As part of our ongoing series of continuing education events for professional advisors, Susan Schoenfeld will be joining us in October to take a hard look at the “soft issues” of family wealth planning.
Susan is the CEO and founder of Wealth Legacy Advisors LLC, which serves as a thought partner to families of wealth through personal attention and human spirit. An award-winning thought leader and professional public speaker, she provides guidance on legacy, next generation, stewardship, governance, leadership succession, and philanthropy.
Based in New York City, she is a “recovering” attorney and CPA with deep experience as an advisor to families and family offices on the human issues of wealth. Susan’s passion is helping families and their provider organizations with the tools to take them to their full potential.
In anticipation of Susan’s upcoming appearance in October, we’re sharing some of her insights and lessons learned from helping a high net worth family build a lasting philanthropic legacy (the following are excerpts from an article entitled “Top 5 Traits of Effective Family Philanthropy” co-written by Susan Schoenfeld and Rebecca A. Meyer, which previously appeared in Trusts & Estates/WealthManagement.com).
A Clear Mission
With a clear mission, a family’s philanthropic vehicle can carry forth its founder’s values or promote the family-at-large’ shared values and vision. A mission statement allows a family to explicitly express its sense of responsibility to society and its plans for giving back to its community. Committing to a stated mission helps the family coalesce around its philanthropic goals, but it may also enable individual family members to support their own chosen causes. For example, the Anderson family revised its family foundation bylaws to allow different branches of the family to champion their own areas of interest as long as the foundation’s overall mission was met.
A Defined Decision-making Process
Having a defined structure for a family’s philanthropy keeps the focus on philanthropic ideas and long-term objectives. Furthermore, designating who will be involved in the decision-making process and assigning appropriate roles to those individuals helps to minimize conflict among family members. When adopting a structure, it’s important for families to consider how felxible or restrictive they want to be. The Andersons preferred a collaborative philanthropic approach, but they realized that as future generations married and had children of their own, natural differences would arise among family members. Anticipating this development, they incorporated flexibility in their decision-making process and established a grant-making structure in which the family must unanimously approve half of the foundation’s annual giving, while the other half is allocated by individual family branches. This foresight makes the Anderson family foundation an evolving philanthropic vehicle that can meet changing needs over many generations.
Deep and Open Dialogue Across Generations
While good communication among family members leads to stronger relationships and more effective philanthropy, the reverse is true as well. Lack of communication is often at the root of family strife and failed family enterprises. Interactions among multiple generations can be particularly challenging, and longer life expectancies mean families may have as many as four generations sitting at the table. The Andersons see philanthropy as an important means to engage rising generations as they mature. Experienced family members actively involve children and grandchildren in selecting charitable recipients, which gives younger family members an important sense of ownership and responsibility.
Respect for Personal Passions
We all know that being part of a family means accepting that our parents, siblings and cousins may well have very different personalities and quite an array of likes and dislikes. As families grow, the range of opinions becomes ever more diverse. A family foundation tends to be most effective when it helps members find their own passions rather than forcing them into the founder’s shoes, which for many family members can seem too big to fill. For the Anderson family, Richard was a larger-than-life patriarch.
Receptive to Outside Expertise
Philanthropy is a complex undertaking. Few individuals are equally knowledgeable about regulatory matters and the issues or causes a family might want to support. For families to achieve their philanthropic objectives, they need expertise in the areas of trust and tax law, as well as matters related to potential grant recipients. Assistance from outside professionals can be instrumental when refining a foundation’s focus or obtaining a better understanding of relevant technical issues.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT SUSAN:
Susan Schoenfeld brings a unique combination of financial services, family office, estate planning law and entrepreneurship experiences to any project, and helps ultra-high net worth families, family offices, and their provider organizations create a family-centered culture around the human issues of wealth to boost morale, new business and the bottom line.
After practicing law in both tax and trusts & estates, Susan was fiduciary counsel at Bessemer Trust for over 14 years, then served as family ambassador for a private single family office, before launching her consulting practice in 2013 to families of wealth and family offices.
Susan won the Outstanding Thought Leadership Award at the Family Wealth Report Awards in 2023 and 2018 for “her many pieces of written thought leadership and participation on panel discussions and in interviews,” and was awarded the Women in Wealth Management Award at the Family Wealth Report Awards 2020 for being “one of the few women on the national speaking circuit who is guiding financial services firms and their clients to connect with the human side of the client relationship.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT SUSANSCHOENFELD.COM AND WLALLC.COM.
