How does the UUCC Endowment Fund contribute to UUCC’s annual budget? 

This is the second in a 3-part series of Tapestry posts about the UUCC Endowment Fund. Last week, we described what the Endowment Fund is, and we introduced you to the Endowment Board. This post more fully describes the annual operations of the Endowment Fund at UUCC. 

The UUCC Endowment Fund provides a way for donors to give assets to the congregation with the assurance that those assets will continue to support UUCC for as long as UUCC exists, because the principal of the Endowment Fund is always maintained. The majority of the UUCC Endowment Fund assets are invested in the UUA’s Unitarian Universalist Common Endowment Fund (UUCEF). The UUCEF helps to ensure that our assets are invested in ways that align with our UU values. Importantly, they calculate an annual distribution, early in the calendar year, from the Endowment’s invested assets to be made to each participating congregation. 

Following the annual distribution from the UUCEF, the UUCC Endowment Board decides how much of the distribution to disburse to the UUCC Operating Fund. In general, the Board will disburse the full amount of the annual distribution, but in challenging economic times, the Board may decide to reduce the amount to protect the principal of the Endowment Fund. For UUCC’s current fiscal year, the Board recommended that the planned $23,595.00 disbursement be directed to those areas of most need to sustain UUCC through this upcoming year, as determined by the UUCC Executive Team.    

As of September 30 2022, the total amount of UUCC Endowment assets invested with UUCEF is $536,696. This is less than we began the year with, largely due to the challenging conditions in financial markets in 2022. The UUCEF made the annual distribution from those invested assets to the congregation and the Endowment Board calculated a distribution of $27,509 to the congregation for the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The Endowment Board notified the Board of Trustees and Executive Team about this distribution in March to enable them to factor this into UUCC’s budget and pledge drive planning. In the past, Endowment distributions has helped to fund the positions of Assistant Minister, Executive Director, Youth Director, and Director of Communications. 

In our next blog post, we will talk about ways to give to the endowment fund and how we work to protect those donations. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to any Board member.  More information is also available on the UUCC website: uucolumbia.net/governance/legacy-giving.