The Power of Partnering with a Community Foundation

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Phil: We're excited to share stories of charitable impact today from three different perspectives: a Foundation staff member, a professional advisor, and a local nonprofit organization. We’ll start with the Foundation and an introduction from Marci Peace.

Marci: Hello, it’s great to see everyone. I have been at the Winston-Salem Foundation since 2025, serving as Vice President of Finance and Investments. I came in after Todd Slate retired, having been with the Foundation for over 33 years—some pretty big shoes to fill. I've been in the nonprofit sector since 2001. I've worked in higher education, at a United Way, at the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro, and now the Winston-Salem Foundation. I have about eight years of experience in the community foundation world.  

I’m excited to be with the Winston-Salem Foundation because I think it's really unique. The role that I play at the Foundation is to safeguard the assets. We ended 2025 with over $685 million in assets, which is an excellent year for us. I also maintain and monitor the controls of the Foundation to ensure that we're able to safeguard those assets. And most importantly, my role is to ensure that we honor our donor’s intent and create the legacy that they want to create.

Phil: What are some unique benefits of working with a community foundation for long-lasting impact?

Marci: Community foundations offer a lot of advantages. The first is that we have different rules than private foundations, and that allows a donor to give more efficiently. At a community foundation, we can steward the assets to ensure they're around in perpetuity. Private foundations are required to give away 5% of their assets a year and may require staff. Our spending policy can be modified if the corpus of the gift is falling below a level that would maintain that legacy forever—which is always our goal.

The other benefit is the knowledge that the Foundation has in the community. We have been around since 1919, which is historic. We're one of the oldest community foundations – not just in North Carolina – but in the country. That proves we are here for the long term.

We are able to manage gifts in perpetuity much differently than other organizations might be able to. We have the capability to track complex gifts, maintain them, oversee the spending policy, and steward what the donor wanted. We also have oversight so that if a charity that a donor had chosen were to close, we can use variance power to fulfill the donor’s intent to support another charitable organization with a similar mission.

Phil: What in particular makes the Winston-Salem Foundation unique amongst community foundations?

Marci: What makes the Winston-Salem Foundation unique is all the people in this room. We are different than other community foundations because we have such a strong professional advisors network. We have a strong alliance managers program with over 40 managers that we work with, with asset size ranges from $500,000 up to $99 million (see our current investment managers).

It's a win-win situation. As an alliance manager, you're able to keep the relationship with the donors—they have a trusted relationship with you, which you have built over years. They value that relationship and they want to maintain that. And it's a win for us because the Foundation can create more impact in the community.

Phil: This reminds me of a new donor that we recently worked with—a family that, a little over a year ago, had set up a private charitable foundation in honor of the patriarch who had passed away. They wanted to honor his memory by establishing a scholarship program and they did this through a private foundation. When it came time to administer that scholarship program, to start accepting applications and awarding scholarships, they realized they didn't have the knowledge or the administrative support to carry it out. So, they came to the Winston-Salem Foundation to talk about setting up a scholarship fund that we would administer that would honor the original intent. We were able to do that, while also bringing on their trusted advisor to continue to manage the assets. Marci, can you share how that process went?

Marci: Yes. This is a really great example of how we're able to help your clients. That was a situation where a private foundation didn't make sense. It was expensive to have a private foundation. It's hard to find expertise to give out scholarships. There is a process to make sure that's done in an appropriate way, and we were able to help them figure out a better way to do this. Our Development and Donor Engagement Team can work with your clients to figure out how they want to give.

You may have heard of people giving widely but not deeply, that's where the Foundation can help: to figure out how to make an impact now and into the future.

There’s also initiatives like the All In For Our Schools campaign that we raised more than $9 million for last year to help fill a deficit in our local school system budget. We are able to convene in the community in a different way than any other organization because we have trusted capital and relationships.  

We're able to facilitate entry-level gifts into a donor-advised fund, but also much more complex gifts, like real estate, private business interests, or other complex issues that your clients might face. As for our alliance manager program, if you have a client that you're working with, they can speak to us first or you can speak to us first. At some point they may say, “I want to give a donation to the Foundation.” They sign a letter of intent to bring on a new alliance manager and then it's our duty to perform due diligence around that. It’s an easy process and we're happy to talk to you at any point to share more.  

Phil: Great. Thank you, Marci. We're going to slide the mic over to Alex Barrett for a perspective from a professional advisor. Alex, please introduce yourself and tell us about your work and your experience as a board member with the Winston-Salem Foundation. ‍

Alex: Thanks, Phil. I'm Director with the Hoge-Barrett Group of Truist Investment Services.
I've done that for 11 years, beginning with BB&T Scott and Stringfellow. I've been a Foundation board member since 2023. Today, I'm the Board Treasurer, I serve on the Executive Committee, and I oversee the Finance and Investment Subcommittee. ‍

Phil: We recently worked together to outline charitable legacy plans for one of your clients. Why did it made sense to engage the Foundation as a partner? ‍

Alex: Yes, this was my conversion moment for sure with the Foundation. We had a client of ours who had lost his wife. They had been very charitable their entire lives, primarily through the theater, art community, and their church. He lost his wife to cancer in her early 70’s and wanted to continue charitable giving on an annual basis but wanted to begin some legacy conversations about after he was gone.  

