What do we gain when we think of legacy as the good we do instead of as the material success we’ve had?

Lauren, a young millennial and one of our first clients, once said that, although she is committed to moving her family’s giving back to Black and Indigenous communities, her mother and her mother’s siblings are still deeply attached to how their grandfather earned the family fortune and the sacrifices that even their father made to carry on his dad’s legacy and hard work. Lauren is now three generations removed from who made the money and how it was amassed. She’s also seen how all of that “hard work” to make the money sometimes brought pain and distance within their family, including to her mother who had a father and grandfather with priorities that were more focused on living in the cold, sterile world of business rather than living in the warm and vulnerable world of love. Lauren is not alone.

Lauren’s story is not unique; we hear some iteration of this exact history from many of our clients. Understandably, wealthy people and families want to both honor this legacy and preserve the history of the family’s wealth accumulation and philanthropy the future generations of their family to understand where their wealth came from. Perhaps, this desire is in hopes that their kids, grandkids and so on will receive some insight on what it means to work for something. But what often gets lost in the history that is passed down is the harm this success for a few may have caused for many—including their own families.

The Impacts of Wealth Accumulation on Families and their Relationships

I have been working in the field of philanthropy and community organizing for 20 years and have learned that wealth accumulation has huge implications for communities and society as a whole. However, we so often overlook the frequent and less positive lasting impacts on the generations of families that become the beneficiaries of that wealth. Isolation, inter-family trauma, imposed expectations, and pedigree are some of the common woes that I’ve heard. Furthermore, there is often a dynamic tension for inheritors that grapple with being grateful for the wealth and knowing they didn’t really do anything to deserve it. Inheritors often look for purpose in their work or life choices that is separate from their family’s wealth and family business. It is also why many wealthy people prefer to not talk about their wealth. By its very nature, wealth separates those with it from the rest of the world in order to preserve it.

Read the full article about family legacies by Will Cordery at the National Center for Family Philanthropy.