Gift Acceptance Policy

Plain-language summary: Most gifts we simply accept, gratefully. Some we have to look at first, because accepting them could cost us more than they are worth or break a rule we are bound by. A few we decline. This page says which is which, who decides, and what we owe you as a donor — including the right to stay anonymous and the right to your own advice rather than ours.

Purpose
Guiding Principles
Who Decides
What We Accept
What We Review First
What We Do Not Accept
The Limits the Law Puts on Us
Real Property and Other Complex Assets
Restricted Gifts
Your Own Advisers, Not Ours
Anonymity and Acknowledgement
Receipts and Valuation
No Finder’s Fees
Gifts from Insiders
Transparency
Review of This Policy

Purpose

Stimpunks Foundation accepts gifts that support our mission: building mutual aid, access infrastructure, and Neurodivergent-led public education.

This policy exists to protect three things at once — the donor, the Foundation, and the people our money is meant to reach. Most of the time those interests point the same direction and there is nothing to decide. This page is for the times they do not.

It applies to every gift, from any source, in any form.

Guiding Principles

A gift should never hurt the person giving it. We will not accept an irrevocable gift if, under any reasonable set of circumstances, it would jeopardize the donor’s own financial security. Our community includes a great many Disabled people living close to the edge. Generosity is not a reason to look away from that.

A gift should not cost more than it gives. Some assets arrive with debts, taxes, insurance, maintenance, or legal exposure attached. If accepting something would consume more staff time and money than it delivers to our programs, taking it is not stewardship — it is vanity.

A gift does not buy anything. Not a program, not a position, not a say in what we publish, not silence. We are glad to be funded. We are not for sale.

Every gift gets a prompt answer, whatever its size. A five-dollar recurring donation and a five-figure grant get the same courtesy and the same speed. We are a mutual aid organization; we know exactly what it costs some people to give us five dollars.

Who Decides

We are a small foundation with two paid staff. This policy does not invent a development department we do not have.

The Executive Director is told about any gift or bequest that is not a routine donation, and handles acceptance, acknowledgement, and accounting.
The President is accountable to the Board for this policy being followed. Under §7.6 of our Bylaws, payments in the Foundation’s name are signed by the President or the Treasurer.
The Board of Directors decides anything on the review list below, and any exception to this policy.

The Treasurer seat was vacant until 29 September 2026, and the President covered those duties, which put one person on both sides of that line. The Treasurer is now a different person from the President. See Board & Governance.

What We Accept

These need no review. They are simply received, receipted, and put to work:

one-time and recurring cash donations through our payment processor
grants aligned with our values
publicly traded securities, which we ordinarily sell on receipt
in-kind goods and services that directly support our work — tell us about those with the In-Kind Donation Form

What We Review First

None of these are refusals. They are gifts we cannot responsibly say yes to on the spot, because saying yes creates an obligation we have to be able to carry. Each goes to the Board, and where the terms are complex, to counsel:

any gift with a restriction on how it may be used
real property of any kind
an interest in a privately held business, including partnership and LLC interests
cryptocurrency and other illiquid or highly volatile assets
vehicles, equipment, or anything carrying ongoing cost — storage, insurance, maintenance, licensing
life insurance policies, after examining how the policy is funded
bequests and other deferred gifts. We are honoured to be named in a will, and we should say plainly that we do not currently operate a planned giving program. We do not issue charitable gift annuities and we have no staff for charitable remainder trusts. If you intend a deferred gift, tell us early so we can arrange the review it needs rather than discovering it later.
any gift from a person or organization connected to a director or a member of staff — see Gifts from Insiders
any gift arriving without prior contact from us, until we are satisfied that the gift and the manner of giving it are in the donor’s own interest

When capacity is in question

We do not accept a gift where the donor’s capacity to make it is in doubt. This is a protection, not a judgement, and we hold it carefully: we are a Disability organization, and “capacity” has been used against our community for a very long time. It is about a specific decision at a specific moment, and nothing else.

Someone acting under a power of attorney may make a gift on a donor’s behalf only if that power of attorney specifically grants the authority to make charitable gifts, and only where the gift is consistent with the donor’s own giving history and financial situation.

What We Do Not Accept

We decline gifts that:

require us to compromise our mission or community safety
involve discriminatory restrictions, or conditions on who we serve, hire, or platform
are tied to reputational laundering or harmful conditions
demand control over our governance or our voice
would jeopardize our tax-exempt status, or require us to do something our governing documents forbid
would cost more to accept, hold, and dispose of than they are worth to our work

Declining is not an accusation. Sometimes an asset is simply wrong for an organization our size, and the kindest thing we can do is say so early rather than accept it and manage it badly.

The Limits the Law Puts on Us

Some gifts we could not accept even if we wanted to. Article NINTH of our Certificate of Incorporation, adopted in September 2022, binds us — for as long as we are a private foundation — to the excise tax rules of the Internal Revenue Code. Three of them decide what we can be given.

Self-dealing (§4941). A donation from an insider is ordinarily fine — giving us money is not self-dealing. But if a disqualified person gives us property that carries a mortgage or lien, and we take it subject to that debt, the transfer is an act of self-dealing. The rule reaches back ten years: it applies if the property was subject to the debt at any point in the decade before the gift. Self-dealing is prohibited outright, not weighed — no vote by the Board can authorize it. So we cannot accept encumbered property from an insider, full stop. A gift made on a condition that benefits the donor personally — satisfying a pledge they owed elsewhere, for instance — raises the same problem.

