As you gear up for the holidays and build your year-end checklist, the community foundation is here for all of your charitable giving “to do’s.” Whether you’ve been a fundholder at the community foundation for years, or you’ve just established a fund or are considering doing so, our team can help.
We understand that philanthropy is an important part of your family's traditions and values. You want to involve your siblings, partner, children and grandchildren in charitable giving. Not only do you want to deepen intergenerational connections and values, but you also are committed to leaving a family legacy in the community.
You can do both! The community foundation helps you deepen family connections through philanthropy and also helps you develop a charitable giving plan to leave a lasting community legacy. Our tools and services are designed to make your family’s charitable giving journey enjoyable and rewarding as you support the causes you love.
In this issue, we’re focusing on family philanthropy. By popular demand, we’re providing a reading list that may help you and your family round out your conversations about charitable giving. At the very least, we hope our book recommendations will validate all the good you are already doing. Perhaps a book or two will even land on your gift list this year–both to and from!
Enjoy!
Your Community Foundation
Level up family philanthropy at any age with these books
Because immediate families often gather for the holidays—and especially if adult children living away are visiting—this time of year lends itself to conversations about personal or family finances, generosity and especially philanthropy. Not to steal away the joy of the season, but these discussions, either comprehensive or brief, can pay dividends, so to speak, for 2023 and even decades beyond.
Timely conversation starters can include:
--Were 2022 savings goals reached?
--Are employer-provided benefits being fully matched or used?
--How to make the most of a down year in the market?
--What effects are inflation having?
--And last but not least, against that overall financial backdrop, what causes are you most passionate about and want to support or continue supporting?
For some, a big-picture conversation about family philanthropy may be in order.
For generations, community foundations have served families’ formal needs for philanthropy. And indeed, it is generational wealth—the passing of the torch—that often provides lasting sustenance to a preferred cause or organization.
In Putting Wealth to Work, author Joel L. Fleishman writes, “Where the genes and values of founding individuals or families are strong enough, families can not only endure but can blossom in pursuing a kind of philanthropy that adapts well to changing time while preserving the essential focus of their founders.” Referring to the rewards and fulfillment of family investment, he quotes the late Ford Foundation officer Paul Yivisaker as saying, “There is something distinctive and precious about family foundations that suggests they should remain as they are: a unique opportunity for families to make and leave their mark on society around them, to share with others the fortune they have enjoyed and the creative energies they so often possess.”
Family finance conversations—be they about budgeting or philanthropy—can occur anytime, and the younger the better to build a knowledge base. Accordingly, we offer a list of books suitable for all age ranges, and we've included the published descriptions and a few reviews. We hope you and your family will discover new reading material to feed the lifelong learning and giving process.
Raising Charitable Children by Carol Weisman
Giving is the necessary counterbalance to getting, according to Carol Weisman, MSW, CSP, MOM. Otherwise, she says, most children will grow up thinking only of themselves. This realization is what led her to write Raising Charitable Children, where she shares real-life stories collected from all over the world of how parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, scout leaders, friends, next door neighbors, and her own family have either initiated or supported ways to teach children how to give back to those in need.
The Family Philanthropy Navigator offers an easy-to-use, step-by-step inspirational guide for new and legacy philanthropic families to initiate or enhance their giving journey. The book speaks to the highly rewarding ways that individuals and families can make a difference in a rapidly changing world. Steps cited to ensure meaningful and impactful giving include:
Understanding the importance of philanthropy as an integral part of your family enterprise or ecosystem.
Exploring the motivation, focus and ambitions of your giving.
Selecting the people and organizations you wish to partner with.
Deciding on resources, structures and processes you need to achieve impact.
Learning from the stories of active philanthropists to inspire and inform your giving.
Preparing thoroughly to begin your own philanthropic journey or to change the direction of your giving.
Creating Change Through Family Philanthropy: The Next Generation
This book explains how young people can use privilege to better society. Based on the authors’ experiences with Resource Generation, a national nonprofit working with wealthy young progressives, the book makes the case for financially addressing urgent social and economic issues. It frames controversial topics from power dynamics to grants payout in an accessible way, offering next-generation readers the tools they need to transform their funds. Drawing on more than 40 interviews, this is an essential guide for both young philanthropists and anyone working with wealthy families interested in learning a point of view on ethical giving.
Generation Impact: How Next Gen Donors Are Revolutionizing Giving
Released in 2017 and since updated, authors and philanthropy experts Sharan Goldseker and Michael Moody provide a contemporary view of how today's donors are measuring successful giving through impact. Going beyond prior generations’ knack of giving for the sake of generosity or recognition, the authors focus on intergenerational giving and offer a series of best practices for families including:
Starting discussions early in the next generation’s life.
Embracing the idea of a multigenerational family team.
Showing the impact of the family’s giving.
Talking about each generation’s values to find ones to be shared.
Helping next gen donors find their place in their family’s legacy of giving.
