It has been a big year for philanthropy policy. The minimum distribution rate for ancillary funds has increased. A new tax deductible giving structure - the Community Charity Trust - has formally arrived, taking structured giving into donor communities it has never been able to reach. And Division 296 has prompted a fresh conversation about where capital goes when it leaves superannuation. At EOFY, those threads converge.
Beyond the tax advantages, this is a particularly good moment for families with genuine charitable intent to ask whether it is time to stop giving casually and start giving deliberately. Not because the fundamentals have changed, but because the available structures just got stronger.
What structured giving actually is
Think about the kinds of people for whom a year-end donation suddenly feels inadequate.
Someone who has just sold a business. A shareholder who has taken a large capital gain. An executive who has received a significant bonus. A family that has recently lost a parent and found themselves thinking differently about what wealth is actually for. A professional in their late fifties who is still earning at a high marginal rate, knows retirement is coming, and wants to bring forward deductions while they can still get full value from them.
What these people share is not just a tax problem. They share an intention - to give generously, to support causes that matter to them, to do something with their wealth beyond accumulating more of it. The tax question is simply the catalyst that makes them ask whether there is a better way.
There is. And for the right family, it is one of the most satisfying financial decisions they will ever make.
A structured giving vehicle is a purpose-built legal container for charitable capital. A donor contributes money and receives an immediate tax deduction. That deduction can be spread over up to five years, which is useful if income is expected to vary and the donor wants to match deductions to the years where they will have most effect. The capital sits in the vehicle, invested tax-free, while grants flow out over time. The donor is not simply giving away a shrinking pool. Properly managed, the capital can continue to support future distributions while meaningful charitable work is funded.
The separation this creates is the point. Commit capital when it is most financially effective. Decide where it goes later, carefully, without a deadline.
And it is also, for many families, the beginning of a conversation that turns out to matter more than the deduction.
Andrew and Sophie Henderson farm merino sheep and dryland crops near Corowa, on the NSW-Victoria border. This financial year they sold a parcel of land and are facing a substantial capital gain. They have talked about giving something to the region for years. This is the moment. Now they need the right structure.
With a private giving fund, they could contribute a significant portion of the sale proceeds this financial year, securing a deduction now when it matters most. The capital is then invested and grants flow out over years - to the local hospital auxiliary, the rural fire brigade, a mental health service operating in the area. They bring their children into the grant decisions each year.
Over time, the Henderson Family Fund becomes part of how the family understands itself. Philanthropy stops being a line item and becomes a practice. In the great intergenerational wealth transfer - trillions of dollars moving between generations over the coming decades - that kind of deliberate handover of values alongside assets is not a small thing.
Until very recently, two main options
There have been two principal vehicles for structured giving in Australia, and they suit different kinds of donors. Both share an important limitation worth understanding from the outset: private and public ancillary funds can only make grants to organisations endorsed by the ATO as DGR Item 1 recipients - a restriction that, as we will see, matters more than it might sound. Pending legislation will rename private and public ancillary funds as private and public giving funds. For ease, I use that terminology here.
A private giving fund is essentially a family's own charitable foundation. The donor sets it up, controls it, and makes all the decisions about where grants go. It carries real administrative weight: there is a trustee structure to establish, an annual audit requirement, and ongoing investment and compliance obligations. Most advisers regard a starting corpus of around $2 million as the level at which those costs make sense relative to what the fund can do.
For families who want a distinct philanthropic identity, a long-term structure they control, and the ability to involve children and grandchildren over decades, it is a powerful option - and for many, that control is not a feature to be weighed against administrative cost. It is the point. A private fund bearing the family name, governed by family trustees, making grants that reflect family values, is itself an act of intergenerational wealth transfer. The structure becomes part of what is handed down.
A public giving fund is a lighter-touch option. Rather than building their own entity, the donor places their capital in a named sub-fund within an existing organisation that handles all the administration, compliance, and governance. The donor can advise on grant-making from the sub-fund, without needing to operate a separate structure themselves. Entry can be as low as $10,000. For someone who wants the benefits of structured giving without the administrative burden of another structure, this is often the more practical place to start.
What has changed: the distribution rate
Both types of giving funds are now required to distribute more. The minimum annual distribution rises to 6% of net assets for both private and public funds - up from 5% and 4% respectively - with a two-year transition for existing funds. Trustees now have the flexibility to average distributions over three years, which helps with larger grants or weaker investment years. For existing funds, the practical question is whether the investment strategy still supports the higher baseline comfortably. For new funds, it is simply the starting point.
