Help Transform Lives with a Major Gift to United Way

When you make a donation to United Way, you are making an investment in your community and giving your family, friends, and neighbours a hand up when they need it most. Every dollar of your donation is invested right here in your community to transform local lives and create lasting social change. It’s also rigorously measured for its effectiveness and efficiency, ensuring that together we are driving the most meaningful results and the biggest possible impact.

At United Way all donors are vitally important. Donors with the ability and interest to give at the $25,000 level are considered members of our Philanthropist Circle with its unique benefits. Major donors are influential members of the local Victoria community and serve as inspirational leaders, playing a vital role in helping our most vulnerable citizens overcome poverty and by building stronger communities. They can rely on United Way to ensure their gift is used in the community where it will have significant impact. Or, they can help choose how their gift is used, through the establishment of a named, donor-advised fund.

Major gifts can be cash donations, but gifts of securities also make great sense at this level, considering the special tax benefit these provide for donors.

Donor-Advised Funds

Now you can create a donor-advised fund with United Way that you can name (i.e. after you, a loved one, or your organization). You help direct how your fund will support social services in the community. You can also specify a portion for other types of charities you identify, so all your donation needs and wishes are covered in one fund.

Options exist for your fund to be fully utilized within a set number of years, or to be invested (endowed) in perpetuity. If fully-endowed, a portion of funds earned each year from investment are used to help in the community.

If you are already creating a donor-advised fund with your financial/investment firm or a community foundation, you can make United Way Greater Victoria a beneficiary.

For more information on options available please request our booklet on donor-advised funds or view it here.

Gifts of Securities

Giving appreciated securities is one of the most cost effective and tax-effective ways to make a major impact on the issues you care about most.

In order to make a direct donation of securities please request a copy of our special form, or download it here.

Examples of the lives you can change through a major gift

For the generous gift of $5,000, you will:

Provide 500 hot lunches for children at a community school or a year of counselling for 2 youth.

For the generous gift of $10,000, you will:

Provide 200 youths living on the streets find a safe place to stay OR 200 seniors with a healthy food hamper.

For the generous gift of $25,000, you will:

Send 70 youths with disabilities to summer camp with support aides OR fund harm reduction and education programs about opioid use to middle – and high-school students and their parents.

The Purkis Family Fund

For Dr. Mary Ellen Purkis, what you give is what you get out of life – and it truly impacts your state of health and well-being.

“I am fortunate to have had a strong, supportive family who instilled the values of volunteering in me through their own actions –arising out of a prairie spirit,” says Dr. Purkis.

Mary Ellen has vivid, happy memories of volunteer commitments going back to her childhood: her mother would volunteer on the weekends to make hot chocolate for the local community centre where her father helped to maintain the ice rink for winter sports. The tradition of volunteering continues in her family.

Dr. Mary Ellen Purkis has been involved with United Way since the mid-1990s where she was a key participant in the reorganization of United Way’s funding process. Since 2012, she has been a Board member, Chair, and most recently Past Chair. Since 1993 she has been with the University of Victoria, as Professor of Nursing, Director of the School of Nursing, and Dean of the Faculty of Human and Social Development. Her research and community leadership has focused on advocating for the homeless, the elderly and for Indigenous peoples.

A generous supporter of United Way since 1995, in 2018, she created a Donor Advised Fund to support her family’s passion for volunteerism. The fund is open to donations from other interested donors and allocated annually to United Way community partners, particularly towards building capacity throughout the social services sector.