The catalyst for using the Winston-Salem Foundation was not only that I had been involved on the board long enough to build a lot of trust there and see all the fantastic amount of work that they do and how diligent they are with everything—but also because everything is so local.

If it's local, I urge you to think about the Foundation as a partner. There is simply no way to get that granular and meet with folks who know people who attend the churches, who attend temple, who are board members of the charities that you're looking to support. Coming to this from the financial advisor/broker/money manager standpoint, these situations are always a comparison between the Fidelities, the Schwabs, the broader national level donor-advised funds. So, it's competitive, right? Or it's at least comparative. I wanted to bring Winston-Salem Foundation in to fulfill my client’s unique requests. We just couldn't go through that 800 number process.  

Phil introduced me to the idea of a Revocable Trust Agreement, which was fantastic to learn about, and that's as customizable as your estate planning documents. At passing, my client will make a large one-time gift, then we'll have annual endowed gifts. Always maintaining the named fund. That was the number one thing—always with his late wife’s name to honor her memory. And the Foundation will continually monitor the gifts to ensure his intent is fulfilled. ‍

Phil: We'll shift to our final perspective, which is from a local nonprofit organization. Brianna Cantwell, the Executive Director at the Piedmont Wind Symphony. Tell us about the organization and yourself. ‍

Brianna: I've been with Piedmont Wind Symphony five years now, my third year as Executive Director. Piedmont Wind Symphony was created in 1989. We're in our 36th season. If any of you know Rob Simon, the owner of Windsor Jewelers, he is our founder. A lot of people don't know this about Rob, but he is very musically inclined and he formed Piedmont Wind Symphony to kind of face the Eastman Wind Ensemble in Rochester, New York. Frederick Fennell was a mentor of his.  

We don't have a lot of professional wind ensembles in the United States and what is different from us than say the Winston-Salem Symphony is that we don't have any string players. We have only woodwinds, percussion, and brass and I think that that sets us apart because we are the only non-military professional wind ensemble from DC to Atlanta.  

Piedmont Wind Symphony stands as an organization that is not dedicated to playing a lot of the repertoire that some of you, if you were ever in middle school or high school band may have played things like Holst. We want to consistently push the boundaries of what classical wind band music can be and constantly collaborate with artists and conductors that are local and national – and constantly commission new works. Just his past weekend we commissioned and premiered a new tuba concerto. ‍

Phil: A few years ago, Piedmont Wind Symphony approached the Foundation to establish an organizational endowment fund, to be invested and managed by the Foundation and produce annual income for the organization. Why did your organization decide to partner with us?

‍Brianna: We created our endowment in September 2024, thanks to conversations with a specific private donor of ours who wanted to ensure that Piedmont Wind Symphony would be here for the rest of time. We wanted to diversify our revenue streams. Previously, Piedmont Wind Symphony raised money for a fiscal year to ensure that we could pay for artistic programming. Since the pandemic, we have created education funds and now have created this endowment.

We specifically chose the Winston-Salem Foundation for our organizational endowment because we wanted to do something local. We wanted to partner with a local financial institution that our donors and patrons already trusted.

A lot of our donors already have a donor-advised fund through the Winston-Salem Foundation. It was so easy and streamlined. It was everything we could have imagined. Now we are the second highest paying professional ensemble in Winston-Salem. We have a larger staff than ever before. And this summer we are going to kick off an endowment fundraising drive. ‍

Phil: Yeah, that's fantastic. And I'm glad to hear that the Foundation was an easy partner for you in setting this up. If you could leave this room of advisors with just one takeaway sort of to help clients support nonprofits wisely, what might that be? ‍

Brianna: I advise you and your clients to trust arts organizations and nonprofit organizations the same way that you trust larger institutions, whether it be businesses you shop at or places you go to eat. Trust in a way that is not just to support artistic programming, trust in the institution to make an impact of that gift. Ask the nonprofit to be transparent and to share their financial records if they have a question about that. Sometimes donors will want to donate to a specific program, but the most impactful type of donation is an unrestricted gift to a nonprofit. But ask for the transparency. When an organization talks to a donor, that’s when the relationship forms and a donor can build trust in the institution. I think some people lose sight of how important that is. ‍

Phil: Brianna, Alex, and Marci – thank you so much for sharing your insights today. The stories you shared are a great reminder of how conversations about leaving a legacy can help many advisors deepen relationships with their clients over time, and how the Winston-Salem Foundation can be a valuable partner and resource in these conversations.

TAKE PURPOSEFUL ACTION WITH US:
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• Learn more about why to partner with a community foundation on your charitable giving, either now or in the future through a planned gift.  
• Explore our Advisor Toolkit for tips and resources to support your charitable clients.