Giving Through a Donor Advised Fund
What a donor advised fund is
A donor advised fund is a charitable account you open through a sponsor, make donations into, and then recommend grants out of to the charities you want to support.
You get your tax receipt when you put money into the fund, not when the money reaches us. That means you can give once and then decide later, over months or years, where it goes.
In Canada these funds are held at places like CanadaHelps, Charitable Impact, GiveWise, and community foundations such as the Victoria Foundation and the Vancouver Foundation. Some financial institutions offer them too. If you already have one, you will know it by the name of whoever holds it.
If you do not have one, this page is probably not the place to start. It is written for people who already give this way and want to direct some of it here.
Why People Give this WayA few reasons come up repeatedly.
The timing of the receipt is separate from the timing of the gift. People who have had a high income year, sold a business or a property, or received an inheritance can take the receipt in that year and decide where the money goes afterwards.
Securities can go in directly. Donating appreciated stock to a fund avoids the capital gains tax that selling it first would trigger, and the full value goes to charity rather than part of it going to tax.
One account, several charities. Rather than tracking receipts from a dozen organisations, there is one account and one annual statement.
Giving can be anonymous. Most sponsors let you recommend a grant without your name attached, which matters to some people giving to mental health causes.
How to recommend a grant to us
Log in to your fund, search for us, and recommend the grant. Your sponsor sends the money and handles the paperwork.
Search by our legal name or our charity number, not by the short name. Many sponsors search the CRA register, where we are listed in full.
Legal name
Borderline Personality Disorder Society of British Columbia
Also known as
BPD Society of BC
Charity registration number
82698 0708 RR0001
Contact for giving questions
finance@bpdbc.ca
If your sponsor asks for a designation, you can leave it as an unrestricted gift, which is the most useful to us, or name a program. If it asks for a mailing address, email finance@bpdbc.ca and we will send you what they need.
There is no minimum. Sponsors usually set their own, often somewhere around $50 to $250, so check yours.
What your gift supports
We are a small charity in British Columbia supporting people living with borderline personality disorder, and the families and friends alongside them.
Peer support groups. Free, weekly, drop in, with no referral and no waitlist. Between 50 and 60 people attend across our groups each week, in Victoria, the Westshore, New Westminster and online. Family members and supporters are welcome in them too. These groups are run by trained volunteer facilitators, which is why a modest gift goes a long way here: it pays for facilitator training, materials and the cost of keeping a group open rather than for overhead.
DBT skills programs. Dialectical behaviour therapy skills groups, delivered by registered clinicians and heavily subsidised so that cost is not what decides who gets in. Demand runs well ahead of capacity. Roughly 50 people apply for each round of the adult group and 10 places are available. We also run a free 26 week group for adolescents aged 13 to 17 with a component for their caregivers.
An unrestricted gift is the most useful kind. It lets us keep groups running through the gaps between grants, which is where small charities usually lose programs.
If you have already given through a fund
Thank you, and please tell us if you can.
When a grant arrives from a sponsor, what we see is often the sponsor's name rather than yours. We have no way to thank you, keep you updated on what your gift did, or recognise you alongside our other donors unless you let us know.
If you would rather stay anonymous, that is completely fine and we will respect it. You can still email finance@bpdbc.ca and ask us to record the gift as anonymous, which at least tells us a person is there.
Questions?
Email finance@bpdbc.ca. If you are weighing up whether a donor advised fund makes sense for you at all, that is a conversation for your own financial or tax advisor rather than for us. We can only tell you how to direct one here once you have it.