Inspired Stories: Newsletter Volume 12, Spring 2009

We announce our new Associate Director, Jonita Fair-Payton, M.S., M.B.A. Team Member Jonita Fair-Payton, M.S., M.B.A. Jonita Fair-Payton has worked for over 10 years in both the nonprofit and for profit sector. She has worked fearlessly to be an advocate for those whose voices are often ignored; the homeless, the unemployed, at-risk children and disenfranchised communities. From establishing nonprofit/business collaborations to developing and implementing programs and services, Jonita has a strong background in nonprofit and business operations. "In these crucial times, I believe that Inspired Legacies is uniquely positioned to create strategic partnerships to educate, train and prepare our constituents for lasting relationships that could have long term affects on the communities in the Houston Area. With strong donor, advisor and nonprofit collaborations Inspired Legacies can truly transform the way in which the community perceives, receives and practices giving. It is my privilege to be Associate Director of Inspired Legacies and I am looking forward to serving with such a dedicated staff and board." See also our whole team. Upcoming Events FEBRUARY 11 Transforming Philanthopy, IL lunch, Houston, TX 12-17 Women's Fund of CA, San Francisco, CA 18-19 Dallas Women's Foundation, donor events, Dallas, TX 20-22 Weekend with family office in Charleston, SC MARCH 12-13 New York for Gloria Steinem's 75th birthday, Ms. Foundation, NY, NY 17-18 Women's Fund of CA workshops, LA, CA APRIL 3-4 Donor event, Dallas, TX 20-21 Austin Community Foundation Workshop, Austin, TX 22 Chartered Advisors in Philanthropy, pre-conference meeting, Chicago, IL 23-25 Advisors in Philanthropy, Chicago, IL 24-28 Tipping Point Network Conference, Sequoia Seminars, in No. CA 29-May 2 Women's Funding Network, Atlanta, GA MAY 2 Justice for Children event, Houston, TX 4-5 Astraea Fnd event, Houston, TX 7 River Bend Women's Foundation, Davenport, IA 13 Pew Charitable Trust, staff training, Delaware 15-17 Conf. for Global Transformational/Landmark Education, Burlingame, CA 17 Woodcock Family Foundation, San Francisco, CA 27-29 Wisconsin Cream City and Milwaukee Fund for Women, Milwaukee, WI 30 IL Board meeting, Houston, TX View our calendar for more. Resources Connectipedia - www.connectipedia.org A wiki-style database of organizations and topics for the greater good. Facing the Financial Crisis: 10 Smart Things Your Board Can Do Now, from Board Source - *.pdf format Kids and Consumption http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin /commerce.cgi?display=home Read about Kids and Consumption rivercityfamilyvillage.blogspot.com /2008/10/kids-and-consumption.html Please feel free to send us links to resources that address legacy or philanthropic planning and revitalize democracy through citizen participation. Making Change Happen Inequality and the Common Good, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, focuses on the danger that growing inequality poses for the U.S. democracy, economic health and civic life. Chuck Collins and Alison Goldberg are helping shape ideas for new revenues for the common good. mail: 1112 16th St. NW, Washington, DC. 20036 phone: 202-234-9382 http://extremeinequality.org/ The New American Dream helps Americans consume responsibly to protect the environment, enhance quality of life, and promote social justice. phone: 301-891-3683 or 1-877-68-DREAM mail: 6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 900, Takoma Park, MD 20912 http://www.newdream.org/ The Algebra Project Quality public school education as a constitutional right. Join their initiative! Support their transformative work! mail: 99 Bishop Allen Drive Cambridge, MA 02139 phone: (617) 491-0200 http://www.algebra.org/ See our growing list of organizations making change happen. Be sure to check our next issue in June 2009! Would you like to donate to support Inspired Legacies and Inspired Stories? 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 May 1.

View from the Founder

We've Got to Move!

"Spend, Save, Panic?" the headline said. I quickly added "PLAN!" as I moved through the airport listening to the economic news and the buzz of concern around me. I was on the way to facilitate a dialogue in a panicked family sidelining their planning with paralysis.