The third option: Community Charity trusts and organisations
Now suppose the Hendersons want to support something harder to fund: not a single institution, or even a single cause, but the broader health of a region. They have lived through the drought, fire and flood cycles that shape life in their area and want to back local efforts led by people with deep knowledge of the community.
They want to support flood recovery in Indigo Shire. They care about Indigenous-led land care programs connected to the country they farm. Much of this work is practical, valuable and deeply local. But many of the organisations doing it do not hold DGR Item 1 status.
That is where the problem arises. Private and public giving funds can only make grants to DGR Item 1 recipients. So while the Hendersons have the means to give, and a structure through which to do so tax-effectively, the organisations they most want to support sit outside the rules of both vehicles. In some cases, a giving fund can reach non-DGR organisations indirectly by granting to a DGR-endorsed intermediary that then supports them. But that adds a layer and a cost, and not every intermediary exists for every cause.
The vehicle exists. The intention exists. But the destination does not fit the structure.
This is where Community Charity trusts and organisations change the picture - and why advisers who think they already understand the structured giving landscape should pay attention.
A Community Charity trust can operate in much the same way as a public giving fund. Donors establish named sub-funds, advise the trustee on their giving preferences, and the foundation handles everything else. But it represents a genuinely new DGR category, created specifically to enable place-based and community-embedded giving. The critical difference is grantee flexibility: a community charity trust can grant to organisations that do not hold DGR status at all - provided the grant furthers a purpose consistent with the Community Charity's own charitable objects - and can directly carry out charitable activities itself, which a giving fund cannot. This is not an unlimited discretion, but within that framework the reach extends well beyond where giving funds can go.
In February 2026, the government added 34 organisations to the Community Charity category since it was first established in 2024. Among them is Border Trust, the Community Charity trust for the Albury-Wodonga region, exactly where the Hendersons farm.
Had the Hendersons established a named sub-fund within Border Trust rather than a standalone private giving fund, the deduction would have operated in much the same way. But the structure could have reached the flood recovery group and the Indigenous land care program. Their fund would also sit within a foundation that has been embedded in the region for decades - one with the local knowledge, relationships and institutional memory to keep giving well after the Hendersons themselves are gone.
That is the place-based advantage a Community Charity offers that a giving fund, for all its considerable strengths, cannot replicate: proximity. Giving directed by people who understand the nuances of a community, and the organisations doing the work within it.
Community-based giving is not confined to regional Australia
It would be a mistake to read Community Charity trusts and organisations as a purely regional phenomenon. They span the full geography of Australian giving.
For example, both Sydney Community Foundation and Australian Communities Foundation offer Community Charity trusts that can fund organisations across metropolitan and regional Australia, meaning donors are not limited to DGR-endorsed charities. When bushfires hit Strathbogie in January 2026, ACF helped establish a community-led relief fund within days, directing support to affected households and businesses directly, without waiting for DGR intermediaries. It is an example of what community giving can look like when the geography is national and the infrastructure exists to move quickly when it matters.
The right vehicle depends on three things: control, flexibility, and purpose. A private giving fund gives the family a philanthropic entity of their own - the structure itself becomes part of the legacy. A public giving fund removes that administrative weight while preserving the ability to advise on grants, at a much lower entry point. A Community Charity trust sub-fund goes further still: broader grantee reach, place-based infrastructure, and giving that can reach the organisations closest to the cause. The tax advantages and outcomes across all three are comparable. The differences are in what the giving becomes.
Why this EOFY matters
The Hendersons are not an unusual family. They are representative of a generation of Australians sitting on significant accumulated wealth - in property, in businesses, in superannuation - who have charitable intentions they have never quite organised into a structure.
Division 296 adds another layer to the EOFY conversation for some clients, particularly those already thinking about whether capital should remain in superannuation or be deployed elsewhere. That does not make philanthropy the answer to a superannuation tax problem. But where genuine charitable intent already exists, it may make the timing of structured giving more relevant than it was before.
The tools are better than they were. The higher distribution rate is manageable. And the Community Charity framework has opened up a genuine third option for donors whose giving is rooted in place, community or causes the traditional giving fund structure could not directly reach.
The Hendersons had the intention all along. Most families like them do. The structure is what turns intention into something that outlasts the tax year - and, with the right vehicle, outlasts the family itself.
Rachael Rofe is an estate planning lawyer focused on intergenerational wealth transfer, structured giving and philanthropic planning. She advises families and their advisers on how assets, authority and values move together across life and death.