An Interview with NCFP’s Senior Fellow Ginny Esposito

金妮·埃斯波西托（Ginny Esposito）with NCFP’s inaugural Senior Fellow, Alice Buhl

编者注：杰森出生的计划副总裁最近与NCFP创始人金妮·埃斯波西托（Ginny Esposito）谈到了她在2020年初过渡到高级研究员的角色，以及她正在担任新角色的一些项目和计划。

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I’m here today with my long-time friend and mentor, Ginny Esposito. Ginny is a legend in the field of family philanthropy, and was the founding CEO of NCFP. After more than 22 years, at the end of 2019, she transitioned into the role of senior fellow for the organization. We’re pleased to talk with her about the role of the senior fellow, highlights from her recent conversations with families, and what she sees for the future.

Ginny，您可以从告诉我们NCFP高级研究员的历史和当前角色的一些开始吗？

Thank you, Jason, and thank you for asking me! Interestingly, NCFP has had aSenior Fellowfor quite some time, almost back to the earliest days. We recognized at the time that there was real value in bringing someone in from the outside who cared deeply about the Center and its mission, and who could support our small staff in their thinking about potential research projects, publications, and presentations. We were very lucky that one of NCFP’s founders, Alice Buhl, who had one of the most distinguished practices providing consultant advice to families, was willing to come in and help with projects like theGenerations of Givingresearch and thePursuit of Excellence Report和POE董事会自我评估工具。Alice wrote and spoke for us countless times, and when we as staff just wanted to talk through an issue with her, she was available to us. Essentially, the senior fellow role began as a way to advance and augment the NCFP staff.

Some years later, we inaugurated theNCFPDistinguished Fellow, looking to honor and engage someone with a long career as a volunteer, who could help share their knowledge and experience with the field. Our first Distinguished Fellow, named in 2014, wasSusan Packard Orrof the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and our current Distinguished Fellow, appointed at the end of 2018, isMary Mountcastleof the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation.

And then we also added theNational Center Fellows, who are mid-career professionals and volunteers, offering them a platform for what they had to say and contribute to the field. Our initial Fellows class includedKatherine LorenzandDoug Bitonti Stewart，当前的研究员是六月威尔逊andKelly Nowlin。

How and when did you transition to the role of Senior Fellow?

Well, I was really lucky that Alice, who had been my longtime mentor, let me know that she was ready to retire from that role. This was about the time I was ready to find a way to continue contributing to the Center, but also allowing the Center to go forward and explore its future with a new CEO, a new team, and new board members. So, I came to this as the sort of logical next place for me. And, I was very lucky that the Board wanted to make that kind of work possible for me, and Nick and the rest of the staff were also excited about that possibility!

You’ve been talking with many donors and leaders in the field over your first six months as Senior Fellow, and of course before that as the long-time CEO of NCFP. Can you highlight a few of the concerns that you have been hearing? Is there any optimism or hope out there?

My first formal Senior Fellow project evolved quite a bit from what you and I imagined. I began talking with different families abouthow they are navigating the pandemic。What are the grantmaking, financial, and health tensions and challenges that family giving leaders are dealing with? I’ve realized through these conversations that people are eager and committed to finding purpose and value in times of tragedy and transition.

种族问题确实改变了对话，并增加了第二个大流行，如果您愿意，这个国家绝对需要应对。因此，高级研究员议程的第一本出版物是几周前发布的这些对话的结果。

I will say that I’m having some of the most moving conversations that I have ever had. And I don’t say that lightly. I frequently got off a call feeling both excited that the people I am speaking with are out there working on behalf of all of us—because they are just so incredibly engaged and thoughtful—but I would also feel a bit emotionally wrung out because they were, too.

But as I listened to them, I was struck by how they were able to embody the best of family philanthropy: how do you marry the empathy you feel for your communities, that compassion you feel, with the analysis and strategy necessary to be a good funder?

And I think family philanthropy, at its best, bridges the line between these two things. Family philanthropy is frequently the heart and the mind. It allows donors to follow both routes to understanding: the compassionate, and the analytical.

这些家庭都感到与社区的联系，无论是地理社区，还是是一个关注的社区，因为他们在教育方面提供资金，或者可能是什么。

This is part of who they are. And, because they are so committed to seeing their communities through these times, they’re finding creative ways to do so. They’re finding partnerships. They’re realizing that they can’t always do things the way they have done. I was really impressed with the fact that so many of them were saying: “How do we work with the people in our communities to address this situation?”

And many of them realized that the logic which says you never put money directly in the hands of individuals doesn’t hold up when people are starving, and when people are homeless because of what has happened. And they needed to come up with a creative way to say, how do we get out help to these families quickly?

Just last year, you published a report on place-based family, titledPride of Place。您在谈论的许多事情都是您在该研究中发现的东西。您还想分享该研究的其他教训吗？

What I learned in that study, was that founders and families投资于社区的长期健康。他们知道球员，他们知道他们可以依靠谁，并带入完成这项工作的过程。他们不会去任何地方。

Probably the comparative is, if you’re funding in the environment these days, it’s not something you do for two years. If you’re going to take on the environment, you’re going to take it on for the long haul.

