Profiles in Family Philanthropy

Each month, Family Giving News celebrates the legacies and philanthropic contributions of family philanthropists all over the world by highlighting the story of one philanthropic donor or family in "Profiles in Family Philanthropy."

Read National Center President Virginia Esposito's Introduction to "Profiles in Family Philanthropy."

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Profiles 2008

SEPTEMBER 2008:  The Tow Foundation

When Leonard and Claire Tow created the Tow Foundation in 1988, it was like many other family foundations that base their grantmaking programs on the interests of the trustees. But by the late 1990s that had changed. Seeking funding gaps in their home states, the trustees began to focus collectively in an area about which no family members were particularly knowledgeable: juvenile justice.

Today, the foundation’s staff members commit more than 50 percent of their time to advocacy and collaboration with public and private partners to improving the lives of children involved in or at risk of involvement in the Connecticut juvenile justice system.

With support from the foundation’s ally and partner, the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance (which the foundation co-founded in 2001), this strategic approach led to the 2007 passage of a state law that will raise the age at which courts treat a youth as an adult from 16 to 18. Currently, Connecticut is one of only three states in the nation that treats 16- and 17-year olds as adults, increasing the odds that these youths will be life-time criminals.

“When a private foundation steps into the public policy arena, it can really make a difference,” says Emily Tow Jackson, executive director of the Tow Foundation and the Tows’ daughter. This philosophy is what earned the Tow Foundation a 2008 Critical Impact Award from the Council on Foundations.

“This wasn’t anybody’s pet project,” Jackson explains. “We got excited about potentially having a deeper impact on the lives of a population of youth very few had sympathy for and in whom few foundations were invested in helping. And when you start seeing legislative change happen because of what you do, it’s pretty amazing.”

Jackson credits her parents for inspiring the entrepreneurial, risk-taking nature of the foundation.

“They are a real American Dream story, true pioneers in their families,” says Jackson. “They came from very humble beginnings and built a very successful business, Century Communications, in the early 1970s before cable television was a mainstream business.”

The Tows’ success in cable television and other ventures prompted an interest in philanthropy, particularly in the performing arts, higher education, and medical research.

In the arts, their work is centered mostly around new, young playwrights, artists, and musicians. In higher education, they support, among other things, public service internships to encourage the involvement of young, bright students in the nonprofit sector.

In medicine, the Tow Foundation’s focus has been on new and cutting-edge research that could not happen without private investments. They quickly discovered that even a little seed money—when granted at the right time in the right way—could leverage more public dollars to impact a greater number of patients.

“We identified some niche strategies on how to fund individual doctors’ research without funding big institutions,” says Jackson. In one instance, a doctor’s research had stalled for lack of the statistical analysis that would allow his team to apply for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. A grant from the Tows changed that.

After starting the Leonard and Claire Tow Foundation in 1988, her parents “very quickly brought the children onto the board and we changed the name to the Tow Foundation to reflect the whole family,” says Jackson. “In the beginning, we still largely funded a few medical research projects and other personal interests of the board.”

In 1994, the Tows came to Jackson with a request.

“‘We’re going to be putting more money into the foundation,” ‘they said,’ “and we’d like you to consider taking this on as a professional commitment,’” Jackson explains. “I didn’t have any training. I didn’t know anything about philanthropy as an industry or sector. I didn’t know anything about running a foundation—but I said, ‘Okay. I’ll give it a try.’”

At the time, Jackson had worked in the cable television industry and in graphic design, and was teaching outdoor education in New Zealand. To prepare for the new responsibility, she moved back to New York and immersed herself in the field, doing research at the Foundation Center, as well as joining the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers and the Council on Foundations.

“The learning curve was very steep,” she says. “I just called foundation executives in New York and asked if they would be willing to meet with me and share how they run their foundation. Not once did anyone refuse, and I got amazing insight into how different foundations do business and form their grantmaking strategies. I went to the Council on Foundations’ Family Foundation Conference in 1995 in San Antonio. [National Center Founder and President] Ginny Esposito [then director of the Council’s family philanthropy program] was one of the first people I met in the field. I found I was not alone, and met other people who had shaped their careers around running family foundations. That was really my introduction to philanthropy as a field.”

It was through these calls and meetings that Jackson began thinking about a more strategic approach.

As with their medical research efforts, the Tows looked for what was holding grantees back. One grantee pointed to their program for paroled kids. They had a state grant to keep clients involved for the next four months. They felt that if they could keep the program going for 12 months, then they could show their services were really helping court-involved youths turn their lives around and making this behavior change stick. Sure enough, with the Tow Foundation’s help, the program showed success, prompting more funding from state agencies.

The foundation’s board then convened a series of roundtable discussions with stakeholders in Connecticut’s juvenile justice field, asking questions and looking for gaps in funding and areas where improvements could be made. Insisting “no child is beyond help,” the foundation embarked on a program of juvenile justice reform, with goals that included fewer arrests and court referrals; fewer youth in detention and residential placement; improved family support; increased community-based mental health, academic, work-readiness, life skills and recreational services, and less punitive school and community practices.

The Tow Foundation has moved from funding only direct service program grants to supporting general operating expenses and advocacy initiatives as part of their system reform strategy. They now require all their grantees to engage in some form of advocacy on behalf of their clients, services and mission.

“This requirement —lobbying on behalf of their grantees, speaking with local government officials, testifying at legislative hearings – is essential if we are going to work together to make significant change happen in this field,” says Jackson. “The advocacy grants are an essential key to our success. Being a founding member and the first funder of the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance was the single most important grant we ever made.”
Tow and its foundation and nonprofit allies, both regionally and nationally, are part of a larger movement, as Jackson puts it, “to move money from the deep end of the justice system (incarceration) to the front end (prevention and early intervention).”

Even a little money invested in the right way can make a huge difference in the lives of others. The Tow Foundation’s 2007 Juvenile Justice Initiative brochure, an advocacy tool, weighs the economic and societal costs of continuing to pay for failure: an effective after-school program costs $3,800 per youth compared with $119,000 a year for one juvenile detention bed. And the cost of a high-risk youth’s life of crime is $3.8 million while a college graduate will contribute $1 million in taxes over a lifetime.

“The difference we are making is what is generating excitement on our board. For our foundation, removing everyone’s personal passion was key,” says Jackson. “The success of the shared grantmaking, building expertise in an area together, and really seeing the impact of our investments is what gets my board fired up.”

That isn’t to say that board members do not still pursue their own charitable interests. For instance, concern for the state of mainstream journalism prompted Leonard Tow to award two challenge grants totaling $8 million to Columbia University and the City University of New York to enhance the teaching and research of interactive journalism and new media with the goal of creating a population of journalists that will provide balanced news and information to future technologically savvy generations.

“What unites it all, though—the general operating support, the grants to hospitals, universities, theaters, agencies— is the thinking behind it: being strategic and innovative for the greatest good and the greatest human gain,” says Jackson. “We are determined to make a difference together, as a family.”

For more information on the Tow Foundation and its work, visit its website.

AUGUST 2008

Profiles in Family Philanthropy takes a break this August.  We will return in September with more profiles of inspiring giving families.

JULY 2008:  The Lawrence Welk Family Foundation

A few summers ago, the board of the Lawrence Welk Family Foundation issued a challenge to young family members. Gathered at a family-owned resort in San Diego for the family’s annual meeting, the fourth generation of Welk family members was told about a local shelter for homeless families. The shelter hosted a preschool and therapeutic learning center that needed a new air conditioner. It would cost around $1,000, and the children, ages four to 14, were going to help. The children went out in teams throughout the resort raising funds by selling doughnuts.

“They were really invested in it,” says Lisa Parker, the foundation’s President. “There was no way they were leaving without raising this money, and they did it.”

When the children heard that they had not only succeeded but that they had raised enough money for two units and the family board was going to match the funds they had raised, Parker says, “You could have heard the hollering, the cheering, the excitement all the way in DC.”

It is through activities like these that the Welk Family Foundation continues the legacy of giving begun in 1960 by musician and entertainer Lawrence Welk. His daughter, Shirley Fredricks, became the foundation’s president in 1980, and quickly established one of the nation’s first next generation boards in 1983. For Shirley, it was an obvious way to involve the family.

In 1997, Shirley stepped aside to allow one of the next generation board members to assume leadership. Lisa, Shirley’s daughter, became president. Shirley became Vice Chair. This year, the $1 million family foundation re-established the Junior Board for a new generation of potential family philanthropists, now ages 2-17.

“I can hardly believe it, but here we are,” says Parker, attributing their successful successions to innovative encouragement, savvy structure, and thoughtful celebration of their family’s history.

Welk himself created the foundation in 1960. The success of his show attracted numerous requests for assistance, and the good-hearted, thrifty musician, who grew up a poor farmer in Strasburg, North Dakota, created the charity to handle them. It was certainly tax advantageous for the family, Shirley admits, but Welk had something else in mind.

“My parents were very kind,” she says. “They just grew up in a society where people helped each other.”

The charity was managed by the Welk Group, which handled the family's business interests.  The foundation is still funded by the company, which includes the Welk Music Group, the Welk Resort Group, and the Lawrence Welk Show.  Upon Welk’s retirement, Shirley’s brother, Lawrence Welk, Jr., took up leadership of the family business and asked Shirley to take on the foundation. She took up the twin challenge of involving family and focusing the foundation, which at the time was receiving more than 300 grant requests a week.

“We weren’t really having any impact,” Shirley says. “We were giving $100 here and $1,000 there. It was a shotgun approach.”

The trustees created a flexible mission—supporting families in poverty in Southern California—that would give structure and focus to the family’s giving while allowing a new generation to adapt the vehicle to new needs.

It was to the younger generation that the foundation turned next when they launched a next generation board in 1983.

“You have to credit my mother for that,” Lisa says. “She launched that with the real intention of involving all of us in the philanthropy.”

Ranging in age from 14-24, the third-generation Welk family members were included in the family board meetings and site visits but weren’t given voting power. They could review proposals and participate in discussions but not participate in the final vote.

