Inspired Stories: Newsletter Volume 5, Summer 2007
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Team Member
Upcoming Events
Resources
Making Change Happen
Team Member
Luis Gilberto Rivas
Operations Manager
Working with his fourth nonprofit, Luis is an experienced operations and systems manager. His twelve year career includes exemplary organizations such as the Girl Scouts of South Texas Council, The Children’s Museum of Houston, and the Houston Area Women’s Center. Luis volunteers his time with the Houston chapter of PLAG and Hyde Park United, a neighborhood civic association. A graduate of Texas A&M University, Luis credits his mother and grandmother for inspiring him, at a young age, to work for social change.
“I’m excited to be part of all that is Inspired Legacies and look forward to supporting and contributing to its work. With projects youth giving circles and future local chapters of EPIP, I will help mobilize, inspire, guide, and transform young people – both locally and nationally – as they begin to take the reigns as the next generation of philanthropists. After all, it’s what we leave behind.”
See our whole team.
| If you want to book Tracy Gary as author and inspiring speaker or workshop leader for your donors, please do so soon. Check out our calendar for available dates. Dates for late October through June 2008 will fill up five months in advance, so begin your planning now. For details email us. |
Upcoming Events
June 28-30 : Threshold Conference, Connecticut.
July 13-14 : Fund for Idaho, Boise, Idaho.
July 17-20 : Tipping Point Network,
Gold Lake, Colorado.
September 19-20 : South Natick Community Foundation, Boston, Massachusetts.
View our calendar for more.
Resources
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 1.7 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 September 1, 2007. |
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View From the Founder
Legacy Tools
Inspired Products
Legacy Partnerships
Letters to Loved Ones
View from the Founder
Happy Summer! As you travel on your journeys this summer, ask yourself these questions:
- What dream are you holding yourself back from and why?
- How could you have a greater dream for your family, community or the world?
- If you died now, what would your legacy be?
It’s the season for families and kids out of school of summer vacations and camp and service opportunities, and transitions. Here at Inspired Legacies it’s our time to honor our founding staff person, Lorrie Lampson, and welcome Luis Gilberto Rivas as our Operations Manager. Lorrie has followed her Scottish born sweetheart to run an inn with his family! We will always be grateful for her servant leadership and expertise. Luis has been with us for nearly two months and brings enthusiasm and efficiency to our work of transforming giving and communities. Luis works on our Youth Giving Circle resources, among many projects, as we melt in Houston this summer.
The trends we see for families as many of you gather to see each other are:
Trend #1 — Parents express concern that their teens and twenty-somethings do not seem to be working as they did “at their ages” – yet the work ethic, discipline, and support has never been steadfastly offered. Suggestion: Try setting goals together with incentives and stick to the plan! My friend Kim offer her son Ben her car when he gets his license, and insurance if he can buy the car for $1000. And she’s supporting him to save and learn more about budgeting.
Mark and Erica have tied any future travel abroad for their 18 year old to: 1. final grades of a B average and above; 2. verifiable service hours of 100 hours per year; and 3. savings of $1,500.00 or more from two summer jobs. All these requirements would have to be met before they will give their travel blessing (and a matching gift to sweeten the accomplishments).
Trend #2 — Teens, twenty-, thirty- and forty-somethings are worried about their "sandwiched generation" parents and caring for their fast aging grandparents. These changing times can be anxiety producing in all their complexities. Fears about aging, money, and global warming seem to be compounded by our denial or lack of significant behavior changes. We invite you to read and use, The Low Carbon Diet as well as resume family meetings or conference calls, emails, and family gatherings as key times to share concerns and plans.
What will you do with your family this summer, large or small, to make a difference? Greg Forbes Siegman, a young change agent wrote, The First Thirty, a book about his efforts to make a difference. Greg inspires people to make a big difference even if they start small.
Greg Forbes Siegman with Tracy Gary in Chicago.
Photo credit: Greg Forbes Siegman.
Named after the thirtieth birthday (11-10-02) of educator and
artist Greg Forbes Siegman and his belief people thirty and under can
and should make a difference. The 11-10-02 Foundation breaks down
racial, cultural, social and generational barriers and stereotypes,
while also funding grants and scholarships for need-based students as
well as the schools and organizations that assist them.
Come! Let us consider, together, what large-scale, legacy-building behavioral transformation could be. Let us convene our families and bring about the conversations and then changes, collectively. Small steps do matter.
Our own book, Edition III, Inspired Philanthropy: How to be an Effective Donor During Your Lifetime and Beyond--Your STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE to Creating a Giving Plan will be out in mid-October with a formal release in November. It includes 100 new pages and 35 new worksheets.
Would you like to train others in being more strategic donors? We will be holding trainings for donor and legacy organizers and philanthropic advisors (including organizations and foundations who want to use the new workbook for donors, advisors and nonprofits) through teleconference training in early August and again in September. Please contact us so we may keep you informed of details. The full agenda will be available by the end of July along with the table of contents of the book.
Email me your story: Tracy at Inspired Legacies.org or share your concerns and best practices and have a wonderful summer.
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Legacy Tools
Working to convene your family? Here are some tools for Families in Transition that ask the tough questions we need to discuss within our families when different ideas about what matters to us gets in the way of our love or acceptance for each other.
