Donors can create a charitable fund at the Foundation to make their giving as effective as possible. The Foundation’s work is designed to have an impact long into the future, and so the Foundation invests and administers the grants from these donated funds.

The Foundation uses a leading community foundation information management system to account for gifts and investment returns on permanent funds held at the Foundation. Donors with funds at the Foundation receive quarterly fund statements that will tell them what was earned, what was gifted out and how and when they can make grants in the future, much like a pension fund statement.

All gifts at the Foundation are accounted for separately, even though donor funds are invested collectively. The larger investment portfolio allows us to get better services, better fees, and access to good investment opportunities. For larger gift, the Foundation has the capacity to legally segregate funds, offering additional and robust security for large investments.

Even though our focus is endowments, the Foundation helps businesses and other organisations give effectively and efficiently by offering a range of grants management support services through our technology platforms, professional giving infrastructure and expertise. These services vary from back-office administration and support to conducting on-site/phone interviews to assess not-for-profit programme concepts or agency capabilities. The Foundation assists with: 

• Clarifying the donors’ philanthropic objectives by translating their general interest into more concrete grantmaking strategies and assisting the donor in selecting the approach most likely to achieve their objectives.
• Managing a competitive grant process by accepting grant applications online, tracking grant requests and creating shortlists of potential organisations to fund.
• Identifying unexplored opportunities for philanthropic support and exploring ways to increase impact or assess results.
• Providing best practices updates to the donor community.

A listing of grants made to date is presented below. These reports are meant to share and to illustrate – at a high level – the core grants facilitated and/or made through the Bermuda Foundation, excluding disbursements for specific operational programmes. The Foundation’s audited financial statements are the official sources for grantmaking transactions as reported on the financial year.

 “The Bermuda Foundation makes giving easy, effective, and efficient. It promotes balanced giving – raising funds that go not just towards pressing needs but to the holistic concerns of the community. The Foundation also promotes accountability and due diligence in philanthropy, and its structure helps focus resources on what the community cares about.”

Friends of Bermuda Community Foundation (FBCF) is a public charity that is exempt from Federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to FBCF are deductible under section 170 of the Code.

The Bermuda Foundation formed FBCF in August 2014 to provide fiscal sponsorship services to American donors who make donations to or through FBCF. Individuals, families, businesses and other nonprofit organisations who have an interest in or connection to Bermuda are invited to donate to Friends of Bermuda Community Foundation organisation.

As a Bermuda-based nonprofit, the Bermuda Foundation can receive grants for its operations and endowment from FBCF. US Taxpayers can also make contributions to Bermuda-based donor-advised funds at the Foundation via FBCF.

Sometimes people just don’t know where best to give. An internet search can produce so much information that it can be difficult for a prospective donor to figure out who is doing exactly what in the areas they wish to support. Or sometimes there are really great community initiatives that need support, but don’t have the type of visibility they need.

The Bermuda Foundation is a resource for donors to learn more about nonprofits’ work and how they contribute to improving life in Bermuda. We also manage GiveBermuda.org – an online giving portal.

For more information, please visit www.GiveBermuda.org.

This area of work involves developing field and issue information; determining high priority community issues and increasing donor understanding of local social conditions. The Foundation aims to gather third sector data and make it available to the donor community in the form of:

• Social issue summaries, which will be made available on GiveBermuda,
• State of philanthropy, state of field and civic indicator reports by accessing data available through large surveys (census, omnibus) and programme surveys,
• Vital Signs – leading the production of a community well-being report.

The Bermuda Foundation participates in Vital Signs® research to measure the state of the island, and to help us all build a healthy, vibrant and liveable community.

Vital Signs® is a community programme which uses local knowledge to measure the vitality of a community and support action towards improving the collective quality of life. It was originally developed by Community Foundations of Canada and has been adopted around the world. It effectively gauges the quality of life as determined by the community. This information creates a benchmark measurement which can be used by individuals and philanthropic organisations, such as the Bermuda Foundation, to target their giving more effectively.

The Foundation introduced the Vital Signs® programme to Bermuda to give the community the opportunity to evaluate what was important to their quality of life. This helps to enable donors to become better informed and community service providers to remain targeted on the most important quality of life issues.

The Bermuda Vital Signs research process began in 2017 with a community study on what people believed was important to their quality of life. Responses from a representative sample of the population guided the ensuing work. This was followed by a series of convenings held in 2018 and 2019 that explored the identified priority areas in more depth. Subsequently, a report on the pandemic was published in 2022.

Click here to access all Vital Signs reports.

The Bermuda Vital Signs® Outcomes Wizard offers a starting point for donors and nonprofits to consider the impact they are trying to make and the ways they can measure it. Stakeholders can use the Wizard to create an outcomes report that are customised to your activities and intended impact. Get started here!

Hemera Fund has sought opportunities to make impactful social investments, developing a core set of champions working in the early childhood development field to improving outcomes for kids. In 2017, they funded creation of www.redflagsbermuda.org for parents, caregivers, and community members who have concerns about a child’s wellbeing. It is based on the Red Flags Guide, which was first piloted in 2002 by the Simcoe County Early Intervention Council in Canada. In 2014, Bermuda Government’s Child Development Programme adapted the Red Flags Guide to promote the early identification of children who need additional resources to meet their developmental milestones. But the Bermuda adaptation of the Red Flags guide was only available to childcare providers. With the pool of people caring for children in Bermuda being quite small and overlapping, a public-facing tool that could inform parents, professionals, and the larger community needed to be developed.

In 2024, Red Flags Bermuda’s was relaunched as Early Years Nurturing Bermuda. The new site features:

• the science and research behind early childhood development
• tips on how families can support their child
• a guide to developmental milestones and how to know if a child is missing them
• links to helpful websites, toolkits, and up-to-date local resources that support children’s early years development
• news about issues in children’s development, both in Bermuda and abroad

By sharing this info in a supportive and engaging way, they hope to help families on their journey towards providing the best possible lives for their children.

The goal of the central endowment is to grow an unrestricted community trust of funds that are invested and that yield a return on investment. These returns are expected to be granted out to the nonprofit sector at a rate of 4% per year.

In the short-term, while the principal is growing, the Foundation runs a small grants programme (approximately $200,000 per annum). The board reviews and approves the grants (up to $15,000) from the fund.

In the next phase of the programme, when the invested funds begin to yield larger returns and the grantmaking pool is more substantive, grant committees will be appointed from the community, to consider grant applications and to make recommendations to the Foundation’s board.