However, third-generation family members then met in breakout sessions to distribute 10 percent of the grantmaking budget. They could vote to further fund the senior board’s choices, fund some organizations the board had not, or present their own proposals.

“They had to lobby each other and decide together how the money would be distributed,” Shirley says.

“One benefit for all of us was learning about the decisions and the jargon that comes with board service,” says Lisa. “It prepared us for board service in other areas of our lives as we became adults.”

The opportunity to make their own proposals allowed next generation board members to explore programs outside the grantmaking guidelines. They contributed to organizations fighting AIDS in the early 80s. The grants were small, but the young board members were proud to be a part of the nonprofits’ work.

“The foundation didn’t have a focus on environmental issues,” says Lisa, so next generation members found local organizations like Santa Monica’s Heal the Bay. “It’s one we’re particularly proud of because Heal the Bay has become a force to be reckoned with.”

Site visits proved a significant source of inspiration.

“I think the most important thing was taking them on site visits,” says Shirley. “They just didn’t know the nonprofit world. When they went on site visits, they were astonished and very impressed.”

The youngsters quickly took to the joys of giving.

“I had to be careful because they were coming back to our meetings and becoming extremely passionate advocates for organizations the senior board might or might not be funding,” Shirley says.

By 1997, the young philanthropists were all grown up.

“We thought, ‘Why doesn’t everybody just become a board member?’” Lisa says. “In our naïveté, we went with that. That worked for a while, but it was tough finding a time to meet. We were in that phase of life where we’re in medical school, starting families, and traveling.”

Shirley stepped aside and Lisa became president that same year. Shirley recalls that the transition, like creating the next generation board, seemed obvious and felt easy.

“I had a rich personal life,” she says. “I had a husband. I had five children. I have ten grandchildren now. I’m interested in arts, politics, history, archaeology. I could have walked away and had a wonderful life without the foundation. It was easy for me to step aside.”

“For a time, I didn’t even go to the meetings,” she recalls. “I wanted them to get their sea legs.”

Over the next few years, the board anticipated the potential problems of a larger, more involved family and created the policies to address them. The board created classes of board members serving three-year terms, staggering the classes’ terms of service so the board wouldn’t be entirely replaced in a given year. The board’s size was limited. Seven to nine board members would serve at any one time. Later, the board was opened to spouses who brought new insight and enthusiasm, but the foundation created rules in advance about what would happen in the event of death or divorce. The board required the participation of representatives from each of the three branches of the family and a certain number of lineal descendants to encourage and preserve family presence.

This year, the foundation welcomed the fourth generation to the next generation board. The members decided to distribute their $3,000 allotment equally between the Cambodian Children’s Fund, Right to Play, and a Romanian orphanage—the idea of one grandchild whose best friend was adopted from Romania.

When told they could break the amounts up, and give, for example, $500 to one, and then more to another, the children objected.

“They said, ‘Oh, that wouldn’t be fair,’” says Shirley, who facilitated the session.

To serve on the next generation board, family members technically have to be at least ten years old, but enterprising seven-year-olds have been known to be allowed in. At age 5, fourth-generation members can have their charitable gifts matched by the foundation. Many young family members donate part of their allowance to charity or volunteer with nonprofits.

“If they present their work at our family meeting, our foundation will make a small contribution—$100—to that organization,” says Lisa.

One 7-year-old family member recently celebrated a birthday and asked friends to bring gifts for children at the local children’s hospital instead of for her. Lisa’s son gave his Christmas money to Marin Search and Rescue. He was invited to meet the team leader who praised his philanthropy and showed him slides of the team’s rescues.

One grandchild, age 13, learned in school about Invisible Children and the plight of Ugandan child soldiers. While major hostilities have ceased, he learned, the peace is tenuous, and many in northern Uganda still live in IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps.  The young man wanted to do something. In addition to successfully securing matching funds from the family foundation, he went to his father’s Rotary Club to raise more money, and has since spoken at churches, synagogues, and other service groups to raise awareness.

“It’s about doing it in a natural, organic way,” says Shirley. “It’s not parents and grandparents saying what they need to do. We’re saying, ‘Go into your communities, and find out what you care about.’ They’re discovering the organizations they love, and funding them.”

Lisa’s cousin recently adopted a child from China. When family members asked the adoption agency what might be done for other children, they learned about a young boy with a cleft palate. Change jars with a picture of the young man on them were distributed to family members. The effort was infectious. Teenage friends of the family were inspired to donate their allowances to the jar. Board members personally chipped in.

“We came together with much fanfare at the annual meeting and counted all this change,” says Lisa.

Ultimately, the family raised more than $7,000--enough to help six additional children.

Whether they ascend to leadership roles in the foundation as Lisa did, or pursue service opportunities elsewhere, the experience and training in philanthropy has been important.

“As a mother, I’m used to encouraging kids and very happy to see that they find their destiny and fulfill it,” says Shirley. “To me, that’s a complete joy. Why wouldn’t I do that with the foundation? They need to know very early that they can impact their communities. There’s a power within them that they need to discover.”

JUNE 2008:  The Tecovas Foundation

A family foundation writes a new chapter of the family legacy after the deaths of its generous founder and two family trustees.

“I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, went to Kent State University, and majored in history and political science,” says 25-year-old Mary Galeti, Vice Chair of the $11-million Tecovas Foundation. “My focus ended up being ‘revolution in neocolonialist Europe.’”

“So that totally set me up for philanthropy,” she says.

The Tecovas Foundation was created in 1998 by Galeti’s grandmother, philanthropist Caroline Bush Emeny, with a single purpose: to establish the Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts in Amarillo, Texas.

“She wanted to build a performing arts center as her lasting legacy,” says Galeti. “She always thought the arts were an easily overlooked means to growth and development.”

Amarillo had been a home to the family since Galeti’s great-grandfather worked with Joseph Glidden to patent barbed wire and, in 1881, helped create the Frying Pan Ranch outside Amarillo to boost publicity for his invention. In 1898, Glidden passed the land on to his son-in-law William Henry Bush. The ranch included the freshwater Tecovas Spring, which Emeny, Bush’s daughter, eventually took for her foundation’s name.

In 1998, Emeny made a multimillion-dollar gift to begin building the center for the performing arts. The amount is still undisclosed but is reputed to be the largest charitable gift in Amarillo history. Emeny, and her daughter Mary then spearheaded a multi-million dollar fundraising campaign for the center. Sadly, Emeny died in 2001, five years before the center opened its doors with a performance hall that bears her name.

The other part of Emeny’s legacy—the Tecovas Foundation—was thus in the hands of her children and grandchildren. Unfortunately, tragedy soon struck again, when the family lost both Galeti’s mother Caroline Emeny Taylor and aunt Ruth Emeny in 2004.

“Because the foundation was created for a singular purpose, there was a huge sense of ‘what do we do now?’” says Galeti.

“We went from having $750,000 to having about $11 million in the course of a few years,” she remembers. “We had to give away large amounts of money, and we had no infrastructure, no training to do that.  I joined the board when I was 18 in 2000. The rest of my cousins followed shortly after. It is now four twenty-somethings, my stepdad Alex Taylor and my aunt Mary Emeny.”

“We thought, ‘Should we take on another large goal? Or should we hang on to it and think about it differently?’” Galeti remembers. “The general feeling was that we were too young to waste the opportunity to have a lasting impact over the long-term.”

The young board took on the task of writing the next chapters of the family’s philanthropic history, making commitments to the family’s home cities of Amarillo, Texas and Cleveland, Ohio, as well as a number of international organizations.

“My grandmother grew up in Chicago and Amarillo,” explains Galeti. “My grandfather grew up in Salem, outside of Cleveland, where they settled. My aunt Mary took her family to Amarillo. My family stayed in Cleveland.”

“We try to strike a balance in supporting the two cities in the different ways they seem to need our support,” says Galeti. “We’re more likely to invest in economic development and food banks in Cleveland, and in education and after-school programs in Amarillo.”

“We also do some international work, a particular interest of my aunt and cousins,” she says. “Most of the international work that we do is about integrating the global economy.”

Galeti understands the maxim “give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”

“But you don’t need to teach people how to fish,” Galeti explains. “They know how to fish. The problem is the barbed wire around the lake.”
The Hunger Project, which takes a bottom-up approach to empowering women and men to end their own hunger, and the Women’s Trade and Finance Council, which seeks to influence trade policy to foster women’s inclusion, are two grantees that illustrate the Tecovas approach.

“We’re hoping for more boots on the ground to end hunger and encourage trade and for change in policy at the top to integrate that trade into the global economy,” says Galeti. “We’re pretty excited about the direction it’s taking.”

“We’re still feeling our way through the process,” Galeti acknowledges. That’s why she attended a symposium on family philanthropy the National Center held in Cleveland earlier this year.

“It was good to hear that others were having the same discussions we were, that others had the same insecurities and were butting heads the same way.”

Like many family foundations, Tecovas grapples with the challenges of creating strategy and focus amid the sometimes tumultuous dynamics of family.

“We’re all so young, and our interests are constantly changing,” says Galeti, pointing to the foundation’s reluctance to set up too much structure. “On the other hand, without any structure or focus, it feels like we’re not being as effective as we can be. It seems irresponsible to not to be as effective, as strategic as possible.”

“It’s a conflict of vision, and I’m not sure who’s right,” Galeti says. “We all have very different leadership styles, which I think is ultimately good for an organization but sometimes difficult.”

Like any family, it can be tough to get everyone on the same page, especially when it’s hard enough just to get everyone into the same state.

“One cousin just graduated, the other’s in med school, people are thinking about having children—we’re all over the place,” Galeti says. “Getting everybody in one state at the same time to sit down, focus, and really dedicate the energy to it is really hard. We try to meet in person once or twice a year for all kinds of family business, including the foundation.”

