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Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious for someone to explain the choice of charity. It looks like Silicon Valley Community Foundation is an organization that specializes in helping people and companies set up large spendings of charitable donations. Does anyone else do that on this scale?

It seems the alternative is spending a fair amount of mental overhead to set up a charitable foundation or donating to an existing foundation institutionally equipped to spend that much money as a non-profit (the Gates Foundation).

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Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a Community Foundation (in contrast to a Private Foundation), which means that they manage lots of different pools of money from different sources. It also means that donations to them are tax-deductible in the exact same way it is with other charities[1].

I'm not familar with the specifics of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, but it looks like SV Community Foundation, similar to most Community Foundations, does a lot of work managing what are known as donor-advised funds. Check out this Wikipedia page for some good info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donor_advised_fund

1. Private Foundations have a few different rules in place, including lower maximum deductibility for donors, required 5% funds disbursement to charitable organizations, etc. Check out this link for a comparison http://www.programforgiving.org/charitable/pages/considering...

I set up a donor advised fund (DAF) with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation when I sold my company in 2000. At that time they had the policy of selling all the donated shares immediately. It turned out to be one of the best things I did. Now I have more time available to look into how to give money in meaningful effective ways and I have a pot of money available for this thru the DAF where I don't have to be doing the math on whether or not I can 'afford' the donation. My post acquisition world has been much richer for the interactions I've had with people I respect that stemmed from this.

It's not a normal charitable foundation, but it's more like a fund that donors house their donations, and that then act as a sort of clearing house to match up these donations with grant applicants, where the donor keep a directorial role. The SVCF doesn't seem to have much in the way of limits on the kind of charitable projects they support - from what I can see, the money might go to malaria prevention in the Congo or it might go to funding prestigious professorial chairs.

I guess Zuckerberg likes the kind of projects the SVCF has funded in the past and the way the donor-applicant matching works.

Recall that Zuckerberg has already pledged half his wealth to charity: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-09/seventeen-of-wealth...

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