Community Leadership and Donor-Advised Funds: Navigating Logics of Donor Services and Community Leadership in Community Foundations

The growth of donor-advised funds provides an increasingly robust source of philanthropic capital for community foundations, but its impact on their leadership roles remains unknown. To what extent do community foundations maintain community leadership amid increasing pressure to accommodate donor wishes? Drawing on the institutional logics perspective and historical accounts, I theorize that community foundations are hybrids—they operate by combining the field-level logics of donor services and community leadership at varying degrees. Through an exploratory mixed-methods design, I analyzed the text data from annual reports and administrative data from the 990 forms of 482 community foundations. The findings reveal a positive association between the logic of donor services and leadership practices; specifically, foundations with a strong donor service logic, as indicated by the ratio of donor-advised fund (DAF)-funded grants, tend to exhibit a broader range of leadership activities. This study reveals that these logics not only coexist but may also mutually reinforce each other within the community foundation field.