It began with a hat. A handful of cousins, members of the sixth generation of an American family whose fortune was more than a century old, sat in one of their family meetings and decided to do...
It began with a hat. A handful of cousins, members of the sixth generation of an American family whose fortune was more than a century old, sat in one of their family meetings and decided to do something together. They passed the hat among their own generation and collected ten thousand dollars. They gave it to the youth center in their family's old hometown, an organization their grandmother had supported, serving children at risk in the three counties where the family's wealth had originally been made. Nobody present would have called it an institution. It was a whip-round, the kind of collection taken at a funeral or a wedding, and by the standards of a family that size, the amount was almost nothing.
Twenty years later, that hat had become the thing holding the family together. The story is told, in the family's own words, in Dennis T. Jaffe's Borrowed from Your Grandchildren: The Evolution of 100-Year Family Enterprises (Wiley, 2020), the report of a six-year study in which Jaffe's team interviewed leaders from just over one hundred family enterprises worldwide, each having passed control across at least two generational transitions while sustaining more than $250 million in revenue and a shared identity. He calls these rare survivors generative families, fewer than 1 percent of family enterprises by his estimate. The usual honesty note applies with full force: this is a sample of enormous, mostly North American and European fortunes, with not one African family in it, and its percentages describe those families only. But this particular chapter of the book is about something money does not gatekeep: what keeps a scattered family showing up to the same table after the business that used to gather them is gone.
Here is the problem the hat solved, and it is a problem success creates. For the first generations, a family enterprise is its own gathering force. There are decisions to make, harvests to bring in, a counter to staff; the family meets because the work demands it. Then time does what time does. The family disperses across cities and countries. Members stop working in the business. And in half the families Jaffe studied, the original company was eventually sold outright. Whatever else a sale brings, it quietly cancels the standing reason the cousins had to be in the same room. The family still shares a name and a history, but nothing on the calendar requires them to share anything else. One branch drifts, then another. Nobody fights; they just stop arriving.
The family with the hat, whose fund Jaffe presents under the name Beacon Fund (the family, like almost all his interviewees, is anonymized by design, so we know them only as a family in the study), saw this coming and said so plainly: "We saw philanthropy as one way to keep a family together." Notice the direction of that sentence. It does not say the family stayed together and therefore gave. It says they gave in order to stay together. The giving was the strategy, not the byproduct.
And it worked in a way none of them predicted. Year after year, the sixth generation raised money among themselves and wrote letters about it to the wider family. Contributions began arriving from the fifth generation, their parents' cohort. A decade in, the older generation merged one of its own dormant foundations into the young people's fund. Twenty years from the hat, the Beacon Fund was giving away over $200,000 every year, employing a part-time executive director because none of the family lived in the old hometown anymore, making capacity-building grants, and convening other funders in the community. Meanwhile the family's formal structures wobbled; their family council, one member admits, "has been difficult to maintain." The fund did not wobble. In that member's words: "the real glue has been the Beacon Fund because that's been an attraction for different branches." As the family entered its seventh generation, it started an internship program bringing college-age G7 members back to work in the community's service agencies, in the place where the wealth was made, generations after the family had left it. The company is gone. The fund goes on. The fund, it turns out, was the durable asset.
For what this looks like at institutional scale, Jaffe turns to a family that is not anonymized: the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation. George Mitchell, the Texas energy magnate, and his wife Cynthia incorporated their foundation in 1978 and eventually committed most of their fortune to it, signing the Giving Pledge in 2011, two years before George's death in 2013. The foundation has since distributed or pledged more than $400 million toward sustainability and community causes in Texas.
The instructive part is not the size. It is what the family did to make the giving genuinely shared. Katherine Lorenz, George and Cynthia's granddaughter, who was elected the foundation's president in 2011, describes how the foundation became a true family project: in its later years, the aunt then leading it brought in consultants who ran a year-long strategic planning process involving every direct descendant over twenty-five, all ten of George and Cynthia's children and twenty-seven grandchildren. "That has been the most amazing aspect of the philanthropy we do together," Lorenz says. Fifteen scattered opinions about clean energy became, through shared learning retreats, one direction chosen by people who had studied the problem together. And the founders remained in the room after they left the world: the family holds an audio recording of both grandparents from 1993 describing what they wanted for the foundation, plus twenty years of videos recorded up to George's death. "We've been able to revisit what they said they wanted," Lorenz explains; the recordings are brought into the family's learning sessions so that a generation that never knew the founders can hear them argue their values in their own voices. The family does not always agree on what the grandparents would have wanted. But the recordings keep the question alive, and the question keeps the family at one table.
