Inspired Stories: Newsletter Volume 6, Fall 2007
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Inspired Leaders
Team Member
Upcoming Events
Resources
Making Change Happen
Inspired Leaders
Monthly we have invitational calls about projects so that donors and their advisors may hear
first hand about cutting edge leadership and initiatives. Tracy facilitates these. If you would like to be invited please call 713.527.7671 or email us.
Team Member
Ernest McMillan
Board Member
Ernest McMillian has devoted his life's work to youth development and community empowerment. Ernest gives to endeavors that he believes truly make a difference. "I expect Inspired Legacies soon to become a genuine force, one helping America strengthen its promise, in word and in deed."
Joanne Reich
Board Member
Joanne Reich currently serves as the Child Protection and Community Assistance Officer and Ministries with Women, Children, and Families for the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church. She also serves as the Chair of the Justice For Women Working Group of the National Council of Churches USA, and as a board member of Interfaith Worker Justice and FaithTrust Institute (working on sexual and domestic violence). Her entire career has been involved with Not For Profit Organizations related to Justice Issues. Joanne received her BA in Economics from Mary Baldwin College and her Masters in Social Work from the University of Houston. Joanne currently resides in Ashland City, TN.
Stan McDonald
Board Member
Stan McDonald is a leader in his community as the chairperson of the social committee of his civic association and at-large board member. He is very active in his community in both the political and social arenas with his hands-on work in the voting process and non-profit organizations. Stan spent years in Human and Special Resources at Fed Ex as well and brings wonderful expertise to Inspired Legacies. He is an award winning poet and leader in his family retreats.
See our whole team.
Upcoming Events
October
8-9, Vermont Community Foundation, Lake Morley, Fairlee, VT.
10-11, Astraea Foundation, NY, NY.
16, PNC Bank, Scranton, PA.
18, Great Houston Community Foundation donor event, Houston, TX.
19-21, Bioneers Conference, Northern California.
22-23, St. Charles Foundation, Portland, OR.
24-25, Austin Community Foundation, Austin, TX.
29-30, PNC Bank, Bridgewater, NJ.
31, Women's Foundation of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN.
November
1, Council of Minnesota Foundations, Minneapolis, MN.
1-4, Women's Donor Network Conference, Los Angeles, CA.
7, Minnesota Women’s Foundation & partners, Minneapolis, MN.
8, U of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.
12 -16, Women Moving Millions, NY, NY.
14, National Council for Research on Women, NY, NY.
15, Childbirth Connections, Legacy Event, NY, NY.
20, San Francisco Release party with The Women's Building, UBS Financial Services, and co-hosting organizations, San Francisco, CA.
View our calendar for more.
Resources
Sixdegrees.org to create a badge that you can easily embed on a blog or social networking profile. Badge includes an image, a description of why you support that cause, a video link, and a links directly to a 501c3 charity.
Beyond Success asks how you can build a lasting legacy. See the book, Beyond Success: Building a Personal, Financial, and Philanthropic Legacy, which offers a legacy planning framework full of actionable steps and insights into philanthropic trends. The site offers a clickable questionnaire for rating your legacy mentorship development.
Foundation Source, the nation's leading provider of support services for private foundations, has been honored as the 2007 Philanthropic Group of the Year at the annual High Net Worth Industry awards sponsored by notable industry publication Private Asset Management.
Please feel free to send us links to resources that address legacy or philanthropic planning and revitalize democracy through citizen participation.
Making Change Happen
There are now some 1.5 million nonprofits to choose from. Each quarter we will link to nonprofits that inspire us and our readers. We urge your own due diligence of these nonprofits.
See our growing list of organizations making change happen.
Receive another Inspired Stories!
We welcome your feedback and ideas at any time! To contribute to the next issue of Inspired Stories please submit by
November 1, 2007. |
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View From the Founder
Legacy Tools
Inspired Products
Legacy Partnerships
Letters to Loved Ones
Transitions
A person's worth is not determined by what he takes away from this world, but by what he leaves behind for it. ~ Tirukral
View from the Founder
“If you look at the data you get depressed, but if you look at the human heart, you know everything’s going to be OK.”
Paul Hawken from the film, “11th Hour”
Facing the 11th Hour of our lives or our planet is overwhelming. As I watched the new 11th Hour film and heard Paul’s wonderful quote, I thought, YES, our inspired legacies are also about the evolution of the heart through making more transparent and deliberate the articulation of our hopes. Then I read Bill Clinton’s new book, Giving. My heart expanded. We are the “how-to” organization for each of these important initiatives.
