Inspired Stories: Newsletter Volume 3, Winter 2006

Board Member Upcoming Events Resources Making Change Happen Board Member Michael Shaughnessy IL Board Michael Shaughnessy teaches at Saint Ignatius College Preparatory School in San Francisco, California, where he lives. His area of expertise is ethics and leadership training. He has worked with young people for over 30 years focusing on decision-making and clarifying life goals. His previous board experience has included a neighborhood cooperative nursery school and a Bay Area soccer club. See also our whole team. Upcoming Events Dec 2: Alternative Holiday Giving Fair, Houston, Texas. Dec 6-7: Falcon Fund, New York, New York. Jan 9-13: Tipping Point Conference. Jan 18: Women's Funding Network, San Francisco, California. Jan 24-25: Nevada Women's Fund, Reno, Nevada. Feb 26-28: Heritage Foundation, Portland, Oregon. View our calendar for more. Resources JustGive.org has nonprofit info, mission statements, and financials on over one million nonprofits! Plus they have two outstanding features: The JustGive Guide section of their website has 19 categories (such as arts, children, the environment, peace, hunger, the environment, health, women, etc). You can see lists of groups, strategies they employ, and make your own mission matches. They also have the JustGive WISH LISTS. This way, you can ask your relatives or friends to choose organizations or issues they want you to give to in their names. Get your family to go to the Just Give web site and to sign up on the WISH LIST, with their choices, or choose for them, based on what you know about them. www.globalgiving.org has similar resources for international giving. Please feel free to send us links to resources that address legacy or philanthropic planning and revitalize democracy through citizen participation. Making Change Happen There are now some 1.7 million nonprofits to choose from. Each quarter we will share links to nonprofits and over the year include many that our readers share with us. We urge your own due diligence of these nonprofits. Alternative Giving International http://www.alternativegifts.org Heifer Project International http://www.heifer.org Our Voices Together http://www.ourvoicestogether.org Plan USA http://www.planusa.org/ SEVA Foundation http://www.seva.org/ TEWA http://www.tewa.org.np/ See our growing list of organizations making change happen. Receive another Inspired Stories! We welcome your feedback and ideas at any time! To contribute to the next issue of Inspired Stories, please submit by February 15.

View From the Founder
Legacy Tools
Inspired Products
Legacy Partnerships
Letters to Loved Ones
Transitions

View from the Founder

Give up giving stuff! Join the Generosity Generation.

So, it's the giving and getting season. Spirits are up. The market is up for the year substantially! Up for the year as of 12/4 an average of 12.8%.

Note the personal giving line as a percentage of income: a downward trend. More people are giving to more nonprofits. However, we are also buying more stuff.

We invite you to do something else. In this enewsletter, we will share in "Letters to Loved Ones" a message you can copy, edit, and send to your own family to let them know you are on another path. We offer you the tools to get there:

1. Make a commitment to give 20%-50% of your gifts at the end of the year as donations. Give to those in true need or to organizations that change things. A new report out just before Thanksgiving claims the average American (household income of about $40,000 after taxes) spends about $800 per adult at holiday time. And $100 of that is spent on ourselves!

First and foremost, decide to keep your giving truly on path for others in need. Calculate. What is the average you give annually as material gifts? NOW decide what you will give. (20% or maybe 50% this year, or even—join us—give 100%!)

2. Review your nonprofit giving list or giving plan for the year. Have you accomplished what you wanted? Do you know how much you can afford or want to give? Be sure to ask your advisor: what is the maximum amount that I can give this year to family or nonprofits for tax benefit? If you don’t care about the tax benefit, then give more and enjoy it. We encourage you to check in with your financial advisor if you have one.

To whom or which organization could you give more? Who might be the right recipient for a gift in honor or memory of someone you love? Think about a moving love note that will explain your decision to give in their honor and why you chose the nonprofit. These notes, especially if handwritten, can mean so much!

