To contemplate your legacy is to discover a rich new perspective on your life.
The idea of a legacy is at once forward-looking and deeply retrospective. Wondering about what your legacy will be compels you to look far into the future, and from that distant point to reflect back upon how your achievements, choices and generosity will someday be viewed.
When you think about the potential for affecting people and communities years or even generations beyond the present, you realize that a legacy can be a powerful force. A philanthropist is very much like the teacher in the famous Henry Adams quote, a person who “affects eternity” and “can never tell where his influence stops.”
As the National Center for Family Philanthropy has noted: “Legacy also begins at home — it’s within your power to define. The way that the world will view you and your philanthropy is a mirror of what you set out for yourself. Step back and explore what motivates you. There is something so powerful about coming together as a family to explore the work you choose to do, whether you’re the first generation creating the effort or subsequent generations.”
In the case of the Ami Reiss Charitable Foundation, the creation of a lasting legacy is based on Tzedaka, the Hebrew word for charitable giving, a fundamental pillar of the teachings in the Torah. These values, principles and traditions inspire the Foundation’s outreach and guide its direction. There is so much work to be done in the world, and this framework helps narrow the focus of the Foundation, magnifying its effectiveness in the lives of the people it touches.
Mankind has been thinking about legacies for a long, long time. Pericles advised, “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” In our own time, businessman and philanthropist Peter Strople has written, “Legacy is not leaving something for people. It’s leaving something in people.”
While many foundations have been established by large institutions, many are smaller family ventures that reach out with tightly-focused assistance — helping people and communities, individually. Although the smaller foundations lack the endowments that are typical of the larger, well-known varieties, they can be a dynamic instrument of philanthropy that transforms family wealth into a relentless force of hope, promise and prosperity.
As The Center notes: “A common thread in giving families is their rootedness in shared values. While the particular giving focus and structure may change with the times and with different family engagement, values anchor the family. At times, these values are tethered to a particular faith or shared belief system; just as often, they are simply connected to a family’s modeling and explicit recognition of what is important to them based on their own journey.”
Journey is the ideal word to describe family philanthropy. Charitable initiatives follow a progression that often, but not always, begins with great success in business. Rich with the rewards of achievement, a family feels the impulse to give. This charitable imperative may be based on the idea of giving to a society, country or organization that helped the family become successful; or to an institution that helped or healed a loved one. It may be primarily motivated by faith.
From this point, the exhilarating journey begins: identifying needs in communities, designing ways to meet those needs, and establishing a structure to ensure that help is effective and enduring.
As the years pass by, the family legacy slowly builds, with an unstoppable momentum that can change the future — as far as the eye can see, as far as the mind can imagine.
Family Foundations: Charitable Journeys, Enduring Legacies