Inspired Legacies hopes are being expanded, too, by our wonderful three new featured board members, and outpouring of support for the launch of our new book, named by donor educators as “The best and most comprehensive book on philanthropy.”
Editor Nancy Adess and I just completed (with Inspired Legacies’ advisor, Phil Cubeta and a multitude of great organizations and legacy exemplars) our three hundred pages plus CD key source. Our main event this fall will be the release of the expanded third edition of Inspired Philanthropy, Your Step by Step Guide to Creating a Giving Plan and Leaving a Legacy by Jossey-Bass our publisher on Nov. 13th. Join us for a 45 minute free teletrainings. See our flyer for more details. Join us:
- October 17 by invitation for groups listed in the Inspired Philanthropy resource section.
- November 19 at 2pm EST / 11am PST
- November 27 at 8pm EST / 5pm PST
- December 11 at 8pm EST / 5pm PST
- December 18 at 2pm EST / 11am PST
If you want to expand philanthropy or improve your own, you should join one of our free 45 minutes trainings on how to use the book.
We will be sure you are on our mailing list for details. In the training, we will review the use of the book and help those of you who hope to use it for professional training or for your family education. We simply ask that you pass on what you learn and that you make the commitment to buy at least ten of the books from Inspired Legacies. (This is how we recover costs and market other tools and breakthrough concepts.) All we ask is that you are willing to consider before the call, buying within the next 60 days, 10 copies of the book from our office or site.
In our launching enewsletter in November, we will list all donors who are public and also the organizations who are buying from us in advance books or who are participating in our trainings.
We will be in ten cities this fall and up to 30 next year with the addition of our newest team member, our Associate Director, and other trainers promoting transformative philanthropy and legacy planning. Your inspired legacy planning matters. Don’t miss the expanded Inspired Philanthropy for your philanthropy library. Review the Table of Contents.
New Programs
We are incubating a new comprehensive fund, called the Tipping Point Fund with the Tipping Point Network members and a leadership circle called the Transforming Philanthropy Leadership Circle. See the whole of our program work in design our IL program chart 2007-2010 (pdf). which resulted from our staff and board’s good works.
Luis and I, along with our local board and volunteer team will be focused on Houston and Texas work as we develop Our Giving Center, Houston’s learning center for donors, advisors and nonprofit leaders. This month we roll out our first program for Resourceful Women of Houston, with promise to expand over the next years with funding and partnerships for all of Texas. We also will have programs for nonprofit leaders working as emerging managers and founders who need succession plans and support. Fundraising coaching, legacy mentoring, youth giving curriculum, and legacy tools are also part of our offerings.
We are excited to be growing and contributing to a more inspiring and effective future for all. The balance of our democracy is shared by the triad of government and business and our nonprofit sector’s contributions. It’s time we invested more in the capacity of our nonprofits and leaders.
Join us!
Tracy Gary
Email me your story: Tracy@Inspired Legacies.org or share your concerns and best practices and have a wonderful fall.
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Legacy Tools
Take a peak at one of the exercises in the forthcoming book. This exercise explores who you are planning for. Who Are You Planning For? (pdf)
Used with permission of Tracy Gary from the new Inspired Philanthropy:
Your Step by Step Guide to Creating a Giving Plan or Leaving a Legacy. Nov.2007, Jossey Bass (with over 60 worksheets or exercises that lead up to this!)
Use Policy:
We encourage you to use our materials. We would like to know that you are using them so please fill out our contact form or email your proposed use and full contact information. Feedback is encouraged. Please also make a donation to Inspired Legacies to commiserate with the value you find in it's use. This helps us cover costs and create more tools for you and the world.
We welcome your feedback and ideas at any time!
Look for our next issue
in mid-November! |
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Inspired Products
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming
Paul Hawken
352 pages, Viking Pres
In Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming, a leading environmentalist and social activist, Paul Hawken, examines the worldwide movement for social and environmental change. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture.
Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to re-imagine our relationship to the environment and one another.
GIVING: How Each of Us Can Change the World
Bill Clinton
256 pages, Knopf
GIVING: How Each of Us Can Change the World takes an inspiring look at how individual endeavors can save lives and solve problems. Through the stories of amazing people and dedicated organizations, President Clinton offers compelling examples of both citizen and corporate activism at work in the world today.
Bill Clinton is on the bandwagon to mobilize the country and world on especially effective global giving and nonprofit engagement. We urge everyone to read his book which is full of role models and projects in October.
