Giving Compass' Take:

• David Callahan interviews Henry Ford III, Trustee of the Ford Foundation, and Valerie Rockefeller, Chair of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund about family philanthropy and how their legacies differ from one another. 

• What are the barriers of family giving? Rockefeller and Ford both describe different approaches to family philanthropy that they have been involved with over the years. What strategies are more effective or less effective?

• Learn more about family philanthropy, here. 

Henry Ford III, Trustee of the Ford Foundation, and Valerie Rockefeller, Chair of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, discuss the weight and opportunity provided by multigenerational wealth and legacy in philanthropy. Moderated by David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy.

David Callahan:
In my world, coming into philanthropy everyday, two names, of course, loom very large, Ford and Rockefeller. And it's not everyday that I get to talk to both a Ford and a Rockefeller at the same time. And my guess is that it's not everyday that a Ford and Rockefeller get to talk to each other.

And I think it's a timely conversation because right now there are a lot of families in America sitting on a lot of money, and they're having conversations about how things are going to play out with philanthropy, how they're going to play out in the next 10 years, the next 20 years, the next 50 years. And so who better to get some advice from, than the people from two families that have been at this for a very long time and have a lot to share. Henry, I want to start the conversation with you and ask you about the kinds of conversations that have been happening in the family around philanthropy.

Henry Ford III:
Our family has sort of been thinking about philanthropy for as long as I can remember, but the conversation has changed a little bit over the past couple of years, and I didn't necessarily have a great sense of awareness of what the rest of my family was sort of working on involved in. That sort of dialogue just didn't exist in my family. Our philanthropy was segmented, you know, by all the individual families. And over the past several years I think we as a family, have started to look at that and tried to increase the dialogue that we have as a family and in many ways, use philanthropy, almost as a way to unite our family in how we think about it. So we actually formed a family council, and from that family council we have an impact subcommittee, and that subcommittee is charged with identifying opportunities for family philanthropy... And what we've found is that many times you can make more of a difference when you're unified together as a group versus just doing things individually.

Read the full article about legacy and justice at Ford Foundation.