3. Use organizations like Seva (www.seva.org) and Heifer Project (www.heifer.org) that make giving easy. My partner and I add up our lists, put them together, and buy a large gift, valued total at, say, $500, then send all our friends a note saying we have made a gift in their honor to Seva or Heifer. They get the joy of helping others and a lovely card from us. See the list to the right in the resource section if you want more choices.

4.If you arent' sure where to give, there are many options to explore. Call us at 713-527-7671. We are happy to walk you through or discuss your year-end or alternative gifting. We offer our services free to donors. The best two sites we have found for considering or researching multiple organizations are JustGive.org and GlobalGiving.org. See the resource list to the right.

5. Lastly, email us about your commitment. We will make a gift in your name to a nonprofit and send you notice of what we chose in your honor.

We’d love to know your giving story. Just the day before Thanksgiving, one of our supporters decided to give her daughters the gift of giving! She gave what will be millions to her daughters by setting up donor-activist committees at women’s foundations.

Some of you with substantial means might consider giving $12,000--your annual gift maximun per individual gift--as a gift for your kids, a friend, or family member. Then have them donate it to a donor advised fund or any charity so that they can give it away. This is a true win-win for all but the IRS. Ask your advisor for more ways to have inspired outcomes. Call us if we can be of support.

HAPPY GIVING.
Enjoy the silence and calm and joy of giving.

Thank you!
Tracy Gary
Email me your plan or story: Tracy at Inspired Legacies.org

Share your concerns and best practices.

See the services IL offers.

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Legacy Tools

Sample Shopping List: A Sample list of gifts full of ideas for you to use.

My Shopping List: A list for you to use!

Recent articles about Inspired Legacies or Tracy Gary:

'Tis the Season to Give, Examiner, Noveber 16, 2006.

Learning to Give is Life's Best Lesson, Chronicle, November 27, 2006.

Use Policy:

We encourage you to use our materials. We would like to know that you are using them, so please fill out our contact form or email your proposed use and full contact information. Feedback is encouraged. Please also make a donation to Inspired Legacies to commiserate with the value you find in it's use. This helps us cover costs and create more tools for you and the world.

We welcome your feedback and ideas at any time!

Inspired Products

The Giving Family: Raising Our Children to Help Others
by Susan Crites Price, Published by The Council on Foundations (January 2003) A wonderful resource for parents who seek tips on how to raise generous and caring kids.

The Giving Book: Open The Door To A Lifetime Of Giving (Spiral-bound)
by Ellen Sabin, Watering Can; Spiral edition (October 30, 2004) For ages 4 - 8, this book is full of wonderful exercises on giving for kids. Buy this and grow kids with character!

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Legacy Partnerships

It's our honor to support many donors and their work as well as nonprofits and their legacy efforts. This includes philanthropic and financial advisors, wealth coaches, and wealth advisory firms in their client work. This Fall we continue to advise several family foundations and three charitable trusts. With them, we conduct site visits, evaluate and network grantees, leverage leadership, and help to move contributions. In several cases, we convene family foundations working on the intergenerational transfer of wealth. Our donor partnerships assist donors to determine their legacy and donor intent before they update or complete their legacy or estate and charitable planning.

We love supporting sound communication in families and with advisors. Could we be of help to you next year?

During this giving season, we help families and individuals find the right mission matches, setting priorities to maximize and focus their year end giving. As the chart above showed, the investment markets as of early December were up about 12.8% and yet giving as a percentage of consumption was down. We appear to be buying more and more material objects and not giving as much charitably as we are surely able. In response, Inspired Legacies along with several collaborators offer Alternative Holiday Giving Fairs (flyer). We are also helping a local comunity leader put on holiday programs on alternative giving (giving to nonprofits or to fair trade companies) for both children and parents. Furthermore, in 2007 we will launch our youth giving circles and host a youth giving camp for a week in July for young people ages 13-17. We seek to unleash generosity, and thus share our message by expanding our media coverage, our outreach, and our services locally and nationally.

