-advised fund has really helped our giving power. We were able to put funds allocated to put funds in the account. They could be invested and they could grow which would give us additional capital to contribute to charity. Isse was diagnosed when she was 42 years old. You know, everybody thinks of colon cancer as an old man's disease. We've given a lot to Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center. I participate on the Young Adult Cancer Initiative. That definitely keeps her legacy alive. She did not want this to happen to anybody else. When I say giving, it's financial, but it's also giving in terms of time. In 2019 we started a race in Nashville in partnership with the Colon Cancer Coalition and we had over 1,300 people participate. We raised over $175,000 and the great part of that program is 75% of those funds can go back into your community. So, she really wanted to create awareness around the disease, and we have been able to do that through the race, and also the Schwab Charitable donor-advised fund. So, the community Isse, that's hard to talk about. She was such a big presence and meant so much to so many people that I think the race, in the best way that it can, captures who she was by bringing everybody together and the joy that you see on everybody's face when they're participating in the event. It's incredible. So, it's been important to me, that her kids know what a champion she was. She was an amazing person generally, but what she has done around colon cancer and creating awareness just speaks volumes about who she is as a person." 

I'm Jean. I'm a third generation Japanese American. My grandparents, both sides, came from Hiroshima. They worked on the plantation.

I first came to the University of Hawaii at Manoa as a senior at Roosevelt High School. I'm the first grandchild to graduate from college.

I climbed the ladder of success at the University. I went from instructor to professor.

Without scholarships we wouldn't have been able to have the careers and the life that we had. And so, I've always wanted to give back to the University of Hawaii and Schwab Charitable is allowing me to do that.

Tuition was getting more and more expensive. I had a sister-in-law who was also inclined to be generous, and I said, ‘Why don't we start a scholarship?' We got help when we were students and so we want to show our gratitude in some kind of way.

We transferred money into our Schwab Charitable account. We get the full tax break, but we didn't have to distribute it at that moment. The beauty of it is, I didn't have to make decisions about where to give that money all at once.

The Donor Advised Fund helps us be anonymous in our giving which is what we want to do. It's giving without fanfare.

Giving because, well, we think it's the right thing to do.