The effort, as many giving families soon discover, is certainly worth it. Caroline Bush Emeny’s legacy and that of her daughters can be heard in the Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts and in the good-natured teasing of board members who love to interrupt each other. It can be seen in a family’s common commitment to cutting through the red tape and barbed wire that keeps people in need and in a new generation of philanthropic leaders at the Tecovas Foundation.

“Family philanthropy is more than writing checks and site visits,” says Galeti. “It’s about volunteering, and finding the intangible ways of supporting your community. It’s more than buying a table at the benefit. It’s about offering to write a letter of support. It’s about reaching out to friends. It’s about being an active member of the community. It’s about being a leader.”
 

MAY 2008:  The Butler Family Fund

Inspired by a vision of “a world where being low-income does not mean having to choose between housing and food, and where everyone can have faith in our system of justice,” the $11-million, Washington, DC-based Butler Family Fund is an important advocate in the realms of homelessness and criminal justice reform. It awards $800,000 in grants every year to organizations from California to London.

Spun off from the larger J.E. & Z.B. Butler Foundation in New York, the Butler Family Fund was created in 1992 with an asset base of $10 million. The seven nieces and nephews of Jack and Zella Butler established two program areas: homelessness and at-risk youth. By 2001, concerned that a lack of focus was hindering the fund’s effectiveness, the fund moved away from funding at-risk youth and began a program of criminal justice reform, including death penalty reform, juvenile justice, and drug policy reform.

As the fund’s award-winning 2004 report The Butler Family Fund: The First Ten Years notes, “Board members walk a fine line between focusing on the greater community’s needs and fostering a constructive working atmosphere among themselves.” One way the fund develops that atmosphere is through its program of board development.

In 2007, the fund successfully turned control over to the younger, second-generation family members, who had been serving rotating three-year terms on the board in anticipation of one day taking the reins.

More recently, though, the fund has undertaken an “exchange program” for trustees. Second-generation board members looking to expand on their training within the fund began to seek opportunities to learn from other family foundations.

“One of us had the idea to start visiting other foundations,” says Martha Toll, the fund’s long-time executive director. “We said, ‘Why not learn what others are doing?’ So over the last year, we’ve been arranging for our board members to attend other foundations’ board meetings.”

Trustees found foundations in their own backyards and brought their learning to the Butler Family Fund’s twice-a-year meetings. Board President Eve Wildrick, based in Philadelphia, attended meetings of the Philadelphia Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, and the Needmor Fund. Vice President Jennifer Gravin, based in California, met up with the Durfee Foundation in Los Angeles. Trustee Lisa Siegel visited with the staff of the Meadows Foundation in Dallas. Trustee Rebecca Morrison visited the New York Foundation.

“I was surprised at just how valuable the experience was for us, and how very open [the other foundations] were,” says Toll. The trustees’ visits pushed members to think more broadly about program and strategy.

“As a result, we don’t spend as much time talking about specific grant applications. We look more at the broader issues of policy and education,” she says. “We do longer site visits, for example. We’ve always done these things, but we’re spending more time with them now.”

As a passionate family grantmaker, the Butler Family Fund has gained much from these exchanges with other funders.

“The staff educates the board, and the board educates the staff—we have that circle,” Toll says. “But this is about family foundations teaching each other.”

For more information about the Butler Family Fund and its work, visit its web site.

If you’re a family foundation trustee and would like to attend a family foundation board or committee meeting, or if you are interested in hosting a fellow trustee, contact Kevin Laskowski at the National Center for Family Philanthropy at 202.293.3424.

APRIL 2008:  The Roy A. Hunt Foundation

Like many family foundations of its size and age, the Roy A. Hunt Foundation of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania faces a number of challenges: carrying on an important charitable legacy while engaging a growing geographically dispersed family, and balancing the diverse interests of that family to make grants that make a difference. It succeeds in navigating these sometimes difficult waters by virtue of its passion for giving and its creativity.

The $88-million Roy A. Hunt Foundation was founded in 1966 by the will of Roy Arthur Hunt, president of the aluminum manufacturing giant Alcoa and son of its co-founder Alfred Hunt.

“It was actually the third foundation that he established, the first being the Hunt Foundation in 1951,” says Beatrice Carter, executive director of the Roy A. Hunt Foundation. “He also established the Alcoa Foundation, which is one of the few endowed corporate foundations in the country. In 1994, the Hunt foundations were merged, and they retained the name of the founder.”

Past and Future

The Roy A. Hunt Foundation gives away more than $3.5 million in grants annually, funding organizations engaged in almost all program areas.  The Foundation's grants are concentrated in the areas of Arts and Culture, Education, Environment, Health, Human Services, and Public Affairs, and within these diverse program areas are several special initiatives in Community Development and Youth Violence Prevention.

Giving formed a great part of who Hunt and his wife Rachel McMasters Hunt were, both personally and professionally, and today the family continues their legacy.

For example, there is the family’s great historical and personal commitment to the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Established in 1961, the Institute is a unique facility for scholarly research in selective aspects of botanical history and art.

Rachel Hunt was an accomplished bookbinder and avid horticulturalist, becoming a member of more than 30 botanical organizations, some of which she helped to found. Her collection of historically significant books and art formed the core of the Hunt Botanical Library and what would become the Hunt Institute.

“There simply aren’t too many places like it in the world,” says Carter.

While the Hunts had their own philanthropic interests, horticulture, medicine, and higher education among them, Roy A. Hunt purposely left the mission of the foundation broad to accommodate future generations’ interests.

“The foundation was established as much as a vehicle to keep the family together as a vehicle for achieving social impact,” says Carter.

For more than 40 years, the Foundation has done just that. Carter is currently looking ahead to the Hunt Foundation’s June meeting when the Next Generation Fund, established in 1999 to engage the fourth generation of the Hunt family, will welcome two new members to its ranks.

“It’s a family tradition now,” says Carter. “We meet twice a year, sometimes more often. The trustees meet in November, just the trustees, but in June, the trustees meet and bring their families. In that way, the fourth-generation cousins get to know each other and begin bonding at an early age.  This year, we plan to add some pre-trustee activities to the annual June weekend meeting so that by the time they become trustees, the fourth generation will have had some experience working together as well as playing together.”

“The age range of the current members of the fourth generation is from 21 to 30,” says Carter. “The older ones naturally participate more than the younger ones who are still in school. It’s very hard at that age to have full participation.”

Distance can also make getting together difficult, so next-generation members, scattered throughout New England, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Idaho, meet via conference call prior to the semiannual meetings.

“They make a case for a budget, and a budget is approved every year by the directors for the Next Generation Fund, and that’s what they have to work with,” says Carter. “Last year, it was 5% of the overall grantmaking budget.”

“They work as a group, meet on their own with staff assistance, and attend the semi-annual meetings. It’s about bringing the next generation along to learn about philanthropy and how foundations operate.”

Family and Society

One perennial challenge is how to bring the increasingly diverse interests of the family together to make grants with impact. The trustees include one surviving son of the founder, the founder's eleven grandchildren, and seven, soon to be nine, members of the next generation. It’s a large board.

“They’re challenged every time they meet,” says Carter. “I think what’s exceptional about the family is that they’re so diverse in their interests and political viewpoints, and they’re able to work through ideological differences and find common ground.”

Among the Hunt Foundation’s trustees are academics, authors, physicians, and activists from across the country and the political spectrum. Trustee John B. Hunt is a Republican legislator in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. Marion Hunt-Badiner is an environmental activist, student of Zen, and yoga practitioner. Richard M. Hunt, a former board member of the National Center for Family Philanthropy, is a retired Harvard professor.

“They deal with differences, aiming to achieve consensus, and then come together for a family dinner after a long arduous day’s meeting,” says Carter.

Key to bringing everyone together is crafting of programs and grantmaking opportunities in which there is something for everyone.

The Foundation’s work with the National Parks Conservation Association proved especially exciting and fulfilling as it brought together the trustees' interests in business, public policy, education, and the environment. A collaboration with the Boston-based Henry P. Kendall Foundation, the grant funded NCPA's business plan initiative, a joint venture with the US National Park Service which brought in business and public policy school graduate students to help create a budget template that would allow parks to analyze their annual operating and capital expenditures in a new way.

The federal parks budget, for instance, comes in a massive three-ring binder, Carter explains, and the new budget template allowed parks to aggregate that information and apply it to the situation on the ground.

“The participating parks could see, for example, that infrastructure was deteriorating for lack of adequate capital allocations, or that they needed to do more in terms of interpretation, explaining why the park is an important landmark or why it’s there,” Carter says, describing the grant as a real win for all involved.

“The individual parks came away not only with a new understanding of their financial needs but with young professionals who were now committed to the parks and saw them as a good place to work,” she says. “The parks would not otherwise have had business or public policy school graduates working for them helping with budgets and advocacy. They historically were staffed by individuals with specific environmental expertise or simply a love for the outdoors.”

Thus, the Hunt Foundation succeeds in carrying a family tradition into the future, and in bringing a family together to make a difference.

“In the end, they’re still a family,” Carter says. “It’s about philanthropy and it’s about family, and they always keep those two goals before them.”

For more information about the Roy A. Hunt Foundation and its work, visit its website.

 

MARCH 2008:  The Paine Family Foundation

I catch up with Carol Paine-McGovern in a fourth-floor conference room in the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian.

Carol’s in town for Foundations on the Hill. 300 philanthropy representatives from 35 states and the District of Columbia have gathered in our nation’s capital for meetings with members of Congress. Foundation representatives organized by the Council of Michigan Foundations have assembled at their chosen staging ground overlooking the Capitol dome and are preparing for meetings with every member of Michigan’s congressional delegation, 15 House members and both Senators, over the next day and a half.

Carol is President of the Paine Family Foundation, a small family foundation based in Manistee, Michigan.

“Where exactly is Manistee?” I ask.

Carol holds up her left hand, forming the mitten that is the largest part of Michigan, and points to the tip of her smallest finger.

“Up here,” she says. “We do most of our giving in Mason and Manistee counties in northern Michigan.”

The Paine Family Foundation was created in 1991 by Carol’s parents, Bill and Martha Paine, who had achieved some success with an office furniture and supply company.

