Family Philanthropy: Don't Chase the Light — Become It

“In helping others, I find myself.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

”The act of charity is itself a joy.” — Anthony Brandt

How It Began

The most beautiful encounters in life tend to arrive at the least expected moments.

This was the encounter between Flourishing Tree and our client; the encounter between our client and a charitable trust; the encounter between that charitable trust and “Girls’ Protection.”

Flourishing Tree’s exploration of family philanthropy has been driven and led by our client.

One of Flourishing Tree’s clients is a wise and warmhearted woman. She has long taken part in all manner of charitable and philanthropic work. Much of her earlier giving was non-directed — donated to a general-purpose Red Cross society or foundation, with no way to specify how the money would be used, and no way to know which project it finally reached.

She often turned over a few questions in her mind. First: How can I make philanthropy something bound up with the spirit of our family — a language and a bridge for speaking with my children and the generations to come? That “bridge” grows out of philanthropy made tangible and sustained within the family. Second: How can I direct my charitable giving toward the particular people and projects that my family and I want to support, and actually see the results? Third: How can I do this good work without putting myself or my company on display — because I believe that humility and selflessness are themselves an even more important part of a family’s spirit?

These questions of hers drove us to search for a solution. After looking into and weighing many options, we finally settled on the charitable trust as the vehicle to make it happen. For establishing a family charitable trust makes it possible to: (1) pursue long-term philanthropic aims, rather than merely short-term charitable donations; (2) pass the family’s core values — love, gratitude, responsibility, dedication, and the like — to the next generation through action, which is both a meaningful way and a more effective one; (3) manage and operate the giving with greater flexibility, disbursing funds in stages according to different charitable purposes, while the trust property remains separate from the other assets of both settlor and trustee, achieving a genuine ring-fencing of risk; and (4) draw the family’s younger generation into the process of selecting, funding, reviewing, and adjusting the projects — one of the very best ways to shape their finest qualities.

The Flower Opens

A flower blooms at Zhongyi.

Zhongyi — the Beijing Zhongyi Public Welfare Foundation — is one of the projects our client’s charitable trust chose to support after careful selection.

On June 1, 2013, the founder Sun Xuemei, together with a hundred women journalists from across the country, launched the “Girls’ Protection” public-welfare project. In 2015, “Girls’ Protection” was elevated into a dedicated fund, established under the China Children and Teenagers’ Culture and Art Foundation, devoted to raising children’s awareness of how to guard against sexual abuse and to protecting their safe growth.

This team, made up chiefly of journalists, had no experience whatsoever in abuse-prevention education. At the time, nowhere in the whole country could one find an authoritative, widely accessible curriculum on the subject. So the volunteers set about researching child abuse-prevention experience at home and abroad, calling on many experts for their views, and — drawing on that experience and on trial classes taught by members in many places — through several rounds of revision by more than twenty frontline experts, over more than forty rewrites across half a year, they finally produced, at the end of 2013, the “Children’s Abuse-Prevention Lesson Plan, Primary-School Edition,” a work with its own independent intellectual property.

To this day, it has reached 31 provinces across the country, taught 7.6 million children, and been attended by as many as 740,000 parents.

And all of this Zhongyi accomplished starting from a single full-time staff member — from nothing, from zero to one — until today, when it has more than 60,000 volunteers and over 10,000 trained lecturers, yet still only ten full-time staff. It is a remarkable thing, and a deeply moving one.

In Bloom

Ten years of tending; a blossoming in its own good time.

Last weekend, two of Flourishing Tree’s partners, Carolyn and Joyce, attended the tenth-anniversary conference of the Zhongyi charitable foundation on the client’s behalf. It was at once a commemoration and a report on ten years, a giving of thanks and a presentation of awards — a reckoning of the decade past and a look toward the decade ahead.

The charitable trust of Flourishing Tree’s client is the first, and to date the only, donation made to the Zhongyi charitable foundation with a charitable trust as the donor; every other donor has been a company or an individual. But we believe that in years to come, more and more family charitable trusts will appear across the world of good causes, because so many of the families we work with are considering and designing family philanthropy as a truly important dimension of their family governance.

After the conference, I asked Carolyn and Joyce what makes a good charitable foundation — what qualities it might have. The two of them felt they had seen three qualities in the Zhongyi foundation.

A people-first founding purpose. A grassroots team with no funding, no brand, and no backing, building up bit by bit from that first textbook, that first class, that first person helped. It has always placed people first. The Girls’ Protection project is a very particular one: whether a second round of questioning might cause fresh harm to a girl who has already been abused; whether the content, when taught at a school, will be readily accepted — all of this must be considered from the standpoint of how others feel, and it is on that basis that the lecturers and volunteers are trained.

Ten years, steady as a single day. Doing only one thing, accumulating slowly, iterating without pause, carrying that one thing to its utmost. What is this if not the simplest — and the hardest — way to make something succeed?

“Public welfare takes more than passion; it takes professionalism to benefit society.” Developing a pioneering curriculum in partnership with experts is professionalism; keeping only ten full-time staff over a system of more than 60,000 volunteers and 10,000-plus lecturers is professionalism; publishing an abuse-prevention education survey report for nine years running is professionalism too. A charitable cause must take flight on both wings — passion and professionalism — if it is to fly farther and longer.

Radiance

In that radiance there were tears, there was joy, and there was wisdom, too.

I asked the two of them: what was the “radiance” you saw?

Joyce said:

I have already signed up for the selection of volunteer lecturers — not only because of the meaning of the charitable project itself, and not only because I was so deeply moved at the event that my eyes brimmed with tears more than once, but even more because I believe my actions will shape my daughter’s values, and my actions are a very important part of our family’s values as well.

“The essence of education means that one tree shakes another, one cloud pushes another, one soul awakens another.”

Carolyn said:

First: so long as the end is good, public welfare need not question its motives. Some heal themselves through public welfare; some find their own worth through it; some stay connected to society through it — none of that matters. It is a mutual running-toward, in which helping others fulfills oneself, and that is what gives public welfare its vitality.

Second: as a family office, we saw clearly a beautiful vision. Entrepreneurs create wealth; wealth serves people; and people move toward happiness.

Finally: the rising generation is the backbone of a family. In the course of taking up the first generation’s wealth, they find its “meaning” — and from that moment the family’s heritage capital takes root and grows.

In Decisive Moments in History, Stefan Zweig writes a famous line: there is no greater fortune in a person’s life than to discover, at the very midpoint of the journey, in the fullness of one’s powers, the mission of one’s life.

So how does one find one’s life’s mission? Last week, in the United States, Flourishing Tree’s founder Andy met with Steven Rockefeller, a sixth-generation member of the Rockefeller family, and put a similar question to him. Rockefeller’s answer was this:

I used to think only about each year; now I think about each decade.

I used to think only about the people around me; now I think about a far wider circle — the world, even.

I used to do things by myself; now I want to do things together with people cleverer than I am.

Is this not, after all, the very meaning of family philanthropy?

Don’t chase the light — become the light!