Both are great bookends in your inspired giving library. Then before Thanksgiving, and National Philanthropy Day (November 17th), tune into Inspired Philanthropy’s expanded 3rd version, as your next read in November for how to plan, deepen, evaluate and refine your giving and legacy plans.
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Legacy Partnerships
This summer, we had many occasions to work with donors and families on their legacies. Here are headlines of a few of our findings:
- Even the most careful of our clients have families that, upon their parent's death, did not feel prepared for the complexities of the tax and trust situations that had been set up. Even when meetings prior to death had occurred, beneficiaries and probate attorneys are still in tension and often have clear conflict of interest. Heirs want to pay less; attorneys feel they must be, like surgeons avoiding malpractice, overly careful. Costs or potential costs rise, and we all get distressed.
The solution: Clarity of planning, adequate time in advance, and post death for these needs. In short, anticipating complexity and preparing for it so more intent is understood, long in advance of crisis or life’s finality.
- We encourage clear intentions and their expression to adult children and grandchildren, even in the last leg of life. Margaret Foster, at age 94 decided to spark her grandson Patrick’s new college graduate status, with a visit for his twenty second birthday and a gift. We accompanied Margaret as she gave Patrick her family history about working and earning her way as a nurse and school administrator. Today, through wise saving, planning and real estate investing, Margaret is passing on some of her money to Patrick as well as her adult kids to reduce her estate. She’s also creating incentives for Patrick’s earning beyond his current summer job. Patrick meanwhile gets support from Inspired Legacies for connecting to peers and keeping his own planning moving.
Margaret and Patrick. Photo credit: Robert Foster
Lesson’s learned from Margaret at age 94. We’re never too old to extend our story and guidance for the benefit of future generations. Incentives help!
Take a good look at our projects section, Making Change Happen: Friend of IL, Jenny Ladd did and passed on a resource called SisterMentors to a friend. This is a wonderful testament to the human heart and a legacy of generosity. Jenny had "passed on" funds to one woman to help her get her doctorate and that woman "passed on" the funds to another woman to help her get her degree as a nurse midwife. Years later when the second woman had saved up enough, she "passed on" the funds again and SisterMentors was the catalyst for her opportunity to do so. Here's the story of how $2,500+ keeps getting passed on to help women fulfill their dreams. (with thanks to Dr. Shireen Lewis for her write up.)
Penny Patch “Passes On” Financial Gift to SisterMentors
Inspired Legacies Encourages “Passing On” Funds to Women to Help With Educational Expenses as a Social Justice Strategy
Anti-racist activist and Nurse-Midwife, Penny Patch, recently contacted Tracy Gary with a wonderful gift and an extraordinary intention which we hope others will replicate and use as a model. The model is a gift to one woman to help her with her educational expenses with the intent that the woman will later “pass on” the gift to another woman to help her pursue her education. The gift will live on indefinitely.
Penny has “passed on” $2,600 to SisterMentors, a project of EduSeed, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, profiled on Inspired Legacies’ website. SisterMentors helps women of color to complete their dissertations and get their doctorate. The women in turn, while in the program, pay it forward by mentoring girls of color in middle and high school inspiring them to go to college.
Penny is designating her gift to any SisterMentors woman who is close to completing her dissertation so she can take time off from work to focus on writing the dissertation. This gift comes at a special time for SisterMentors as the program celebrates its tenth anniversary and its success of helping 26 women to earn doctorates and of sending its first group of girls off to college this fall.
Penny’s gift to SisterMentors comes through a lineage of three women who support women’s education and who are committed to social justice. The lineage began with Jennifer (Jenny) Ladd, a philanthropic adviser, coach and trainer who co-founded Class Action, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing issues of class privilege and oppression “into the realm of public conversation and exploration.” Jenny passed on $2,500 to Sue Thrasher to help Sue with her expenses while Sue was pursuing a doctorate in education. Sue agreed to "pass on" the funds to another woman pursuing her education.
Sue was a founder of the 1960s Southern Student Organizing Committee, an organization devoted to working with white college students on the issue of civil rights. After receiving her doctorate in education, Sue passed on the $2,500 she had received to Penny Patch to help Penny pay expenses while earning her degree as a nurse-midwife.
Like Jenny and Sue, Penny is no ordinary woman. In 1962, at the age of 18, Penny dropped out of Swarthmore College to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), spending the next three years working in the Black Freedom Movement in Georgia and Mississippi. She was the first white woman to work on a SNCC field project in the deep south.
