Family Foundations: Building the Family Vision

One of the most important aspects of a family’s legacy planning can be philanthropy. Family philanthropy can be thought of as the organized charitable giving by several members of a family to achieve a unified goal. It is more than the annual giving of one individual or married couple, though such giving is critically important in its own right. Perhaps the key distinguishing feature of family philanthropy is the presence of a larger collective vision. Whereas an individual might be moved to donate to a cause more or less spontaneously, for example, following a natural disaster, or following a change in life circumstance (recovery from a serious medical condition or a child attending private school, for instance), family philanthropy tends to be more structured, its distributions often made to further a particular purpose. Thus, family philanthropy typically has a “vision” that individual giving may not.