What is the Dickinson Area Community Foundation?

The Dickinson Area Community Foundation is the steward for creating endowments by making meaningful connections within the community to build sustainable funding for positive, local community impacts forever. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OVg_M4pWg8

For Good. For Ever.

The Dickinson Area Community Foundation (DACF) is almost like a community trust fund. We work with professional advisors, such as attorneys and financial planners, to identify opportunities for donors to give, whether through establishing an endowment fund, giving over time, or making a one-time donation. 

The funds are professionally managed, and the original deposit is never touched. The earnings from the funds are used to fund scholarships and grants that make a difference in a positive manner. 

As we grow the number of endowment funds, the amount of earnings that are able to be contributed back to the community continues to grow. Endowments can be set up for individual purposes, such as an individual scholarship, or for a specific purpose, such as a nonprofit agency fund or area of interest, while others are general in nature for the good of the community.

The money is invested, saved, and available for future generations through scholarships and grants. 

Local resource for grant funding

The Dickinson Area Community Foundation was founded in 1995. It's local, and we have local controls governed by local boards. Our staff is local.

If there’s a community need, DACF finds out about it, and people know to come to the community foundation.

Without a local community foundation, the more than $6 million given back to the community through scholarships, area of interest grants, and agency fund grants would not be here.  

We want to reach everybody we can in the community, because our work truly impacts everyone in the community, from young to old.

DACF resources

A primary benefit of the community foundation is that it is not one thing. If you are passionate about five different things–educational, healthcare, humanitarian, environmental, homelessness–you can support those five things through the vast endowment catalog. 

We build relationships with organizations to understand the needs in the community. Our donor base allows us to connect donors and their funding with specific needs, whether an individual nonprofit, area of interest, or scholarship. 

In addition to connecting and building relationships with donors and nonprofits, our staff assists in setting up endowments and facilitating donations, manages grant funding for nonprofit agency funds, community impact grants, and field of interest funds, and manages a large portfolio of scholarships available to graduating students at local schools.

Learn more about giving through DACF.