CHARITABLE PLANNING

Gillian Howell

These tips can help you involve family members with different values, interests and talents.

ANY PRIVATE FOUNDATIONS HAVE AN EXPRESS goal of uniting their families in charitable work. Yet family members are very often different people when it comes to their values, interests, strengths, talents, personalities, ages and locations. That can present challenges when they want to run a foundation together.

For that reason, we’ ve come up with five ideas to share with your foundation clients to help them fulfill their charitable goals while celebrating the individuality of their family members.

1. Try New Charitable Approaches

If members of a family have different interests, it can help to expand the way the foundation pursues its mission. For example, it could support hunger relief and regularly fund a food pantry in one family member’ s home community— but it could also support research on the root causes of food insecurity or fund projects to develop pest-resistant crops, different yet related initiatives that can be accomplished from anywhere and might appeal to the interests of more than one family member. Such a multi-pronged approach would engage more of the members and allow for new discoveries and perspectives on the foundation’ s hunger relief mission, helping it achieve greater impact.

2. Expand Reach And Impact

Just as businesses expand their operations to multiple locations, foundations can do the same with their philanthropy when family members live far away from one another and want to bring charitable activity back to their own communities. Doing so can extend a foundation’ s reach and impact while providing the distant members more hands-on roles in their families’ charitable missions.

For example, a foundation that runs a school lunch assistance program in its hometown could initiate a similar effort in the communities where its non-local members reside. Those members have the advantage of building on the successes of the original programs while modifying them for the needs of each new community. As the programs expand and diversify, it increases the ability of program directors to learn and be creative in their endeavors.

If members of a family have different interests, it can help to expand the way the foundation pursues its mission.

3. Offer Discretionary Grant Making

Foundations typically take a team approach to making grants, with board members discussing the merits of various causes and collectively deciding which to support. Sometimes they give their members a portion of grant funds to donate independently at their own discretion on the foundation’ s behalf— without obtaining full board consensus. But as long as the funds are granted in accordance with a foundation’ s charter and its parameters, the practice is legal and, in many ways, beneficial.

By giving some members more discretion, a foundation can better engage family members, especially younger members who might want to support causes beyond the established charitable focus of the foundation. Such an approach also fosters creativity among family members and extends the foundation’ s reach and impact by supporting causes and organizations it hasn’ t funded previously.

4. Embrace‘ PhilTech’ Technology can play a helpful role in the operations of a family foundation. It also

JULY / AUGUST 2025 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | 19