For professional advisors.

Entrepreneurial boldness. Accountability. Deadlines. Results. Beyond traditional philanthropy.

In 2021, the Southwest Florida Community Foundation changed its identity to Collaboratory. It was much more than a name change. It was a naming of the change we are determined to make. We committed ourselves to the goal of coordinating the solving of all of Southwest Florida’s social problems on an eighteen-year deadline. Not just hunger, not just poverty, not just crime, not just illiteracy. Not just one problem. Not whenever. All of the social problems, solved together, on an eighteen-year deadline.

How? Using sophisticated, large-scale coordination practices modeled on those used by NASA to coordinate the 20,000 institutions and 400,000 people who worked together on the Apollo program to put human beings on the moon.

This work is well underway, with five separate teams studying, working and convening in real time, coordinating the activity of dozens of heretofore disaggregated players in the charitable sector, business, government and education.

We invite you to attend one of our weekly Explanation Sessions to learn more. The understanding and excitement with which you leave one of these sessions will be the first step in conveying this unprecedented opportunity to your clients.

Our vision is new.
Our work with sophisticated donors and advisors is not.

We’ve been partnering with donors, professional advisors and nonprofit organizations for nearly 50 years. We have deep regional roots grown over decades with a vast network of nonprofit partners. We’ve done the vetting, so you don’t have to. We have traditional products as well as customizable funds, and all of them can be aimed at a specific area of interest or at our larger vision of creating a new Southwest Florida that works for everyone, with, as Buckminster Fuller said, “no one and nothing left out.” And we have a proven history of prudent financial stewardship, managing over $100 million in charitable assets.

When you and your clients partner with Collaboratory, you become part of a much larger, efficient philanthropic community—a gathering of sophisticated donors interested in real, measurable, exciting progress for our region.

Different tax benefits. Different funds. Different needs for different donors. Different advantages. Let’s meet and help you clarify the options.

Let’s start by getting together in person or over Zoom. We can answer questions, listen to your objectives as an advisor or to your needs for specific clients, and go over options and benefits, including tax benefits, associated with each. We offer:

• Donor-Advised Funds
  Extremely popular, these are personal investment accounts that offer a convenient way to support charitable organizations a donor designates. Our experienced philanthropic team manages the process for you.
• Designated Funds
  These provide permanent financial support to specific organizations or programs donors identify. These can be named to memorialize a loved one.
• Field-of-Interest Funds
  These allow donors to support multiple organizations within the broader range of a cause, or even our big cause of all the causes. They allow you to make an annual grant to that cause area. Simple and impactful.
• Scholarship Funds
  Incredibly rewarding. Plus, donors can customize their scholarship funds according to their interests and values.
• Community Unrestricted Funds
  These funds give us the broadest flexibility to use donor gifts as we see fit to make the greatest possible impact in the community. The range of impact is unlimited.
• Bequests
  These allow donors to designate Collaboratory to receive and manage a philanthropic legacy after a donor has passed, giving donors the ability to guide their legacy while they are living. Donors can name advisors and the organizations and causes about which they are impassioned. Other options like charitable remainder trusts and charitable gift annuities are also powerful ways to fund causes about which donors care deeply. View sample bequest language.
• Collaboratory Fund
  Gifts to this fund are aimed directly at our goal of coordinating the solving of all of the region’s social problems on an eighteen-year deadline. It’s an opportunity to power an initiative that is unlike any other in the world, and which holds the promise of changing the way philanthropy is administered forever.

Contact.

Contact Gina Dengler at 239 333 4171 and let’s get seated with a conversation. We can also get you scheduled to attend one of our Explanation Sessions, which will give you an inspiring orientation to this effort we call, “the greatest community-problem solving initiative in American history.”