Another ACF initiative, The Institute for Emerging Philanthropists, is dedicated to wealth inheritors — as well as young financial advisers and young professionals — with an educational program designed to support, inspire and cultivate developing donors. ACF will work to identify, then nurture, the community’s emerging philanthropic leaders with the aim of giving those in this group a sense of the critical needs of the community, then teach them practical philanthropic strategies to address them.
It will be structured in classes that deal in practical matters, such as developing a mission statement and how to evaluate nonprofits to make sure that their donations effectively address the issues they care about.
“It will also help them develop a lifelong commitment to improving the community and the lives of people around them and to developing their own personal philanthropic goals and values,” Coury says.
Each member of the class’s 20 members will be asked to offer a $2,500 gift to their nonprofit of choice, which ACF will match; at the end of each year-long class, $100,000 will make its way into the hands of the community’s nonprofits.
Community is everything
Both initiatives are being introduced via a concert and conversation with Peter Buffett. The son of the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, and an accomplished musician, author and philanthropist, he will take to the stage at E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall on May 16 to publicly kick off the Center for Family Philanthropy and present the inaugural class of the Institute for Emerging Philanthropists.
Buffett became an “accidental philanthropist” after his father pledged in 2006 to donate 350,000 shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. stock to create the NoVo Foundation, which Peter Buffett and his wife, Jennifer, run.
“It was not something I thought I was going to be doing or really thought about much at all until it became part of what my life was going to be all about,” says Buffett.
When speaking to families across the country through his talks titled, “Life Is What You Make It: A Concert & Conversation with Peter Buffett,” he tries to help those who are in a similar situation understand the importance of exploring how family wealth was created, where it came from and the systems in place that allow one family to have so much while other families have so little.
“Either wealth is going to isolate you from what real community is, which is diversity and complexity and different points of view — you can essentially buy your way out of community, in a broader sense of the word — or it can give you a window into it by looking at how the wealth was created, where it came from and who’s not participating, and start to redistribute it in ways that might potentially build community,” Buffett says.
He says that we are nothing if we’re not in community and in relationships, and that it’s critical to focus inward to determine what’s needed and how each person can effect change where they live.
“Community is essentially everything,” Buffett says. “And a foundation is great way, at that level, to know what’s going on, what’s needed and who can help.”