For those who invest $25,000 or more in our sevuces (through a fee for service or grant) paid quarterly or twice a year, we work on a retainer. This year, The Women's Funding Network and the Hunt Sisters have invited us to collaborate to help grow legacy planning and knowledge for women donors considering mega gifts for women's foundations. We are honored to continue our work into 2007 on this important initiative which will have it's public launch in the spring of 2007.

We have enjoyed working with the Nautilus Company and their many excellent advisors in 2006 and are appreciative for their early investment in our services which enabled us to launch a new office in Houston for Inspired Legacies. We plan to complete work with their advisors and nonprofits with whom they partner.

Working with advisors, community foundations and public or community-based foundations, nonprofits and donor families, takes us all over the country. You can see our calendar of events for 2006 on our site. Our thanks to the 40 organizations who hired us in 2006. We will post in early 2007 our dates for events and speaking thus far. If you or your organization wish to book our services, please contact our offices or Michelle Massman at www.massmanassociates.com or email Michelle at mjmassman@aol.com.

We will share more about the update of Inspired Philanthropy (3rd edition), our work with advisors, and our research on the best advisors with strong performance and wisdom on philanthropy and legacy advising in 2007. We are busy researching through early 2007 and promise solid results with personalized referrals.

Our year end wish for you: May you call your advisor and have a good sit down meeting to review all that is needed. May we help you determine your priorities and help you to come prepared with your vision and legacy statements. May you continue to receive the great blessing of giving. And may our trails cross many times in 2007 and beyond.

Finally, thank you for all you do to make the world a better place, day by day.

Recent Inspired Legacies events span the US and Canada.
- current locations in blue, previous locations in green -

Letters to Loved Ones

Dear Family!

I have just read that the average American is expected to spend $800 this holiday season, including $100 on themselves. Do you want socks, another sweater, or even some obscure appliance to add to the cupboards? I propose that we, as a family, consider a new giving tradition. What if we give to something we believe in as a way to honor each other?

I suggest we agree to a flat amount that we each give toward a pool of funds. Then, collectively, we contribute to something that makes a difference. I want my children to understand their connection to a larger world. I want them to appreciate their fortunate position. I believe you share this value with me.

Let our family leave a positive impact—one of love and giving in the true spirit of the holidays. Let's forgo the monstrous piles of presents. Let's be a contribution to the world. Let's start this year.

With love,
Jane

PS. Please send me 1-2 organizations that you care about in the next week by email and their web site addresses, snail mail contact info, or phone. I will tally the list and then make one for our whole family to check off which ones we want our HEARTFELT gifts to go to this year.

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Transitions

We want to acknowledge two great women philanthropists who died this quarter.

Sally Lilienthal, of San Francisco, age 87, died on Oct. 27, 2006. I first met Sally over thirty years ago. Sally was a sculptor involved with human rights activism. A dynamic leader and mom, she was a mentor to me and many others. Sally founded the Ploughshares Fund, in 1981 at the height of the Cold War. Through her leadership, generosity, fund-raising, and tenacity, Ploughshares by 2006 has given away more than $40 million in grants to scientist, policy makers, and nonprofits working to end nuclear proliferation. Sally is survived by five children and eleven grandchildren, all of whom have been moved by her generous legacy and thoughtful spirit.

Charlotte Taylor, of Princeton, New Jersey, age 87, died on November 9, 2006. Charlotte was active in civil rights, women's equality, environmental causes, holistic health, ethical investing, peacemaking, and social justice. She also supported public television and the arts. She advocated for those with mental handicaps, AIDS or facing the death penalty, describing herself as a "volunteer in healing ministries." Charlotte's legacy is one of immeasurable concern for injustice. She was a spiritual person, loving of her amazing family and community in Princeton and will be sorely missed by her sister, her four children, and six grandchildren and great-grandson. Her family, steeped in giving and social investing tradition, carry forth her love and undying sense of responsibility to help others.

I, too, shall miss both these important women in my life.

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