The Finance, Administration and Operations Group for Community Foundations (FAOG) 2026 Annual Conference, held in Salt Lake City from September 20-23, highlighted a fundamental shift in community foundation leadership. The work is becoming more complex, but the answer isn’t simply doing more. It’s building organizations that are more strategic, more resilient and better equipped to adapt.
Here are three key themes from this year’s event.
1. Complexity is multiplying across the portfolio
Portfolios are more sophisticated than ever, with external managers and OCIOs, evolving policies, and rising expectations from boards and committees now the new normal. That complexity doesn’t stop at manager selection. Coordinating an externally managed account program or a slate of alternative investments now touches donor relations, operations, accounting and governance all at once, and results haven’t always matched expectations. At the same time, risk is expanding well beyond the portfolio itself, as cybersecurity, illiquid gifts, regulatory shifts and vendor risk now all fall under the same umbrella. There’s a common thread here. Good outcomes now depend as much on the governance surrounding the portfolio, and the dashboards that make it legible to boards, as on investment selection itself.
2. Governance must keep pace
The investment committee’s job is shifting from routine monitoring to strategy, policy and long-term risk, which raises real questions about composition, education and how committees are evaluated. Judging success by performance against a benchmark alone doesn’t match with a perpetual time horizon and can reward short-term thinking; governance discipline and mission alignment belong in that picture too. AI is forcing a similar shift. The real work isn’t chasing new tools, it’s building the fluency and governance instincts to adopt them responsibly, including asking managers how they use AI and weighing questions of privacy, bias, and transparency. Foundations that get ahead of this will need leadership models built for how fast things are moving, not just new tools bolted onto old ones.
3. Mission belongs in the portfolio, not just the grant budget
Place-based and impact investing put mission alignment into practice. Several foundations are deploying investment assets, not just grant dollars, toward priorities like affordable housing, small business growth, climate resilience and economic inclusion. Contrary to a common misconception, the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA) already offers a path for this kind of investing through Program-Related Assets (PRAs, holdings made primarily to accomplish a charitable purpose, which fall outside UPMIFA’s financial prudence test entirely), distinct from Program-Related Investments (PRIs, below-market loans or investments made to further a charitable purpose) and Mission-Related Investments (MRIs, market-rate investments chosen in part for their alignment with mission), and it doesn’t take new legislation, just the governance to support it. To determine organizational readiness, community foundations need genuine alignment between leadership, governance and mission before they try to scale.
Across every session, it was evident that complexity is not going away, and more effort alone won’t help institutions keep pace. The community foundations that come out ahead will be the ones that invest in governance infrastructure with the same rigor they apply to investment strategy, building clear roles, better tools, and boards equipped to ask the right questions. That is the real work ahead of community foundations.