“They wanted to give back to the community,” Carol says. “They started very small with a real commitment to these two communities. It’s truly a family foundation now. All of us are at the table.”

The foundation currently has 11 trustees: Bill and Martha; Carol, her three brothers, and their spouses; and one granddaughter. They will be joined by a 12th board member this May when Carol’s daughter, Briana, turns 21 this coming May.

“Family members can join the board when they reach 21,” Carol explains. “But from age 10, they can attend meetings and bring funding requests to the board.”

In 2005, the six Paine grandchildren, the youngest of whom is 13, were given $1,000 to donate in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The teens and young adults deliberated via email and chose to make a grant to the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to care for abandoned animals in the wake of the disaster.

Engaging a new generation can sometimes be a challenge, though, as Carol explains.

“You have to think outside the box. They tend to think more globally,” she says, recalling Briana’s requests for support of efforts in Darfur when most of the foundation’s giving is in northern Michigan.

Last summer, Briana accompanied Carol on a tour of Africa organized by Mary Fisher, artist, author, UN Special Representative on HIV/AIDS, and founder of the CARE Fund. The group toured clinics in Zambia, visited orphanages, and explored Mary’s new enterprise that helps AIDS-affected women earn a living, sustain their health, and care for their families.

More than 150 women have so far been trained to hand-crochet bracelets of bone, horn, and gemstones from Mary’s designs with 100 percent of the profits going to the artisans themselves.

“They create these amazing beaded bracelets for sale here in the US,” Carol says, displaying her own. “The money goes to build savings, buy homes, and send kids to school. It doesn’t have to be a lot of money to do a lot of good overseas.”

It doesn’t take a lot of money to do good back home either, especially when that commitment is matched by advocacy.

Carol is a board member of the Council of Michigan Foundations and an active member of their Public Policy Committee. She earned her master’s degree in public health from the University of Minnesota, and her background includes work in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives. The Paine Family Foundation was among many Michigan family philanthropies that provided important support for Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s Project Great Start, a set of early childhood initiatives.

“Politics is just an interest of mine,” she says, citing why she’s come to Foundations on the Hill. “I truly believe in working with whoever your elected representative is. It’s about building relationships, and family foundations and funds are good at that. We are all about relationships.”
 

FEBRUARY 2008:  The Slingshot Fund

A new group of young Jews, the grandsons and granddaughters of several prominent giving families, is carrying on a legacy of giving while rewriting the rules for a new generation.

The Slingshot Fund was born on Grand Street.

Danielle Durchslag, a great-granddaughter of Nathan Cummings, founder of Sara Lee, wanted to meet some of her peers, to explore what the opportunity to serve on the board of the Nathan Cummings Foundation might mean. With the help of 21/64, a nonprofit consulting division of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, Grand Street was created as a network for next-generation family members like Durchslag. She and 11 other young Jews gathered to discuss innovative funding opportunities and their place in the family legacy. It became an annual gathering with a new cohort of 12 next generation board members or board members-to-be added each year.

“At the end of one of these sessions, someone said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a Zagat-style guide to some of these organizations?’” recalls Sharna Goldseker, Vice President of Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies. “We sort of knew what our parents funded, but we felt like there was more out there that was relevant to our generation.”

That conversation gave birth in 2005 to Slingshot: A Resource Guide to Jewish Innovation, an annual compilation of 50 inspiring and innovative organizations, projects, and programs in the North American Jewish community; and, in 2007, to the Slingshot Fund.

Founded by Jews in their 20s and 30s, Slingshot hopes to be “a new model for raising and distributing grants by engaging people in Jewish philanthropy who would otherwise not be involved.” Last fall, the Fund chose eight organizations featured in the Slingshot guide to receive general operating support grants of $45,000 each.

The group’s desire to honor family tradition and faith but in a way that resonated with young people led Slingshot to support organizations like Storahtelling, interfaithfamily.com, and JDub Records Inc.

“It really started as an experiment,” says Goldseker. “If the Jewish community is interested in engaging the next generation, here are 50 possible ‘solutions’ for doing just that.”

“My generation is definitely thinking about the legacy of our grandparents’ and parents’ generation,” says Jessica Warren, founding member of Slingshot, a board member of the Naomi and Martin Warren Family Foundation in Houston, Texas, and a graduate student at New York University. “We’re not disregarding what they’re doing. It’s about figuring out a way to honor that legacy.”

“I’ve been very frustrated with certain models in the Jewish community. It’s very hard to get to the heart of what you can do,” says Warren, pointing to the centralized, hands-off approach that she encounters with a number of organizations.

Warren isn’t alone in her frustration. A recent report from United Jewish Communities suggested that federation giving "declines precipitously" among younger Jews.

Slingshot was crafted to give members a hands-on, strategic, resonant way to support innovative Jewish charities.

In addition to the review process for inclusion in the Slingshot guide, the Slingshot Fund founders spent another 18 months planning their new operation. They raised more than $400,000 personally and from their family philanthropies. A request for proposals was drafted and sent to the Slingshot cohort. Proposals were reviewed; site visits conducted; and final decisions made.

It was particularly important to Slingshot that their grants be for general support.

“There’s so much project-based support out there, and while there’s a little bit of a shift in the nonprofit sector happening, we really wanted to push that as one of core values,” says Warren. “If we don’t trust the organization enough to fund their bottom line, there should be questions about project support. We want to build the capacity to do bigger things.”

“[When you’re doing project support], it’s a lot easier to say I’m helping this child do something,” says Warren. “When you’re doing capacity, you’re supporting copiers, what makes the day-to-day work happen. It’s not as sexy, but it’s important.”
And so was an interactive online presence.

“We want people to know that citizens of all shapes and sizes can be philanthropists,” says Goldseker. “The web site tries to make giving to support transforming the Jewish community accessible and transparent.”

The Slingshot site offers message boards, podcasts, and online giving to support Slingshot charities, features that a new generation expects from the web.

“I don’t know if we’re fully Web 2.0, maybe 1.5, but we went to a pretty interactive site right off the bat,” says Goldseker.

“The values of Jewish tradition are being passed down, but they’re being implemented in a way that resonates with a new generation,” she adds.

For more information about the Slingshot Fund and its work, visit its website.

JANUARY 2008:  The Educational Foundation of America

Many foundation investment advisors contend it’s best to keep the investment side and the grantmaking side of philanthropy separate.

“I hear it all the time,” says John Powers, a board member of the Educational Foundation of America (EFA), a family foundation based in Westport, Connecticut. “Let our money managers make money any way they can because you’ll have more to give away.”

Powers notes that much the opposite has been the case for EFA, pointing out that EFA's socially screened portfolios have consistently outperformed traditional benchmarks.  He feels that the socially responsible companies can better performers.

“In today’s volatile markets, a company that has a forward-thinking HR policy—that has job-sharing, flex-time, and day-care—has management that is demonstrating greater capability, greater flexibility, and greater adaptability to a shifts in the market,” Powers says. “When you're socially conscious, you’re identifying management that is more adaptable to a changing world.”

EFA began looking at socially responsible investing in 1994, examining ways that its investments—through negative screens, investments in socially responsible projects, and shareholder activism—could be utilized to further EFA’s mission.

“[It’s] about getting the most you can done with every tool you have available,” says Powers.

Since 1995, the foundation’s investment managers have been directed to invest only in companies that pass EFA’s social and environmental investment criteria.

The foundation has also taken a lead in shareholder activism, where a foundation uses its shareholder status to attempt to influence corporate behavior.

Powers notes that it is difficult to gain support for shareholder resolutions.  Management and large shareholders typically don't want to change practices, and routinely vote their shares against shareholder resolutions.  Institutional investors and disinterested shareholders either do not vote their proxies or vote with management on most issues.  However, Powers contends that results can be achieved through dialogue with management, education of shareholders, and collaboration with other activist shareholders.

“15-20% of shareholders very, very rarely vote in favor of a shareholder initiative, but when the extraordinary happens, you're seeing something like Halley’s Comet,” says Powers. “It doesn't come around but once in a long, long time, and it catches management’s attention.”

EFA filings and co-filings have caught the attention of a number of corporations.

In 1998, EFA, along with the As You Sow Foundation and organizations such as Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace, and Forest Ethics, succeeded in getting Home Depot to commit to phasing out sales of wood products made from old-growth forests. Home Depot’s competitors subsequently made similar commitments.

In 2000, EFA and Walden Asset Management introduced a resolution asking Coca-Cola to increase the amount of recycled content in its plastic bottles. In 2001, the company announced it had introduced 2.5% recycled content into 75% of its plastic beverage containers. The following year, PepsiCo agreed to match Coke’s commitment.

Currently, EFA is challenging Apple, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM to take responsibility for the return and disposal of old computers.

Powers encourages other family foundations to look at their investments as potential tools for advancing their missions.

“You’ve got the tools of grants and the use of your endowment, tools for social change,” says Powers. “Why tie one hand behind your back when you're trying to reach your goals? Why would you not use every tool you have available?”

For more information about the Educational Foundation of America, visit the EFA website.

Profiles 2007

DECEMBER 2007:  The Efroymson Family

Jacob and Minnie Efroymson moved from Evansville, Indiana to the relatively young state capital of Indianapolis in 1872. The couple opened a small dry goods store on South Meridian Street, unaware they were beginning a family commitment to the city that would last for generations.

Indeed, three generations of Efroymsons, Gustave (1919-1946), Robert (1946-1988), and Dan (1988-1999), would serve in succession on the board of the community foundation—The Indianapolis Foundation—they helped to create in 1916.

Today, the Efroymson family honors its traditional commitment to the city of Indianapolis as it welcomes and helps forge a new philanthropic landscape.

“This is not a flashy, high-profile, self-promoting family,” says Pam Velo, Associate Vice President for Donor Services at the Central Indiana Community Foundation and self-described “chief cook and bottle-washer” to the Efroymson Fund, a donor-advised fund of the foundation. “It’s a very modest, down-to-earth family that truly believes it has an obligation and a responsibility…to give back to the community.”