A Kid’s Guide to Giving by Freddi Zeiler
A comprehensive guide to giving money, volunteering, donating goods, and organizing charity events, this book includes listings of charitable organizations in three categories—People, Animals, and Environment—that make it easy for kids to get involved in the charities that mean the most to them and make a difference in the world.
Wealth in Families by Charles W. Collier
"Charles W. Collier, a Harvard University fundraiser, offers a philosophical look at the meaning and purpose of wealth, in the hope of helping readers–especially those with substantial financial means–to explore family issues, shape their philanthropy, and make wise giving decisions. Wealth in Families builds on the premise that wealth is not just financial–it's also defined in human, intellectual, and social dimensions."
- The Chronicle of Philanthropy
"This book is a small treasure, exploring several different perspectives on the deeper meaning and use of family wealth. Many investment advisers have purchased copies of this book for their clients. It is a resource both for individual families that are looking at what to do with their wealth and for family advisers who want to work better with their clients."
- Dennis T. Jaffe, Saybrook Graduate School
Strangers in Paradise: How Families Adopt to Wealth Across Generations
Surprising to many, wealthy people often come from middle-class or working-class backgrounds. Born and raised in modest economic circumstances, they find themselves as adults in the wonderful but unfamiliar world of wealth, like immigrants to a new land. Whether their wealth came from spending long careers at companies with generous savings plans or their own successful entrepreneurial exits, the adjustment is often harder than they anticipate. Yet awaiting wealth’s newcomers is an even more daunting task: how to raise children and grandchildren successfully in the family’s new world of affluence. Strangers in Paradise takes an innovative approach to the challenges facing wealth’s “immigrants and natives.” Combining clear reasoning with real-world stories, the book outlines for the first time how the key process for families of wealth—like all immigrant families—is adaptation.
In the season of giving, teaching or learning how to give may be the best gift of all. The team at the community foundation is here to help you and your family make the most out of your charitable giving to support the causes you love and build even stronger ties across family generations.
The gift of giving, community foundation style
The community foundation can work with you to create and package a gift of a community foundation fund, pre-established and pre-funded, personalized in the name of your gift recipient. Your gift recipient can be a partner, child, grandchild, colleague, or friend. Frequently taking the form of a donor-advised fund, a gift of a fund empowers the recipient to experience the benefits of working with the community foundation to support their favorite causes.
Whether you are a current fundholder at the community foundation or just considering it, the team at the community foundation can help you create a gift fund from soup to nuts, including granting the recipient online access to recommend grants from their new fund. You can literally put a bow on the carefully rolled up fund document, sign a card listing the login URL and credentials to view the fund online, and present the package to the child, grandchild, friend or colleague as a gift. Both giver and receiver will love the experience.
When the recipient is a child or grandchild, educational opportunities are a natural follow up. For example, you can work with the community foundation to find resources on the community foundation’s website and structure a family giving session over Zoom where participants learn the basics of charitable giving and are introduced to key issues facing communities in our region and across the country. This type of experience helps the family’s values stay intact across generations.
We look forward to hearing from you soon about creating a gift of giving for someone you love!
Four year-end reminders
Don’t forget about stock gifts
Even with late November's rally, 2022’s rough stock market may still be a concern for some. Chances are, though, that not all of your holdings have had an unusually down year. Gifts of appreciated stock to your donor-advised fund or other type of fund at the community foundation is still one of the most tax-savvy ways to support your favorite charitable causes because capital gains tax can be avoided on the appreciated stock.
If you are over 70 ½, consider a Qualified Charitable Distribution
A Qualified Charitable Distribution (“QCD”) is a very smart way to support charitable causes. If you are over the age of 70 ½, you can direct up to $100,000 from your IRA to certain charities, including a field-of-interest, unrestricted, or scholarship fund at the community foundation. If you are over the age of 72, QCDs count toward your Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) for the year. That means you avoid income tax on the distributed funds. Our team can work with you and your advisors to go over the rules for QCDs and evaluate whether the QCD is a good fit for you.
Use your donor-advised fund to do as much good as possible
The team at the community foundation can help you maximize your already-established donor-advised fund, or set up a donor-advised fund if you are not yet a community foundation fundholder. Please reach out to the community foundation to learn more about how “bunching” at year end can maximize the tax benefits of your donor-advised fund, and at the same time ensure that nonprofits are supported as demands on their missions continue to grow in choppy economic waters. Grantmaking from donor-advised funds continues to rise, especially as donors catch on to the ways a donor-advised fund can help with tax planning and, importantly, keep your giving levels consistent even in your lower income years.
Watch the calendar
An important note: Please reach out to our team to find out when certain transactions must occur to be completed during this tax year, including checks to a fund at the community foundation which must be postmarked or hand-delivered no later than December 31. Gifts of marketable securities also need to be fully transferred by December 31, so please contact us in plenty of time for our team to process and receive the transfer.