What’s Your SCCA Legacy?
By Jeff Jacobs | Chairman, SCCA Foundation
What does your SCCA legacy look like? There’s the physical things. A wall of photos. A box of trophies. A collection of patches and pins from corner workers across dozens of Regions. A stack of SportsCar going back decades.
There’s the intangible things. Memories of that first race. That first victory. That first wreck. That near miss. The heroic rescue of a trapped driver. The bench racing after the event. The conversation with a best friend on the long drive home.
What happens to those things when your time here is done? It’s tough to think about. The physical things become something family has to deal with. The intangible things perhaps go with you to whatever is next. But is there something you’ve left that really represents what you want your SCCA legacy to be?
There are more than 1,326 individuals who have been SCCA members for 25 years or more. An amazing 15,222 individuals have been SCCA members for 10 years or more. That represents a lot of people making a serious commitment to the club. You aren’t casual racing fans. SCCA means something significant to you. You’ve likely spent thousands of dollars and many hundreds of hours supporting SCCA events as a driver, worker or volunteer.
You probably have not thought about how you could continue to have a listing impact on the club even after you are no longer able to participate. That’s where the SCCA Foundation and its Legacy Giving program comes in. Legacy giving allows an SCCA member to make an impact that is often greater than what is possible even for the most generous annual donors during their lives. And, legacy giving may provide significant tax advantages for the donor’s estate, while giving the donor control over how the gift is used in a meaningful way.
There are many ways to ensure your SCCA legacy is a lasting one. Most popular and most simple are bequests made in wills. These gifts allow you specify how much you want to give to the nonprofit – whether as a percentage of your estate, a specific dollar amount, stocks, art, cars or property – and how it is used consistent with the Foundation’s mission. Life insurance policies can name the SCCA Foundation as a beneficiary. Members with tax-deferred retirement accounts can make annual required distributions to the Foundation or designate the nonprofit as a beneficiary of the remainder of the account. Non-retirement investment accounts often allow a non-profit to be designated as a beneficiary. These are just some of the ways you can include the SCCA in your estate planning.
The power of legacy giving is evident in the example set by Mark and Wendi Allen in establishing gift of the core funding that founded the Wendi Allen Scholarship. Even as Wendi battled cancer, she was thinking about her SCCA legacy – a legacy that had special meaning to her then and continues to have special meaning to Mark and their twin girls who now compete in SCCA events themselves. Since its inception, 23 women have received scholarships to advance their opportunities to compete in the national autocross program and grow as leaders in the club. Due to their advance planning, Wendi’s legacy wasn’t limited to a few National Champion jackets in a closet – it is today’s women drivers her gift has inspired to SCCA achievements of their own.
So what do you want your SCCA legacy to be? Certainly more than box of dusty trophies. Contact the SCCA Foundation at info@sccafoundation.org or reach out directly to a Foundation Board member to learn more about how you can include the SCCA Foundation in your estate planning, ways you might be able to direct the use of your gift, and how your future gift might inspire others to do the same.