The history of the Efroymson family and its various funds reveals a group of personalities both dynamic and rooted in family tradition.

“The previous generations were the kind of people who stood up for what they believed and [thought] that they could change things by working hard at it,” says Velo. “The current generation is the same way.”

Jacob and Minnie’s son Gustave, the eldest of their five children, would go on to form his own store at the age of 18 with his brother-in-law, calling it Efroymson and Wolf. When the Indianapolis Foundation was created in 1916, the businessman became its vice-president and a trustee.

Gustave worked quietly on behalf of the disadvantaged. He helped organize Jewish, African-American and Catholic civic leaders in efforts to rid Indianapolis of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. He signed affidavits for Jews fleeing Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, helping them find sanctuary in the United States. Despite the high profile nature of some of his efforts and his position in the community, Gustave much preferred the community’s advancement to his own.

Gustave’s son Robert once recalled being in line at a Loews movie theater. When the theater manager noticed Gustave and his family, he offered to let them go to the front of the line. Gustave, after all, had been instrumental in bringing the franchise to Indianapolis. Gustave thanked him but refused. Robert never forgot the lesson. When Gustave died in 1946, Robert took his place on the Indianapolis Foundation’s board.

While Robert maintained the Efroymson tradition on the board, his brother Clarence was more comfortable behind the scenes. The two made an interesting, dynamic pair—Robert the public face at the Indianapolis Foundation, the United Fund, and the Community Hospital, and Clarence the quiet professor of economics working on behalf of the United Negro College Fund, the Indiana Mental Health Association, and The Nature Conservancy. Together, Robert and Clarence would create The Moriah Fund in 1985, each contributing around $40 million to the cause of improving the quality of life for Jews and non-Jews the world over.

The brothers both passed away in 1988, and Dan Efroymson took his father Robert’s place on the board of the Indianapolis Foundation.

As Indiana took note of the growing popularity of donor-advised funds in the late 1990s, Dan and his wife Lori helped craft a partnership between the Indianapolis Foundation, which served Marion County, and the Legacy Fund, which served Hamilton County. The result was a new regional community foundation: the Central Indiana Community Foundation. Already known for their commitment to Indiana through the Indianapolis Foundation and to the Jewish community and social justice through foundations like the Moriah Fund, the Efroymsons established a new vehicle, the Efroymson Fund, donating $90 million, in the hopes that other donors and families would take on the joys and challenges of philanthropy.

“They wanted other families to know that they could do the same thing even without the money that the Efroymsons have,” says Velo.

To date, the Fund has awarded 277 grants, totaling more than $30 million, to nearly 200 nonprofits.

Even as the giving landscape changes to accommodate new vehicles, new partnerships, and new methods; even as the Efroymsons welcome a new generation to the Fund—Dan and Lori’s children, Jeremy and Elissa; the Efroymson commitment to stewardship remains. Lori Efroymson-Aguilera serves as a board member of the new community foundation.

For the Efroymsons, it’s simple really.

“A person has to be a little useful, don’t you think?” Robert Efroymson once said. “And get a little satisfaction out of feeling you’ve done something useful.”

For more about the Efroymson Fund, visit the web site of the Central Indiana Community Foundation.
 

NOVEMBER 2007:  The Dexter F. and Dorothy H. Baker Foundation

Clarifying the founders’ intent is an issue very close to the heart of many philanthropic families, but this concern took on special urgency for the Dexter F. and Dorothy H. Baker Foundation of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1986, the $17-million family foundation is located in Lehigh County where the Orphans’ Court periodically reviews the foundations established there, and has considerable latitude in interpreting donor intent, something that troubled the Baker family.

“When our benefactors are no longer here, we do not want the courts to interpret their words,” says Ellen Baker Ghelardi, the foundation’s executive director and daughter of the founders Dexter and Dorothy Baker. “We wanted to create a visual explanation of what the benefactors intended in their giving.”

The Baker Foundation embarked on a project to ensure the intent, the history, and the impact of the foundation was clear to the family and the communities it served. After looking at other family histories, the family chose to record Dexter Baker and others on camera.

“It was important to us that future generations heard it from him,” says Ghelardi. “But we couldn’t find a single example of a benefactor actually talking.”

The family chose to make a video documentary. Storyboards were drawn up, and many hours of interviews were shot with the founder and his family plus community members. Ghelardi and others realized they had several stories going at once—one for the courts, one for current and future trustees, and still another for current and potential grantees. They created two films—a 12-minute version targeted to the courts and the community and a 25-minute movie for the family.

The films and the experience of creating them quickly transformed a family, a foundation and its grantmaking.

Simply unearthing and dusting off the old family photos, home movies, and stories for the films was a transformative and rejuvenating experience.

“You dig up material and you say, ‘Wow, that really influenced me,’” says Ghelardi. “You start to log a different emotional history. You start to see where you were philanthropic but didn’t realize it, where you’d been involved but didn’t remember it.”

Family members saw their interest in funding the arts in pictures of Dexter Baker playing trumpet in high school. Trustees rediscovered their philanthropic roots in Dorothy Baker’s tales of her parents, owners of a hardware store, accepting eggs and other goods as payment during the Great Depression.

As the benefactors spoke, family members kept hearing some of the same phrases.

“What are the criteria that really influence our funding?” asked Ghelardi. “We fund arts and culture, youth and social service initiatives, but we were using this other internal philosophy that we’d never been able to put our arms around.”

Through the course of the interviews, the phrases “making a difference,” “cultivating partnerships,” and “challenging the status quo” struck special chords and became not only the chapter titles of the short film but the core of the foundation’s new guidelines.

The foundation completely rewrote its funding guidelines to reflect its new appreciation of the family’s goals, which they’d always had even if they didn’t exactly have the words.

For families considering a similar project, Ghelardi recommends beginning with the basics.

“Start by going through all your pictures, files, and documents and see what you have first,” she says. “Start having conversations with specific questions in mind over meetings, at the dinner table, at Christmas, or whatever it might be. Have somebody take notes or record it.”

Ghelardi encourages family involvement but also recommends seeking trusted help.

“You really need to have somebody from the family involved the whole way through,” she notes. “Two are better so that you can go back and forth, and it’s important to get members from each of the generations involved.”

For trusted help, the family examined a number of options and connected with Scott Paul of Class E Media as director, producer, and primary videographer.

“We wanted artistic control. We wanted to have a lot of input, and we wanted to retain all the footage,” says Ghelardi. “We were so nervous that information we would give somebody would be sold or distorted. The level of trust was incredibly important.”

Despite a desire for artistic control, the family quickly discovered it had to be flexible enough to let the real stories be told.

“We thought it would take three months. It took a year and three months,” Ghelardi laughs.

“We departed from the storyboard questions really fast,” she explains. “There was so much more vitality because of it, because you saw thinking, reflective, spontaneous individuals not poised positioning statements.”

One year after their journey began, the Bakers had created two short films, as well as a copious digital archive of their family’s philanthropic efforts. It’s an archive that will grow because the foundation now requires grantees to submit 2-5 minute videos with their final reports.

It can be shot on a cell phone, a digital camera, or a video camera by the grantees or by professional videographers. All that matters is that the story is captured, so that others might experience for themselves what the Bakers felt during their own journey.

“We changed our application. We changed our guidelines,” says Ghelardi. “We’re changing our reports, our recordkeeping, the way we communicate with current and future trustees. And all because we decided to do this project.”
 

OCTOBER 2007:  The Lumpkin Family Foundation

When the Lumpkin family began, in 2005, to consider a new grant program, they encountered a stumbling block. While the family had a number of common interests—healthy food, education, water quality, nonprofit capacity-building—none of them produced enough “collective passion” to warrant the creation of a new grantmaking focus.

“Rather than picking one of the program areas to work in, we said, ‘Let’s create a program to learn about these program areas,’” says Bruce Karmazin, Executive Director of the Lumpkin Family Foundation. 

The result was a four-year program of flexible, peer-directed learning experiences called learning circles.  Each year, the family is taking on a new topic with a series of readings and short presentations capped by a final report to the entire family.

“It’s a cross between a book club and a college seminar,” says Karmazin.  “Our first strategic plan said we would strive to be a learning organization, but we didn't have a clear idea how.  The learning circles are really helping us do that.”

The Lumpkin Family Foundation was created in 1953 with a bequest from Besse Lumpkin.  Besse was the widow of Dr. William C. Lumpkin, who, with his father Iverson A. Lumpkin, created the Mattoon Telephone Company in 1894.  The company became Illinois Consolidated Telephone Company, one of the nation’s largest privately held telephone companies, before eventually going public.  It is still has significant Lumpkin ownership and a Lumpkin, fourth-generation family member Richard Lumpkin, is Chairman.

Today, members of the Lumpkin family's fourth, fifth and even sixth generations contribute both time and resources to the foundation, which has distributed more than $15 million in grants since its founding.

The Lumpkin Family Foundation awards grants in the areas of education, the environment, and at-risk youth.  There is a special focus on the family’s historical commitment to Central Illinois, but the foundation also provides support to groups where Lumpkin family members live.

It was partly this impulse to engage the family members’ own programmatic interests that lead to the creation of the learning circles.

The Lumpkin family took a cue from the Andrus Family Fund’s Board Exploration Triads or BETs in creating their learning circles.  In the Andrus model, an AFF trustee and an extended Andrus family member would be grouped with an outside expert to investigate a different aspect of AFF’s two program areas over a period of eight months and to report back to the family. 

The Lumpkin Family Foundation kept the facilitator and the structured learning environment, but scaled the approach back to fit the needs of a smaller family.  The Andrus Family Fund was designed to engage a family of nearly 400 members.  The Lumpkin Family Foundation represents the 23 adult descendants of Besse Lumpkin and their spouses.

The Lumpkin family’s first learning circle was about food and they found their facilitator in Michael Hamm, C.S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture at Michigan State University.