For donors and families that are place-based, they’ve taken it on for pretty much the length of their giving. And when there’s a crisis, you begin to see flexibility because you can rely on trust.

Funders are willing to suspend grant deadlines and report deadlines, and to make it possible for the organizations they support to better navigate an uncertain world, like we’re in right now.

And it’s not just their flexibility—it’s the fact that they are so incredibly, personally invested and committed to this. This is something they live with, because, as one person told me, “We’re part of this community. We want it to do well.”

家庭和董事会还认识到他们需要的礼物。这不是他们在每个季度打电话的东西。在一个情况下，有董事会在两个月内最多八次会议补充。因为它们需要在快速变化的情况下。他们愿意这样做。

Can you talk a little more about those moments? What are some of the changes philanthropic families are facing?

除了地震社会变化,families reach out to me when the family giving program is going through a significant transition, where something has happened to change the way they think and do their work, and whom they involve in their work. This can be the retirement or deaths of senior family leaders. It can be an influx of new assets, or a moment where the family is not sure it can manage the work on its own and may need to think about outside staffing for the first time. It might be the moment they realize a new generation is ready to come in and lead the decision-making. It might be that they’re at a point as a family where they’ve evolved away from really understanding exactly what the donor would have wanted and are looking for how to develop a shared agenda.

有这些重要的过渡时刻，通常人们在这些时刻中间打电话给我。而且，通常，当时刻通过给他们一些麻烦而表现出来时。也许人们没有填补他们一直扮演的角色，或者新人们想在餐桌上。或者，也许这个家庭需要弄清楚如何在拥有2000万美元的捐赠捐赠期限的情况下如何管理2亿美元的捐赠基金 - 突然之间，他们的系统变得有些疯狂。

因此，我要做的就是进来并帮助他们看到将它们带到此刻的事物的自然演变，并帮助他们解决问题，以便他们可以以有益和富有成效的方式来管理和解决它们。这是我真的很幸运能参与许多渴望做这项工作的过程。

发生的伟大事情之一是，部分原因是NCFP做得很好，可以更好地帮助人们理解这些过渡，这是我现在接到了更多的电话，他们说：“我们认为过渡正在我们未来。我们如何为它做准备，而不是对它做出反应？”预防医学通常比急诊室治疗容易得多！因此，要容易得多，要好得多。

At the same time, families can, understandably, get emotional about these things. We don’t want to prepare for the day where Mom and Dad are no longer at the table. That feels painful. It feels disloyal. We certainly don’t want to talk about it in front of Mom and Dad. But what you can miss by not having that conversation is the opportunity to think about the future when Mom and Dad are still there. And I try and help families see the wonderful opportunity to do some of this planning with the people who are most responsible for the fact that the giving is happening as a family. I help them explore how they can do that in respectful and exciting ways, rather than sitting around after Mom and Dad are not there anymore, and trying to figure out what they would have wanted, which can be a really sad moment.

让我们快速了解未来。您对下一阶段奖学金的直接计划是什么，您最兴奋的是什么？

I have a number of families than I am currently supporting. A few that are going from G1 to G2 or G2 to G3, and a couple that are having an estate event that will add significantly to their assets.

A couple of the families I’m working with are trying to figure out what they share as a family. This is not uncommon when you get into G3 and G4, where you have all these individuals at different stages of their life, asking, “OK, what are we doing together and why is it important to us that we continue doing it together?”

I’m also hoping to go back and do some work around those who’ve been starting up foundations. NCFP is committed to supporting the huge numbers of newer foundations, especially those created in the past 30 years, and providing specialized advice for foundations where the donor is still involved.

And, of course, I’m excited about working with my fellow Fellows around the issues that have been identified by the group, particularly racial justice. And supporting each of them as they work on their personalized issues of senior family leadership, limited life foundations, and next gen mentoring. There are wonderful areas where we get to work as a group.

There will be some other papers and short blogs coming, all with some relationship to governance—everything from what makes for a highly functioning board, to my favorite question, “how do you build the board your foundation deserves?” I’m also looking forward to the opportunity to write about some of the common traps that families can find themselves in and practices to avoid these traps.

最后，我很幸运地为一个对我们社会中正在发生的事情保持高度调整并试图做出反应迅速的组织工作。他们愿意给我足够的灵活性，以尽我们所能做出反应。

这听起来像是一个令人兴奋的活动和数组programs. Any parting words, comments, or words of advice?

我知道在这些时期，许多人感到非常孤立。处理灾难和悲剧是一回事。但是，从您的家庭办公室做这件事是另一回事，您与与您一起工作的人和分享经验的人无关。如今，这确实非常困难，但这并不意味着那里没有人可以帮助和支持您。

And this is a time when the National Center wants to be there for you, even though we’re dispersed too. We are there to have a conversation with you, or to connect you to other families with similar experiences. We are really terrific at that date mating function! Remember that while you may be working in quarantine, you don’t have to be working in isolation. We want to be as much a part of getting you through this as we can possibly be. So, do reach out!