Excess business holdings (§4943). We may not hold more than a permitted share of a business enterprise. A gift of a controlling interest in a company would have to be disposed of inside a statutory window, and if it cannot be sold in time the tax falls on us. That is why any privately held business interest goes to the Board first.

Jeopardizing investments (§4944). An asset given to us is not treated as an investment we chose to make — but the decision to keep it is ours, and that decision is judged as our own. This is the practical reason we sell donated securities rather than hold them.

Alongside these, §4942 requires us to distribute income each year. An illiquid asset does not help us meet that obligation, and can make it harder. And §4945 means a restriction that would direct our grantmaking to a named individual is not something we can accept, however sympathetic the case — that is a taxable expenditure, and it is also not how mutual aid works.

These rules change when our conversion to public charity status takes effect. The private foundation excise taxes stop applying and the excess benefit rules of §4958 begin. The sequencing is set out in our Conflict of Interest Policy. Until the reclassification is approved, the rules above are the ones that govern us.

Real Property and Other Complex Assets

We would most likely decline a gift of real estate, and we would rather say that here than let someone plan around a yes we cannot give. We have two paid staff and no capacity to inspect, insure, maintain, or sell property.

If the Board did consider one, every one of these would have to be satisfied first:

a personal inspection of the property
a qualified appraisal meeting IRS substantiation requirements, and agreement with the donor on valuation
an assessment of every carrying cost — debt, property taxes, insurance, association fees, maintenance
a search for other liabilities attaching to the property, including leases, contracts, and easements
the donor’s full undivided interest in the property, including mineral rights — the IRS does not allow a deduction for a gift of a partial interest
an environmental review: where there is a reasonable possibility of contamination, a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment by a licensed consultant, conducted in general conformance with ASTM E1527. Where contamination is substantially likely, we do not accept the property at all
agreement on who bears the costs of transfer — legal fees, commissions, appraisals — which the donor ordinarily carries, or which come out of the sale

Only the Board may approve an exception to any of this. The same standard of care applies to any other asset that arrives with liabilities attached.

Restricted Gifts

If you wish to restrict a gift to a specific purpose, we will confirm in writing whether we can honor that restriction before we accept it.

We look at two things. First, whether the restriction still leaves the gift able to do the good it intends. Second, whether administering it would take more from our staff than the gift brings in — a restriction can be so specific that meeting it costs more than the money is worth.

A restricted gift is a promise. If we cannot keep it, we decline the gift rather than accept it and quietly spend the money elsewhere. Restricted funds are tracked separately and reported in Where the Money Went.

Your Own Advisers, Not Ours

We are not your lawyer and not your accountant, and we will not act like it. For anything beyond an ordinary donation — a bequest, a gift of property, anything with tax consequences you would feel — we will tell you to get your own advice, every time.

We will never draft your will. We are glad to provide standard language your own counsel can use.

Any attorney or accountant we engage represents the Foundation and not you. They will work with your advisers; they do not stand in for them. Saying so plainly is part of the protection.

Anonymity and Acknowledgement

The right to give anonymously is absolute here. We ask permission before naming any donor publicly, and a decision to stay unnamed needs no explanation and is never treated as a lesser kind of giving.

Many people in our community have good reasons not to be publicly associated with a Disability organization — employment, family, immigration status, safety. We take every precaution to protect the privacy of donors and their families. Full details are in our Donor Privacy Policy.

Receipts and Valuation

We provide receipts meeting IRS substantiation requirements for everything we are given.

We do not put a value on anything except cash and publicly traded securities. For any other gift, our receipt describes what we received and says nothing about what it is worth. That is not us being unhelpful — valuing a non-cash gift is the donor’s responsibility and their appraiser’s, and a number from us would be worth nothing to the IRS and could mislead you.

For non-cash gifts over $5,000, we will sign the donee acknowledgement on IRS Form 8283. That signature confirms we received the property. It is not agreement with the appraised value.

No Finder’s Fees

We do not pay anyone for bringing us a donor. No commissions, no finder’s fees, no percentage, no compensation of any kind to a third party for directing a gift our way.

We also keep gift decisions and investment decisions entirely separate, each judged on its own merits. No gift is ever tied to an investment action by the Foundation, and our staff give no endorsement, direct or implied, to any financial product, company, or agent.

Gifts from Insiders

Directors, staff, and their families give to Stimpunks, and we are grateful for it. An ordinary donation from an insider raises nothing.

What needs care is a gift with conditions, a gift of property, or a gift that would return some benefit to the giver. Those go through the disclosure and recusal process in our Conflict of Interest Policy, and while we remain a private foundation they run into the self-dealing rules described above. A director may not vote on the acceptance of their own gift.

Transparency

We use contributions as described in our fundraising materials, and we publish what happened to them: Where the Money Went, our annual reports, and the Transparency Log — which is also where we record it when we have got our own published figures wrong.

A declined gift is recorded with the reason it was declined, so that the decision can be reviewed later by someone who was not in the room.

Review of This Policy

The Board reviews this policy at least annually, and again when our public charity reclassification takes effect — at which point the private foundation limits above are replaced by the excess benefit rules, and this page is rewritten to say so.

We accept gifts as stewardship, not leverage.

Document ID: SF-GOV-GA-2.0
Status: Adopted by the Board of Directors on 29 September 2026
Sources: Certificate of Incorporation, Article NINTH (Stimpunks Foundation, September 2022); Bylaws §7.6; Nonstandard Gift Policy sample, Nonprofit Insurance Alliance Group, rev. 09.0312