Giving Compass' Take:

• After opening the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation, one family encouraged community members to take part in different initiatives to revive common spaces in their neighborhood. 

• The author discusses how the family blended two points of view to find common cause. Can this method work in every family philanthropic endeavor?

• The Jacobs understand how to carry out the mission of their family's philanthropic efforts. However, succession planning is not always easy in family philanthropy. 

Philanthropies today focus on countless goals and theories of change. These differing missions lead foundations to support a variety of causes - from the arts to education or the environment. My family, for its part, has steadfastly focused its philanthropic efforts for over two decades on a specific goal: community ownership of neighborhood change.

We’ve funded a variety of programs and organizations, but always with the philosophy that to help disadvantaged communities, the communities themselves must actively participate in problem solving and then own the solutions.

We ended up forming a philanthropic foundation in the 1980s that blended my grandparents’ conservative point of view with their daughters’ more liberal perspective. They found common ground in resident-driven community ownership of neighborhood change.

To focus on the mission of community ownership, my family felt it important to work only in one community, so they founded JCNI (Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation) in Southeastern San Diego. It operated programs informed by community engagement and eventually bought a shuttered aerospace factory and a variety of other blighted properties to help spark a community-led renewal.

Our real estate strategy gives us a unique opportunity in philanthropy – we will gradually transition control of the family’s philanthropic effort and real estate assets to the community, until the family ceases to have an active role.

Read the full article about family philanthropy by Andrew Hapke at The National Center for Family Philanthropy. 

To read more by NCFP, check out their Family Philanthropy magazine on Giving Compass.