To preserve family unity and encourage family participation, the foundation revised the trust agreement
Under the new guidelines, any family member who contributed $1,000 to the foundation was considered a voting member of the foundation. Moreover, the family felt a need to develop a broad mission that would include the wide sweep of political philosophies. To that end, they hired a strong and experienced executive director who helped them cut through their political differences to find a common interest in funding grassroots empowerment.
As an undergraduate student, Joe was trained in Socratic dialogue, and this discipline sparked a love of intellectual sparring that he passed on to his three dily has had plenty of opportunities to practice its debating skills
“Ironically,” says Stranahan, “the board’s impulse to move toward a more unifying and less politicized mission led us to more progressive funding. What was dividing the family was not values but rhetoric. Once family members discovered they had similar concerns and that those concerns cut across political differences, they were able to focus on foundation goals.”
This brief introduction to family culture points at the many strands that weave together two systems, the family and the foundation. As will become clearer in later chapters, that influence does not move in one direction but rather is reciprocal. The family is changed by the experience of running the foundation, and the foundation, in turn, is influenced by the changes in the family. Founders die, and with them often go their styles of leadership and management. In-laws join the family, importing beliefs, norms and traditions from their own family cultures, The younger generation comes on board, reflecting a new set of values and experiences and, often, different funding agendas. Conflicts erupt, circumstances change and new challenges arise that require trustees to rethink their old ways or to devise different strategies for managing situations.
And so life moves inexorably forward as both internal and external forces continuously shape and influence the cultures of the two systems-the family and the foundation.
Innovative businessman, Lincoln Filene and his brother Edward built a major retail business, Filene’s department store in Boston, which had been started by their father. Later, Lincoln Filene joined with other store owners to form Federated Department Stores. The Filene brothers were the first to employ a full-time nurse in their store as an employee benefit in an era when most workers could not afford good medical care. They also promoted the creation of credit unions to help workers generate purchasing power.
O’Neill family members worked together in the family business, Leaseway Transportation, a publicly traded company started by Bill’s father and his two uncles. They, with Bill and some of his cousins, built the trucking and warehouse business into a billion-dollar-a-year operation. After the family sold its shares in Leaseway, Bill set up a family office to manage the family’s investments.
Joe is a political conservative and advocate of the free enterprise system, and his dily’s arguments: say what you have to say with passion and heat, and then give others the same opportunity.
The farm continues to be a family gathering place, and because the current owners of the farm are also the directors of the Samuel P
Pardoe Foundation in Washington, DC, at least one of the foundation’s meetings is held there annually. The family foundation is now exploring ways to fund educational and charitable programs that use the farm’s fields, barns and livestock in their activities.
The family’s tolerance for diversity was tested during the 1970s when the family and the foundation were in turmoil. Duane and Virginia divorced, as did several other family members, and others moved away from the family home in Toledo, Ohio. Meanwhile, Virginia left the board, and members of the third generation, politicized by the events of the times, had their own ideas on how to give money away.