“He proved a good and flexible fit to the family,” says Karmazin.  “After family members visited with him, Mike started with an overall presentation on the issues involved in the food system today.  There was a great discussion about the curriculum. Family members said, ‘I want to learn about this. I want to learn about that.  I’m interested in this.’”

The group began with Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, moved on to the ecology and economics of food production, and veered into how educational institutions teach people about food even as they feed them in school and university cafeterias.

The learning circles allowed the family to capitalize on an important space between discussions of grantmaking and family members’ interests.  The circle structure enabled the family to discuss big program issues without having to decide immediately how to act on those discussions.  

Staff members listened closely to what family members were saying and began to understand how apparently different visions intersected.

“It gave much better definition to the Foundation's local food program, already under development," explains Karmazin.

"It was a way to flesh out what’s important,” he says.  “I heard that working with educational institutions was important, that supporting economic development was exciting, and I was able to incorporate those ideas and feelings and bring together a program that was much more readily approved.  They recognized their voices in the program.”

The family recently wrapped up its learning circle on food, and, this fall, welcomed more family members to the learning circle on water quality.

“We’ve managed to figure it out so that most of the work happens on the phone, but it’s not always easy,” Karmazin explains.  “The best possible scenario would be to do it like a book club, where you’re meeting in somebody’s living room or office over a coffee.  People have busy lives and not all the reading gets done, but enough of the reading gets done so that people really enjoy it.”

Karmazin credits the facilitator for some of the program’s success.

“The facilitator is really critical,” he says.  “You can do it without a facilitator.  As families, we’re not always comfortable welcoming someone into the inner sanctum of our living rooms, but it adds an important level of expertise.”

Karmazin notes that, while a learning circle is a terrific way to engage a family programmatically, it’s not for everyone.

“If you’re looking for a facilitator who can referee when Uncle John and Cousin Billy have a personal disagreement, you probably shouldn't be looking at a learning circle,” he says.  “Learning circles are a great team-building exercise, but they’re not the answer to a dysfunctional team.”

They have, however, proved attractive to the next generation of Lumpkin philanthropists. 

At age 10, Lumpkin family members can participate on a grantmaking committee distributing small amounts to selected charities.  At age 16, one becomes an official member of the family philanthropy—eligible to serve on committees, attend board meetings, and participate in the “Introduction to Philanthropy” program.

Teens and young adults may participate in this program for seven years of their choosing between the ages of 16 and 30.  Participants can distribute $1,000 annually in discretionary grants, but they must be engaged in some kind of structured learning in order to receive the privilege.

As a new group of teens came of age, they wondered, says Karmazin, “Maybe we could do this together rather than completely on our own.”

A new learning circle on philanthropy, featuring readings like President Clinton's new book Giving, is a work in progress for the group of three 16-year-olds, as they too take advantage of this new opportunity to learn together.

You can learn more about the Lumpkin Family Foundation, its mission, history, and future, on its web site. 

The report on the BETs that influenced the Lumpkin learning circles The BETs:  An Experimental Approach to Educating Trustees and Extended Family Members about Program Areas is available on the Andrus Family Fund web site.

SEPTEMBER 2007:  The Laird Norton Family

With a family business that goes back 152 years, the Laird Norton family has a lot of history to chronicle. That’s why they’ve chosen several ways to do it, including some novel approaches.

In 1855, two brothers, Matthew George Norton and James Laird Norton, and their cousin, William Harris Laird, formed the Laird Norton Company, the first of many Laird Norton family-owned businesses in the timber industry.  Today the company is one of the nation’s longest-standing family businesses.

Much of that longevity can be attributed to the family’s philanthropy, currently embodied in the Laird Norton Family Foundation.  It is a philanthropy that encourages a unique family’s 380 members to maintain their connections to the past, to the community, and to one another.

Patrick de Freitas, President of the foundation, is quick to point to the comfortable family dynamic that characterizes the family’s work together.

“It’s easy for us,” de Freitas explains.  “We’re all fifth and sixth generation now, so we’re far removed from any original contentions and it’s a whole lot easier to get along.”

That ease comes from an extraordinary sense of family the members discovered and nurtured early in the company’s history.

“We didn’t start out with one patriarch.  We started out with three—two brothers and a cousin,” says Chalan Colby, Family President of the Laird Norton Company.  “We started out with a team.  That made it easier as the years went on to be inclusive.  It felt more like a community.”

The Laird Norton Company and the philanthropy that evolved from it was never any one individual’s creation.  It was always a family enterprise, and the next generation only added to that feeling.

The family maintains its connections to its storied past by employing an archivist who compiles information on the family’s history.  Along with a collection of countless pictures and stories and their quarterly newsletter Woodstock, the family produced two books, Timber Roots in 1972 and Branching Out in 1989, as well as a 150^th anniversary DVD entitled “Roots and Wings.”

“We created a 105^th anniversary committee,” Colby says. “We did a number of things.  We had a time capsule, for example.  Then, we found a local company that had done videos for other families, and we had this wonderful video chronicle of all the years of the family’s history.”

The family has even produced a play, first created in 1955 and occasionally revived at the family’s annual meeting, and a coloring book for younger family members.

 “It simplifies history, but it makes it easier for kids to grasp,” says de Freitas.  “Here’s what happened in 1755 when Matthew and Margaret Laird took a ship from the north of Ireland,” for example.

 “Getting to them when they’re young” is key to maintaining that connection to the philanthropy, says de Freitas.  That’s why the family also created Camp Three Tree--named for the three branches of the family that started it all--for younger family members ages 1 month to 13 years.

Camp Three Tree happens in conjunction with the family’s annual “Summit,” the Laird Norton Company board meeting and family foundation meeting held in June, and offers a curriculum of activities and field trips for infants and children designed to teach children about the philanthropy and one another.

At age 14, the teens “graduate” and are introduced to the family in a special ceremony.  Annual meetings become mandatory, and, as the teens grow up, they become eligible for professional development and, eventually, associate directorships on the family’s committees and boards.

It is the philanthropic boards and committees, as well as the recorded history, that have proved instrumental in engaging the nearly 400 family members.

“When you have a family business, if you’re not actually actively involved in the management, you might feel like you’re just sitting on boards that meet and steer money around,” says de Freitas.  “That’s not particularly engaging or enlightening for most people who don’t care about that stuff.”

When the family held a meeting to develop a new funding focus for the foundation, a group of 80 family members voted on program areas by placing dots on posters around the conference space.  One poster read:  “No Dot Left Behind.” That poster became “Taproot,” a matching fund that supports the charitable work of individual family members in addition to their collective work in conservation, arts education, global climate change, and watershed conservation.

Family members’ individual charitable contributions are matched by the family fund up to $500.  And, to truly ensure that no charitable work goes unrecognized, family members’ volunteer hours are monetized and matched as well.

Today, what began as a family philanthropy continues; no outsiders serve on the board. More than 50 family members participate in the foundation’s various grantmaking and advisory committees. And that strong sense of family remains.

"Collectively, we take governance quite seriously, but we're not Robert's Rules people, says de Freitas. "Robert's was designed for people who didn't know each other."

You can learn more about the Laird Norton family at the websites of the Laird Norton Company and the Laird Norton Family Foundation.

AUGUST 2007:  The Harman Family Foundation

Wellesley College Professor of English Barbara Harman awaited the release of her book The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England. The year was 1998, and when it arrived, after 10 long years of research and writing, she experienced something she assumes many authors discover upon the publication of their work.

“That 10 years had been wrapped up in a little package,” recalls Harman. “It seemed to me that it was an enormous amount of labor and energy and brainpower and sweat and juggling family responsibilities and research interests to have what felt to me like a very small impact.”

It was about that time that she received the annual letter from her father Dr. Sidney Harman, president of the Harman Family Foundation and founder and chairman of multibillion-dollar audio and video manufacturer Harman International. Harman sent Barbara and her siblings the occasional letter, informing them of the foundation’s activities, and asking when he might expect them to join him.

“After 27 years of teaching and grading papers, I got the annual letter from my father, saying, ‘Hey, guys, why don’t you step up?’” remembers Harman. “And I said I am going to step up. I’m going to propose myself as the new executive director of the foundation.”

Today, with her father and stepmother, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), Barbara leads the Harman Family Foundation, a Washington, DC-based philanthropy well known for its support of the DC arts community, including the Washington Ballet, the National Gallery of Art, and the Shakespeare Theatre Company, whose new Harman Center for the Arts opens this fall..

It was a learning experience to say the least.

“I bit off more than I had any reason to expect that I could chew,” says Harman. “But I was a quick study.”

Harman went about discerning and making more explicit the foundation’s mission and direction. She immediately noted the family’s passion for the arts and, as grant proposals arrived and Harman delved into the work of an executive director, Harman began to survey the nonprofit landscape.

“Something was missing from the picture—the small, entrepreneurial, neighborhood-based arts organization that sort of flew below the radar,” Harman observes. “I knew that landscape was there. I didn’t know much about it.”

Harman looked to an innovative project in Boston for inspiration. In 1997, the Ellis L. Phillips Foundation, a Boston, Massachusetts family foundation, researched and published the first Catalogue for Philanthropy, a publication that spotlighted organizations throughout Massachusetts that were often too small to organize their own marketing and fundraising activities. Harman herself had received the publication and hoped to organize something similar for the greater Washington area. The idea spawned catalogues in a few other communities, but Harman took the idea to the next level.

First published in 2003, the Washington Catalogue for Philanthropy has since featured nearly 300 nonprofit organizations with budgets of $2 million or less working in areas such as the environment, culture, and human services. Although there is no way to determine exactly how many donations go to nonprofits because of their appearance in the Catalogue, at least $3.9 million in gifts are directly attributable to it.

Now its own nonprofit, the Catalogue has snowballed into a major philanthropy promotion in the Washington area. Each year, following a request for proposals, a volunteer team of 60 individuals from 35 DC grantmakers and nonprofits selects approximately 70 innovative organizations for inclusion. The Catalogue is mailed to more than 30,000 high net worth households, and thanks to the support of several Washington-area foundations, 100 percent of each donation goes directly to the charities.