Nor is this pattern merely American, though Jaffe's reference points mostly are. He describes the Global Philanthropists Circle, a network of more than one hundred families across thirty-three countries, each giving at least one million dollars a year, built on the same premise: that shared giving is a discipline families can learn from each other across borders. And his interviewees describe the motive in language that will sound familiar at any scale and in any faith. A leader of an Asian family conglomerate: "It's part of our DNA, part of our work." Another family member, quoting the teaching many of our readers grew up on: "It was basically taught to all of us that, to whom much is given, much is required."
Strip these stories to their mechanism and something important emerges: the amounts are almost irrelevant. The Beacon Fund's founding capital was ten thousand dollars from a family worth hundreds of millions. What made it glue was never the sum. It was four properties the giving had, and every one of them is available to a family of ordinary means.
It was shared: raised from many hands, passing the hat, so every giver owned it. It was governed: someone had to decide, together, each year, where the money went, and that deciding is the meeting, the argument, the reason branches encounter each other. It was rooted: pointed at a specific place the family came from, which gave far-flung members, in the Beacon family's words, a reason to come "back there," and gave the family's story a geography. And it was permanent: an annual rhythm, not a one-time gesture, so the next generation could join something rather than merely hear about it.
Compare that with the most common form of family giving, which is one respected elder distributing help privately: paying a nephew's fees here, a hospital bill there. That giving is real and often heroic. But as glue it fails on every property. It is not shared, so no one else owns it. It is not governed, so it convenes no one. And it is not permanent, so it dies with the giver, and often the family's cohesion dies in the same season, because the elder's telephone was, unbeknownst to everyone, the family's only institution.
Here the book needs translating, and honestly. Jaffe's philanthropy chapter assumes the incorporated, professionally staffed foundation as the natural vehicle, with American mega-donors as its reference points. Most African and diaspora family giving does not run through foundations and does not need to. It runs through harambee-style collections (the East African tradition of communal fundraising for a shared need), through church and mosque building funds, school fees paid for the extended family's brightest, burial societies, and the great river of remittances. The instinct Jaffe's families had to institutionalize, we already have as culture. What we often lack is exactly what they built: the shared, governed, permanent structure that turns the instinct into an institution that outlasts any one giver.
So the translation is not "start a foundation." It is: take the giving your family already does and give it the four properties. A diaspora family sending money home separately, sibling by sibling, each managing their own guilt and their own requests, can pool a fixed portion into one named family fund with a purpose chosen together: a scholarship at the home village school, the clinic roof, the church, the youth center your own grandmother would have chosen. Govern it with a short annual call where every contributing branch has a voice and the year's giving is decided together; that call, be warned and be glad, will sometimes be contentious, because governed giving is family life, not an escape from it. Root it in the place your family is from, so that the fund gives the grandchildren born abroad what the Beacon Fund gave its seventh generation: a concrete, recurring reason to go back, and work to do when they get there. And make it permanent enough to survive you, which means writing down its purpose and its rules rather than carrying them in one elder's head.
Do what the Mitchells did, too, at telephone scale: before the founding generation is gone, record the elders, in voice or video, saying why this fund exists and what the family owes the place it came from. Fifty years from now, that recording will settle arguments you cannot foresee, or at least dignify them.
This is precisely what the Legacy Pots module in LegacyPot was built to hold: a named pot with a stated purpose, contributions visible to every branch, and its founding intention written where every future contributor can read it. A family fund whose purpose and record live in one shared place is a fund that can still be governed when its founders are memories.
Here is the one thing to do this month. Convene the relatives who already give, wherever they are, on one call, and pass the modern hat: a modest, equal, founding contribution from each household toward one shared cause in the place your family is from. Name the fund, after a grandmother, a village, a value. Agree on two rules only, to start: how often you will decide together where it gives, and who keeps the record. Then, before the call ends, ask the oldest person on it to say, while someone records, why this place and this cause deserve the family's money. Save that recording where the fund's record lives.
The amount will feel too small to matter. The Beacon Fund's cousins surely felt the same as the hat came back around. But the company their ancestors built, the asset everyone assumed was the family's foundation, was sold, and the family remained. What remained holding six, then seven generations together was the smallest thing they ever built: a fund that gave together, decided together, and pointed home. Companies, it turns out, are mortal. A family that shares its giving has built the asset that is not.