How are you doing in the worst economic times of most of our lives? Are you as confused and rocked as most of us? We do care. Can we help you plan or find advisors? We are here to serve, and there is NO more important thing to do now than to consider options and get professional advisors' help in these changing times.

Last December, we worked right up until New Year's Eve to help meet organizational budgets, including our own. For as hard as the local, regional, national and global government stories are, our hearts dance between supporting you, the advisors, donors and leaders who also care about our nonprofit sector.

Cash flow trickles, if it moves at all, for most of us. Prioritizing is essential. Where will I put my social, influence, courage, creative and financial capital, such that it is?

We are stepping up to our charge. Support us to Grow Great Donors and Their Leadership during these times. Invest in the future, in gold, by weaving intergenerational wisdoms with us. Hear our strategic steps forward, and respond with yours.

1. Building Texas services. Inspired Legacies' welcomes Jonita Fair-Payton, M.S., M.B.A., who joined us in January as Associate Director. Jonita oversees our finances and our Texas work including our Leader of Color Institute and our Texas donor, advisor and nonprofit services.
2. Providing supportive coaching. We are offering more coaching for nonprofit leaders, donors, their families and advisors. With tightening travel budgets we are here to support you by phone or in person. I still do the majority of this coaching, but we have a network of wealth coaches as well.
3. Offering educational workshops. Last year I presented at 120 workshops, for 45 nonprofit and for profit clients, for 1-2 days each, in about 40 cities. This year we have about 15 clients and 40 workshops or keynotes scheduled so far. We've added more Associates with varied fees to serve your needs. Book us for the future; mention this newsletter, and we will give you 10% off our daily rate. Or just call and let us help you or your favorite organization plan its legacy, donor or family education events. Call me, Tracy @ 713-527-7671 x1 or email tracy@inspiredlegacies.org.
4. Developing and sharing more donor education materials. We are the largest provider of donor education materials in the country. We are so grateful to consultants and writers, Karen Payne and Sondra Shaw-Hardy, for completing a draft of our Youth Giving Curriculum. We will be piloting it beginning in May this year. Thanks to our sponsors, it's soon to be available online with support services and consulting by Inspired Legacies and our extended team. We also have our Inspired Philanthropy tools, and, with gratitude to Changemakers, our Donor Partner tools (*.pdf format) and special tools for donors of color, advisors and nonprofit leaders.

As we step up to inspire the next generation of leaders and donors, we tip our hat to you, our 9000 email readers, our 40 clients and our 65 remarkable donors. Together we have grown Inspired Legacies to a $425,000 national hub and organization in just three years. Given the state of our nonprofit sector, who doesn't need more great donors? Please make donor education and leadership a priority in your giving and training ahead.

Will you help keep us moving and in flow for the future with a donation of any size by credit card or by pledge today so we can keep hearts and hopes of key transformational leaders planning and co-creating a better future for all.

Thank you!
Tracy Gary, Founder and Director, Inspired Legacies

Share your concerns and best practices.

See the services IL offers.

Legacy Tools

Inspired Legacies has the rights to use Tracy's materials, so we have made them public with her agreement. Advisors, both philanthropic and financial, can use the workbook for donors, "Inspired Philanthropy: Creating a Giving Plan and Leaving a Legacy" as well as work with their clients using our dedicated site for the book, www.inspiredphilanthropy.org.

IF you click there on RESOURCES, you will find downloadable pdfs of all the exercises in the book. We ask only that you give us feedback such as this quote, from Rachel McDonough, a CFP at Merrill Lynch in Minneapolis.

Her clients said of Rachel's presentation, using our tools and her own wisdom, of course:

Ms. McDonough's was the very best presentation on personal philanthropy and legacy giving that I have ever heard, and I'm including all of the classes I've ever taken anywhere... ...Her follow-up remarks after the giving levels exercise were some of the most important for me personally...that my stretches to make even $100 donations do change the world. I can be a philanthropist!

With thanks to the Women's Foundation of CA for reformatting our tools, here's a way to get moving ahead on your giving plans and transformational goal and giving actions this year.