This year’s October rollout will include not only mailing the full catalogue to 30,000 homes but also sending posters to 100,000 targeted households. By expanding the reach of the project, Harman hopes to double the amount raised for this new class of charities.

The Catalogue has also become a tremendous support network for the featured charities. Inclusion in the Catalogue gives charities access to a host of online fundraising tools, including donations through Network for Good, and a database of sample press releases, marketing materials, and thank-you letters.

“It’s all about helping them get the word out about who they are and what they do,” says Harman. “We make an introduction. They make a relationship. Many of these charities had nothing to hand to a donor or a board member before – now they have the catalogue. Many had never accepted online donations – now they had the web site.”

What started as a simple project by one foundation to help small organizations in ways beyond just grants, has mushroomed into a major enterprise. Harman believes others foundations should consider trying this in their own communities, noting how the Catalogue has helped them build their own grantee portfolio of smaller arts organizations, especially those that serve youth.

“The only way to start is to start,” Harman says. “It’s a little bit like what I used to tell my students when they would freeze up about writing a big paper. I always said, ‘Stick your hands on the keyboard. Something will happen.’”

You can learn more about the Catalogue for Philanthropy by visiting its website.

JULY 2007:  The Charles A. Frueauff Foundation

It’s moving day at the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation. It’s a hectic but exciting time. After 10 years in the same three-room office space, the Frueauff Foundation is moving to a new 4300-square-foot headquarters complete with board rooms and conference space in Little Rock’s booming River Market district. And they’re taking several Arkansas nonprofits with them.

The Frueauff Foundation’s new offices will provide affordable office space for four other nonprofit organizations: the Single Parent Scholarship Fund of Pulaski County, the Arkansas Coalition for Excellence, the Arkansas chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and a brand-new organization working with persons with learning disabilities. The new nonprofit center is but one example of the foundation’s increasingly public profile, a marked contrast to its early days in New York more than 50 years ago.

We catch up with Anna Kay Frueauff Williams, Trustee and Vice President of Communications and Programs, on the day she is finalizing the new lease agreements and making sure the proper names are on the proper doors—the important details and finishing touches that come with moving into a new home.

The Frueauff Foundation was created in 1950 by a bequest from Williams’ great-great-uncle Charles A. Frueauff, a successful New York attorney. The Foundation remained in New York until leadership passed in the late 1980s to a generation born and raised in Arkansas. For a good portion of the Foundation’s history, Williams recalls, “We were like lots of foundations of our age, a foundation that wrote checks once or twice a year in lots of instances to the same things. People knew how to find us. It wasn’t like we wanted our name on anything in order to be found. We weren’t the type that wanted that recognition or publicity.”

After all, as David A. Frueauff, President of the Foundation and Williams’ brother, explains on the Foundation’s web site, “The Trustees of the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation deeply believe that the Foundation is not, nor has it ever been, about us: the Foundation, its staff or trustees.”

For the Frueauff Foundation, the grants are about the mission—the grantees and the communities they serve. To date, the $121 million foundation has made more than $112 million in grants to more than 600 organizations in 29 states in the fields of education, social services, and health and hospitals.

While the Frueauffs were largely satisfied with their public profile, as nonprofits began to express how much the Foundation’s support and partnership meant to them, the Frueauffs became convinced that a higher profile might open up new opportunities to advance their mission. For example, the Foundation began to pursue more matching and challenge grants, putting their name and their wealth behind the fundraising efforts of their grantees.

“In some instances, people just aren’t asked [to donate], or the same people are asked over and over again,” Williams explains. “And then there are folks that don’t contribute because they don’t think they can contribute enough.” A matching grant changes all that, she says. The Frueauffs’ vote of confidence encourages others to give, allowing the grantee to attract new donors and volunteers. Donors who may not think they have enough to give suddenly do. Their generosity will be matched by the Frueauff Foundation and bring the nonprofit that much closer to their fundraising goal. “In a state like Arkansas,” declares Williams. “That’s a big deal, a huge deal.”

In 2000, the Frueauff Foundation launched its website. In developing the site, Williams recalled her experience as a fundraiser:  “What information was I looking for when looking at a website?”

The site includes information about the foundation’s history, what it funds and how to apply for funding. The site also includes a section called "Spotlight on Giving" that features success stories such as the foundation’s life-saving work in support of children’s hospitals, among other critical initiatives.

The web site allowed the Frueauffs to more efficiently respond to grantseeker requests for information. But it also had the effect of attracting many more proposals.

“I think we still, even today, take a deep breath,” Williams laughs. “We still kind of gasp, ‘Oh, gosh, what does this mean? How much will our phone ring now?’”

“At one point, my mom had come in to my office close to our deadline with just a huge pile of letters of inquiry,” Williams remembers. “I had been taking them to bed at night and doing responses via email from bed, just to stay caught up. And Mom said, ‘Oh my gosh, what are we going to do about this?’”

“And I said, ‘Well, this is our job. This is what we do. Nonprofits are supposed to find us.’”

For Williams and the Frueauff family, the question of how high a profile to have, it’s very simple: “If using our name helps further a cause, then use it.”

The mission of the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation is to improve the lives of those in need by awarding grants to non-profit organizations in the areas of higher education, social services, and health and hospitals.  You can learn more about the Frueauff Foundation at its website.

MAY/JUNE 2007:  The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies

Charles Bronfman returned from a trustees' meeting of the Mount Sinai Medical Center with an idea.  Bronfman, Chairman and co-founder with his late wife Andrea of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, had heard of the Medical Center's efforts in the emerging field of personalized medicine.  Dr. Jeffrey Solomon, President of the Philanthropies, recalls, “He came back to the foundation and said, ‘Would we do some homework in this arena?’” 

The result of that homework:  a $12.5-million grant to Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York to establish the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine.  Called a "leadership gift," the grant aims to support a new approach to medicine which utilizes information about a person's genetic make-up to more effectively detect, treat, and prevent disease.  Like many of the Philanthropies' efforts, it represents a significant investment in "the next generation," in this case, the next generation of genetics research and genomics-based medicine.

Currently, medicine operates with a one-size-fits-all, "evidence-based" approach:  symptoms present themselves; various tests are performed; diseases are diagnosed and then treated with appropriate drugs and procedures.  But when every person is different, this approach can have its downside.  Symptoms can present themselves in various ways or not at all for some time, making some disorders difficult to diagnose.  Different people can respond in different ways to the same treatment, making some conditions difficult to treat.  This evidence-based approach, thus, relies on trial-and-error and lacks precision.  Personalized medicine, by contrast, is a genomics-based approach and gives doctors answers based on an individual's unique set of genes in order to reduce uncertainty and error in diagnosis and treatment.

What Dr. Kenneth Davis, President of the Medical Center, hails as "the most important medical revolution taking place today" is not without its critics.  Detractors worry about the expense of designer tests and drugs in an age when many are uninsured and about possible genetic discrimination, such as insurance companies denying coverage on the basis of a person's genetic predispositions.  Advocates contend that personalized medicine is so revolutionary that it will advance medicine beyond the terms of current criticisms.

Solomon asserts, "Personalized medicine is something that will fundamentally alter the medical industry and forever redefine the role of ubiquitous players such as insurance and pharmaceutical companies."  He argues, “If one takes a look at the history of medicine, every time there’s any kind of serious advancement, there are serious public policy issues that emerge. It usually then follows that there’s a debate and change to the laws and regulations to support the best solution to the challenge that is posed."

For Solomon, the Bronfman grant, $12.5 million over the next ten years, "comes at a moment when philanthropy can play a fulcrum kind of role in personalized medicine.  Ultimately, [pharmaceutical companies] are still based on economic models of blockbuster drugs.  They have not yet made the translational shift to much more personalized drugs."  Philanthropy, however, can be what he calls "society's R&D arm."

"Because [philanthropy] is not influenced by either market forces or politics," Solomon contends, "it is uniquely able to evaluate and move on opportunities. Private industry relies on economic models and the market place. Government relies on political drivers, often mitigated by competing forces. However, history demonstrates that once the societal value of a change is observable, those forces change to move both the economy and government. With the potential for personalized medicine, philanthropy is well positioned to play that traditional catalytic role."

When asked why the Mount Sinai Medical Center was chosen as the home for the new Institute, Solomon points to the fact that "it has under one administrative structure and one trustee structure both a medical school and a hospital. That’s a critical variable for real breakthroughs."  Dr. Erwin Bottinger, the Institute's Director, asserts, "The uniquely seamless relationship between our hospital and our medical school has Mount Sinai poised to lead research efforts...and to immediately translate our advances to benefit our patients on a clinical level."

But Solomon also notes the crucial Bronfman family connection to Mount Sinai.  Charles Bronfman's brother Edgar served as a trustee of Mount Sinai Medical Center from 1957 to 1985.  The Center's internal medicine department bears the name of their father and Seagrams founder Samuel Bronfman.  When Charles was asked to serve as a trustee, he did and has done so since 2002.  It was as a trustee that he learned of the Center's efforts in personalized medicine and moved on the opportunity the endeavor presented.

Indeed, the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies are characterized by this desire to catalyze change on behalf of the next generation, whoever that might be.  It is a desire that channels the personal and perhaps arbitrary--but nonetheless meaningful and vital--values, attachments and connections of family into making a difference for others.  The Philanthropies' website states, "In the broadest sense, The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies seeks to nourish the deep and fundamental human desire to belong to a community and to help individuals forge connections between their deeper selves and issues of identity, meaning and community. In so doing, we hope to improve the world." 

The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies is a family of charitable foundations operating in Canada, Israel, and the United States.  You can learn more about the Philanthropies and their work on their website.

APRIL 2007:  Theodore R. & Vivian M. Johnson Scholarship Foundation

“Mr. Johnson felt he had been ‘lucky.’ Those were his words: ‘You know, we’ve been lucky with money.’”

