Borrowed from Your Grandchildren

CHAPTER 15Family Philanthropy: Balancing Roots and Wings

Cowritten with Isabelle Lescent-Giles, PhD, and Jamie Traeger-Muney, PhD

After leaving operational business leadership or selling the legacy business, members of each new generation have to find a reason for staying together. What creative purpose can be meaningful enough for them to take the trouble to attend meetings, align visions, and work together? Making more money is not much of a motivator; their concerns shift toward what can be done with the wealth their family has amassed, how the wealth can do more than just enrich their lives, how it can make a meaningful difference in the world.

This is enacted through the family's social mission, its commitment to wider community benefit. Family wealth allows them to undertake significant social transformation. By sharing concerns about social issues like access to sanitation, health care, education and work, and the future of our physical environment, young people are able to move beyond consumption and even guilt over having such wealth to become part of important social change efforts. While this has always been part of the responsibilities of wealth (noblesse oblige), the twenty-first century offers challenges that engage even the most apolitical families.

Family philanthropy and social commitment are central to every one of the global generative families in this study. It offers a pathway for meaning and engagement for young family members who may not identify with ...