Transformational Philanthropy: A Practical Guide and Worksheet (*.pdf format)

Inspired Products

Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth
A Declaration of Independence from Wall Street by David Korten
Agenda for a New Economy offers bold economic reforms that attack the underlying cause of the current economic collapse, not just it's symptoms.
http://www.davidkorten.org/NewEconomyBook

For the Greater Good
We are honored to be part of Friedrike Merck's remarkable project and site on women activists. Her site is a fascinating collage of diverse women leaders and their photos, all shot and interviewed by Ms. Merck. Visit http://www.forthegreatergoodwomen.org. The goal of the site is to serve as conduit among women activists and their work, organizations, and ideals, hopefully inspiring further connection with many of the women and their favorite project for expanded social activism. Brava, Friedrike! Warning: It takes a while to load.

Seven Rules for Talking with your Kids about the Financial Crisis: by Gregory Ramey, PhD
www.childrensdayton.org/ramey/Columns
/Financial_Crisis.html

Your Money or Your Life, New Edition, introduction by Vicki Robbins
/12/03/about-the-new-edition/

Legacy Partnerships

Inspired InKnowVision is a coaching partnership with Inspired Legacies and InKnowVision. They are a national consulting and marketing firm and a leader in the design and development of wealth transfer planning and income tax solutions for independent advisors who serve affluent families. We are supporting twenty of their advisors to engage more of their clients in philanthropy.

Bolder Giving and Inspired Legacies: We are partnering for new capacity building resources. Here's our two pager on our partnership. If interested in supporting our collaboration, we seek to raise $150k for each organization from new sponsors and funders by June of 2009. Call Tracy at 713-527-7671.

Texas women's giving rocks! At a meeting jointly sponsored by the Dallas Women's Foundation and the Women's Funding Network in January of 2009, over 7 cities and 10 funding circles or women's funds. Inspired Legacies was represented. New donors are coming forth to be sure that the women and girls of Texas, and their leadership and their needs for extra support during these hard times are being addressed. For information, email Tracy @ tracy@inspiredlegacies.org.

We welcome bequests and also living giving for this important initiative.

Texas Women's Funds Network, Jan. 2009

Letters to Loved Ones

Dear President Obama and citizens co-creating our future,

We honor your courage to right our countries' imbalances. Today we commit to new consciousness, new ways of living and giving and collective hope. We will reach out to those in need in our families, non profits, businesses and communities. And we will shine the light on those who are challenged and infirm, those whose innovations deserve our investment and influence, and to those we cherish as the leaders who will take us into a brighter future.

We pledge also to new levels of sustainability and to be watchful and responsible in not permitting greed to run our lives or ruin the lives of others.

We shall find new ways to plan, to gain greater consciousness with our families and advisors, and to propel ourselves to greater mindfulness and our full potential, lifting all we can as we move forward together. We will pay our fair share, and shape our heralds of democracy to reform: our nonprofits, our government and our businesses to serve our shared interests and the betterment of our whole society.

But above all we honor your leadership, and pray for our collective will to make the hard choices of this time and to realign our values and practices for the commons. May we be connected and faithful together on this path, seeking love and transcending all fears. We shall transform. We shall thrive. We shall build together a new American dream. For this we pray. Towards these goals, we take responsible action.

Your family, your citizenry

Gratitudes & Transitions

Gratitude for the legacy of Joan Bavaria, who promoted socially responsible investing. Joan Bavaria passed away last fall. Her work in socially responsible investing spanned nearly three decades. In the early '80s she launched the Social Investment Forum. Joan went on to found Ceres, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies as well as Trillium Asset Management Corp where she was also chief executive. As the primary author of what became known at the Ceres Principles, Joan Bavaria helped establish a 10-point corporate conduct code. In the late '90s, Ceres with the United Nations, launched the Global Reporting Initiative. We honor Joan's enormous impact and carry forth her important work.

Also, Edward Willits, father of Kate Hyatt, and entrepreneur in Corona, CA in the citrus industry, died in December 2008. We honor Kate and her now deceased father and their family for their commitment to assuring that the farm workers in their family business were cared for, and also for their family commitment to preserving the best practices of smaller farmers and respect and preservation of historic agriculturally significant lands. A bow to Kate for her influence and example as well.