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Teaching Values


How do you raise a charitable child? How do you encourage philanthropy among young people in their teens and twenties? How do you inspire charitable enthusiasm in your next generation? These are tough questions for donors, board members, and staff and advisors to giving families. Though present-day leaders of these families can point to why they themselves are philanthropic, they sometimes wish to build greater motivation in others.

Here are a number of ideas for encouraging philanthropy:

  • Start early. Begin the tradition of giving as soon as your child begins receiving.
  • Provide an allowance. Encourage work. Avoid the perception that philanthropy is about giving away other people’s money. Encourage young people to commit their own time, talent, and treasure to causes and institutions they care about.
  • Foster personal development and initiative as well as a connection to the family’s legacy. Encourage young people to find out what excites and inspires them in philanthropy. What are they passionate about?
  • Talk to the young people in your life about giving. Bring them to philanthropy events and site visits. Discuss the family’s values, commitment, and history.
  • Use online giving sites to help young people find age-appropriate charities and to give to them.
  • Find a mentor. Let senior family members, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or older siblings take younger family members under their wing.
  • Be your child’s philanthropic role model.
Keep the door open. Even if the young people in your life do not initially take to philanthropy, keep the invitation open.

Related Reading

Six Tips on Raising Philanthropic Children

July 2005
Providing for children not only involves ensuring that they have clothes on their backs, roofs over their heads, and food in their stomachs, it also requires that families supply a sense of appreciation for their gifts, monetary and otherwise, and the desire to share those gifts with others. In this issue of 'Family Giving News' we offer six tips on raising philanthropic children, and tackle questions like: When should parents begin teaching children about philanthropy? If children are too young to understand wealth, fiscal responsibility or monetary value, how does a parent convey the value and importance of charitable giving? How can parents interest their children in volunteer work or engage teenagers when they are in their anti-everything phase? How can they pass on a family tradition of giving and prepare children for board service while acknowledging and respecting each child's individuality?

[FGN Feature]

Learning to Give

2009
Learning to Give is an innovative educational initiative seeking to maintain and enhance a civil society.

What’s so different about family philanthropy: An Interview with Jack Murrah, former president of the Lyndhurst Foundation

December 2009

 

As part of the National Center’s research into the Value of Family Philanthropy, President Ginny Esposito conducted an interview study with 50 philanthropy leaders. Former president of the Lyndhurst Foundation and founding National Center board member Jack Murrah was among those who were asked to reflect on this topic in this interview from Family Giving News.

[FGN Feature]