Our Letter to Loved Ones this month offers a sample for approaching family about using a facilitator/mediator.
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 late September! |
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Inspired Products
Classified
by Karen Pittelman and Resource Generation
with illustrations by Molly Hein.
Classified is a guide for people with class privilege who are tired of cover-ups, who are ready to dig through the buried files and figure out how their privilege really works. Complete with comics, exercises and personal stories, Classified gives its readers the tools they need to stop hiding their privilege and instead put it to work.
We encourage you to see several exercises: the using money for social change actions plan on pages 148-154 and the using privilege for social change action plan on pages 176-179.
The First Thirty
by Jillip Naysinthe Paxson
Based on the true story of Jefferson Award for Public Service honoree
Greg Forbes Siegman, The First Thirty tells the tale of one person's
efforts to build a nonprofit organization from the ground up, their efforts to make a difference in the 'world outside their window', the influences which shaped that pursuit, and the thirty lessons learned from the setbacks and successes along the way. It includes a focus on issues common to nonprofit and philanthropic organizations like: establishing your mission, creating your logo, raising funds, motivating volunteers, planning your first big Gala, developing Boards, dealing with media, marketing your program, and points in between.
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Legacy Partnerships
This Spring, we have launched a pilot project, Inspired Leaders, in which we invite
donors, funders and key community influencers to listen in on an hour long call with an “Inspired Leader.” This year, thus far, we have met the founders and staff of Reuniting America, Youth Give, the National Council for Research on Women and
finally this month, David Gershon of the Empowerment Institute.net (Cool America plan, and the author of The Low Carbon Diet—A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds!).
If you’d like to help sponsor this program area going forward, for a mere $5000 per year, for hundreds of thousands of potential value monthly, please let Tracy know. We hope to add a similar program for the Texas area, where we are located, and also seek sponsors.
| If you want to book Tracy Gary as author and inspiring speaker or workshop leader, please do so soon. Check out our calendar for available dates. Dates for late October through June 2008 will fill up five months in advance, so begin your planning now. For details email us. |
We have also partnered with Women Moving Millions to unlock million dollar gifts by women for women and girls through gifting to women's funds.
Tracy in Nepal celebrating International Women's Day and TEWA. Photo credit: Dorothy Abbott.
Tracy shares about her Spring travel abroad:
I had the opportunity to meet friends from the Global Fund for Women in Nepal to celebrate both International Women’s Day and the tenth anniversary of TEWA, the Nepal Women’s Fund. (Thank you to Dorothy Abbott for her spectacular photos of the Nepal trip and her service to so many.) I gained perspective, once again, on our community here in the US and our families. Nepal, when I first visited in the early 1990’s, had been the third poorest country in the west. Now it is filled with the grace that comes from
awareness and collaboration at the highest level. The women and men of Nepal are becoming the center of the global women’s movement with their new center and elegant
campus and enterprises. Here we are in our silos of abundance. There they are with the Maoist insurgencies slowly easing, and they are risking all by building community with local craftsmen and women all working together to build their dream. They know the true benefits of interdependency. Inspired Leaders and the people of Nepal both show and teach us how following a dream and truly working together, we can leave a lasting legacy for ourselves and the world.
Other opportunities to build partnerships include media exposure with Bolder Giving in the Christian Science Monitor. Tracy also did a podcast with Tactical Philanthropy. Additionally, recent press clippings include articles in Town and Country, Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the Houston Chronicle.
Tracy; Phil Cubeta, Co-chair of ILs Advisory Board; and Jean Russell, Communications Consultant to IL, at Inspired Legacy Partners event in Chicago. Photo credit: Michael Maranda.
Together with Phil Cubeta, Inspired Legacies sponsored a small pre-meeting of Inspired Legacy Partners, to the annual Advisors in Philanthropy gathering. The diversity of the 35 attendees led to a greater awareness of the disciplines and perspectives at work in legacy planing. We appreciate everyone's insights and sharing around mapping the field and providing strategies around the legacy process.
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Letters to Loved Ones
Dear family,
This time of transition is difficult for all of us. And I wonder: isn't the greatest legacy of our parents our connection with each other? Isn't it worth preserving at all cost?
I suggest we use a facilitator, wealth counselor, coach or some trusted third party-advisor now to help us get on page with each other and to truly listen to each other. Then we can come to some consensus together on priorities and next steps. How we do this is so important to our sanity and to keeping this family together. Would you do this for our family please?
Here's how it could likely work:
- We each bring 1-2 recommendations to the table of people we have heard or are suggested would be good. A person someone in a similar situation has used. Someone we can check references on.
- We write up a statement of our goals and hopes.
- We have 1-2 of us interview the candidates.
This all takes a few hours of the next month. Then, in a month, the consultant emails us questions based on our goals for working with them, and interviews each family member confidentially or asks questions of us each, privately by email. We meet and get a summary and guidance and have someone to help facilitate our planning and dialogue.
It's all done over 2-3 or even 6 months. We have help. We pay a little, a few thousand dollars for preserving our mutual respect.
We carry forward our family care and love. This to me is a vital necessity. I ask for your agreement or willingness.
Your loving family member,
Joshua
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