The SisterMentors woman who receives Penny’s gift will pass it on to another SisterMentors woman so that she, too, can complete the dissertation and get the doctorate. And the passing on will continue …
Dr. Shireen Lewis (far right) and SisterMentors Ph.D. Graduates
Inspired Legacies is encouraging donors, especially those committed to social justice, to model Jenny, Sue and Penny’s work and “pass on” funds to women pursuing their education. We hope that these women will catalyze a movement of other generous souls who will help hundreds, if not thousands, of women to complete their education.
Inspired Legacies is happy to dialogue with donors and potential donors so that they can use this model as inspiration for their legacy. Contact us by email at tracy@inspiredlegacies.org or phone 713-527-7671.
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Letters to Loved Ones
Dear Adam,
On the occasion of Rosh Hashanah, I am giving you the seeds of my legacy plan. I hope we can discuss it and will, over time, come to be partners on all that it means. I have sent a copy to your mom and sister as well. We will have a family meeting within a few months to go over it, with some help to answer questions. No, I am not ill, in fact, I am waking up. I have just read some good books on legacy and giving, two of them Clinton’s and Hawken's books, and am eager to be more active in giving. I hope we can do more together.
I think it’s time we collaborated as a family and talked about our impact and our good fortune. I want us to be as fluent in the language of giving as we are in investing.
I am eager to set up ways to incentivize giving in our family. Let’s talk about how best to do that. Should it be a foundation or do you think we should just give individually and share more ideas but maintain privacy? I want to speak with my advisors and have you present along with your sister. Are you open to being there and thinking with me and your mother on this? How should we handle our grandkids education? We want to start an education fund now.
I am so honored to be your father and proud to be a granddad now. I am eager to learn more about how you, and how your family, as it expands, will be expressing your own generosity and care for the world around us. Do you have a giving and legacy plan, we wonder? Can we share notes and discuss it. We are so blessed. You are part of my new year’s happiness. Know it and congratulations on your contributions to our expanding family. You and Beth have made us very, very proud.
Love, Dad
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Transitions
Brooke Astor
Mrs. Astor died August 13th. Tracy Gary shares her experience of Mrs. Astor, “As a teenager, I remember meeting Mrs. Astor as part of one of my mother’s charitable events. Her advice when she heard I was working that summer for a nonprofit, ‘Oh you will have a great life if you continue to visit and work with nonprofits!’ We make a deep bow to her years of commitment and her active engagement and support of so many who sought her generosity.”
Mrs. Astor was able to leverage her gifts by using her reputation to attract addition funding to projects. The NY Times obituary points to the value of the $195 million she donated through the Astor Foundation: "Although the foundation was not large compared with powerhouses like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie, its contributions often served as seed money: others followed, knowing that if Mrs. Astor had given her seal of approval to a cause, it was worthy of support."
Joe Breiteneicher
The head of the Philanthropic Initiative, Joe Breiteneicher, died on June 22 at age 62. He helped wealthy people discover the most effective ways to give away millions, which he did with great passion and humor.
"He loved giving his typical spiel to wealthy families," Marsha Breiteneicher said. He challenged them, she said, to think hard about their wealth, asking: "How much do you need? How much is enough? After you take care of your children, what do you care about? What moves you? What do you want to do with that money?" (Boston Globe article)
He believed that donors were often cautious and uncreative and urged them to forge strategies that would yield greater results. Inspired Legacies extends its care and respect to our peers at the Philanthropic Initiative and Joe’s family for this terrible loss.
Anita Roddick
Anita Roddick, founder of the cruelty-free cosmetics and environmentally sensitive store, The Body Shop, died Sept. 10 of a brain hemorrhage. The Body Shop's led the promotion of recycling and used suppliers among indigenous people in developing countries.
"I came out of the womb as an activist. I'm part of the 1960s; it's in my DNA. So the idea of dying with loads of money doesn't appeal to me at all. I want to use the last years I have to get my hands dirty working for civil change. I want to be able to see the positive difference that money can make by giving away what I have," she said in June. (Washington Post obituary) "I have a deep sense that to accumulate wealth is obscene," she told Time in 2004. “And when the community gives you your wealth, I have a strong belief that you give it back." Anita gave back: money, ideas, and models.
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Correction and apology due:
If you want an inspiring author and remarkable activist presenter, you'll find Greg Forbes Siegman at his web site, Gregforbes.com. His full name was inadvertently shortened in our last newsletter and his photo credit also omitted his full name.
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