Theodore "Ted" Johnson returned from service as a gunnery officer in World War I and took a job with Merchants Parcel Delivery, a private messenger and delivery service.  Johnson would work his way through college and up in the company, obtaining an MBA at night school and, eventually, a Vice President's position with the company that would become United Parcel Service (UPS).  Having bought stock at every opportunity, Johnson and his wife Vivian soon found themselves incredibly wealthy. 

Malcolm Macleod, President of the foundation that now bears the Johnson name, says that some might have attributed that wealth to Johnson's innate talents, or to his education, or to his work ethic, but Johnson was quick to point to other factors:  “Mr. Johnson felt he had been ‘lucky.’ Those were his words: ‘You know, we’ve been lucky with money.’”  Johnson saw his success as a fortunate collision of all these factors:  getting a quality education, having bought stock in a successful company, working hard, and living in a free society that encouraged it all.

The Johnsons created the Theodore R. & Vivian M. Johnson Scholarship Foundation in 1991 to help those who, through no fault of their own, might not have had the opportunities that led to Ted's success.  The foundation's statement of core values affirms, "We believe that the free market system is the best in the world, but we recognize that some people fail to benefit fully from the system through no fault of their own."  The Foundation would, therefore, "provide financial support to individuals who were qualified to attend college but lacked the financial means to do so."  Macleod relates, “[Ted] chose education because education had always been important to his success, and he believed, rightly I think, that education really was a key to empower people, to get better jobs, to have more choices, to be more independent, to enjoy a better quality of life.”

Today, aided by a 1993 public offering of UPS shares that tripled the foundation's corpus from 1993 to 1999, the $140-million Johnson Scholarship Foundation has distributed more than $44 million in scholarship support.

The Foundation operates a number of “core” scholarship programs, which include scholarships for students attending Palm Beach Atlantic University, disabled students attending universities within the State University System of Florida, and hearing impaired students at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Other elements of the Foundation’s core programming are scholarships for children of UPS Florida employees, support for Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, and support for education of American Indians.

Cleveland Peoples, a student at Florida Atlantic University, speaks to the power of these scholarships to inspire students to success when he contends in the Foundation's 2006 annual report, “This isn’t a 'disability' scholarship. It’s a scholarship based upon their faith that I could move forward and achieve my goals with their help. The [Johnson Scholarship] Foundation not only backed me, but depended upon me – it’s a great motivator.”

Ted Johnson died in 1993 and his son, Theodore R. Johnson, Jr., became the Foundation’s second President.  The increase in Foundation assets around this time provided the opportunity for many new grant programs, the Tribal College Entrepreneurship Scholarship Program and the MBA in American Indian Entrepreneurship among them. 

Macleod, a nephew of Vivian Johnson who joined the board at this time, remembers, "Ted Johnson, Jr. did a lot of site visits to Indian reservations and tribal colleges to find out what the real need was."  The results of his visits were several programs to spur entrepreneurial development, "all driven by the premise that privately owned Native American business represents the best hope for economic betterment on Indian Reservations."  The Foundation's web site declares, "This is not our idea. We have learned from working with and listening to Native American business leaders and educators."

In a 2005 survey, First Nations Development Institute found that graduates from the Tribal College Entrepreneurship Scholarship Program have started at least 93 small businesses and created 118.5 full time equivalent jobs.  The First Nations Survey found that 100 Johnson scholars are working for tribal governments in jobs that require them to use their business skills. 112 of Johnson graduates are working in higher education.  To date, the Foundation has provided more than $8 million to support American Indian education.

The Foundation was established in perpetuity according to the Johnsons' wishes to assure that educational opportunities would be open to future generations, and the foundation's board continues to steward the Johnsons' and the public's trust.  Macleod says, "Johnson wanted this in perpetuity and that was an easy thing for us to accept. We think this is a little jewel that should be nurtured. We feel a responsibility to improve this organization and to hand it down to the next generation in a better state than it was when we found it."  As they continue to support Johnson's founding core programs and develop new initiatives, such as building endowments at many of the colleges with with whom they work, Foundation board members renew their commitment to public accountability with a rare transparency.  Macleod states, "We feel that transparency is really important, and we put it all out there for everybody to see. We’re proud of what we do, and we want people to see it...Foundations enjoy a special place in our legal and tax structure and so we want people to know that we’re doing good. And we want to justify that."

For more on the Johnson Scholarship Foundation and its work, you can view the foundation's history, latest annual report, grants, and financial statements at its website.

MARCH 2007:  The Hill-Snowdon Foundation

Arthur B. Hill, a pharmaceutical salesman with no formal education who worked his way to the board of directors of Johnson & Johnson, created the Arthur B. Hill Foundation in 1959.  For years, the foundation would operate as a "kitchen table" philanthropy with volunteer family members managing the assets and supporting personal interests.  Ashley Snowdon, Arthur Hill's great-granddaughter and now President of the foundation, notes that philanthropy was "very much done [as a] Christmas holiday affair."  Family members, already gathered for the holidays, would meet to discuss the latest round of grants.  By the late nineties, however, the family had become concerned that the foundation should concentrate its energies and become more strategic about its giving.  The foundation that emerged from this process is the $37-million Washington, DC-based, family governed, staff managed Hill-Snowdon Foundation, which supports youth organizing and economic justice.

It is the foundation's focus that allows it to reconcile powerful forces that could otherwise be at odds with one another: How do you balance the professional obligations of trusteeship while respecting the element of family that in many ways makes the fund special?   How does a philanthropy engage individuals but also encourage them to act collectively?  These are challenges faced by many family philanthropies, and the Hill-Snowdon Foundation has found that these forces are not contradictory when viewed in light of its larger family goals.

With the passing of Arthur Hill in 1983 and that of his daughter Lee Hill in 1993, the nineties saw the foundation's assets rise considerably.  A gift from Lee's estate was accompanied by a substantial increase in the value of Johnson & Johnson stock.  By 1995, the foundation was eight times the size it had been just two years earlier.  Ashley Snowdon, just sixteen at the time, became involved along with her fourth-generation siblings Andrew and Elizabeth, when it was apparent that the foundation needed to “get more serious” about its operations and assemble a board to govern in the future.  The foundation took a long look at the grants it was making, found that many of its grants took the form of support for young people, specifically youth leadership.  Working with consultants, it developed its program focus around youth development, which later evolved into youth organizing.  The foundation also eventually made the decision to hire its own staff.  Each of these moves would highlight the "huge tension," as Snowdon mentions, between concern for family involvement and the family's hope that the institution's wealth was spent effectively and accountably, which, for them, meant strategy and professionalism.  While the role of staff in a professionally managed foundation was obvious, the role of family was not.

The foundation, Snowdon declares, "tries to be creative about ways to get board members engaged."  It's a bit of balancing act.  On the one hand, board members want "a meaningful role beyond rubber-stamping staff recommendations."  On the other, board members place great faith in staff expertise and have limited time to devote to the foundation.  Family members are scattered around the country and have full-time jobs of their own.  The concern, says Snowdon, is that their engagement becomes inefficient and burdensome.

To engage the family while respecting their other commitments, the foundation has started publishing a monthly family newsletter and making the transition from meeting twice a year to quarterly, with two or three of the meetings via conference call.  The family also works extensively in small committees, staying engaged on the finance, grants, and executive committees outside of board meetings.  Thus, while the staff has its professional interest and obligation to move the foundation forward, the family board cultivates its personal and familial interests in, as Snowdon says, "making sure that this money is used well."  "None of us... is directly involved with youth organizing or economic justice work," says Snowdon.  "There's a sort of a lay perspective that we bring that I think can be helpful.  But we also recognize that we need to dedicate time to getting smart about these issues to responsibly make decisions for the foundation."

But as staff and trustees each work together around a set of shared goals, how does the family reconcile its desire to engage individuals with its desire to engage the family collectively?  For the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, it was precisely the development of shared goals that allowed them to engage individual family members.  Snowdon points out that, for most of its history, the Hill-Snowdon Foundation operated in a discretionary way, with family supporting projects close to them.  The family soon found this approach unsustainable when it came time to engage the next generation.  Snowdon argues, "If you continue to operate that way, either the pie has got to get a lot bigger... or you've got to rethink that whole mode of operating.  You can't really engage new generations because there's no room for them."  The family took a look at what it was already supporting and found a common interest: youth development.  When the family did this, Snowdon recalls, "people were willing to let go of their individual interests.  There was agreement that the foundation was not the right vehicle to support pet projects."  Instead of offering the next generation family members ever-shrinking pieces of the grantmaking pie, Snowdon encourages families to identify and support common interests.  She also suggests determining roles on the board that meet unique interests.  For instance, those interested less in program can be engaged in the investment side of the philanthropy and vice versa. 

Staff and next generation engagement aside, the foundation is not all that different from when it met at the family’s kitchen table—the Hill-Snowdon Foundation board still focuses on what brings it together as a family.  Now, in addition to the family's holiday gathering and grantmaking, the family makes its site visits together.  Snowdon recalls her site visits as some of her most rewarding experiences as a family trustee.  "I think this happens on family foundation boards all the time," Snowdon laughs.  "You go on a site visit and you sort of fall in love with the work that these organizations are doing and these amazing people you meet, and we absolutely do that."  She remembers spending fourteen hours in a van in the fall of 2001 traveling to meet with different groups working in the Mississippi delta.  "Getting in front of organizations and learning from them - there's just nothing that compares to doing that as philanthropists," she says.  “And there's nothing we've found that’s as effective in engaging board members as doing that collectively...there's no replacing that shared experience."

For more on this family's foundation, a complete history of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation is available on their website.

FEBRUARY 2007:  The Durfee Foundation

In 1935, R. Stanton Avery and his wife Dorothy Durfee Avery founded Kum-Kleen Adhesive Products. Stan provided the product: a new invention of his own design—the first commercially feasible self-adhesive label machine. Dorothy provided the capital: a $50 bank loan using the Ford Model A she had purchased with her schoolteacher’s earnings as collateral. The Avery family would later joke that Stan married Dorothy for her mone