When identity leads, and when it follows
Randal Evans | randalevans.com/writing
The letters went out in April, every year.
For nearly two decades, the Whitfield Family Foundation’s annual grant cycle had run like a quiet clock. Applications opened in January. The review process unfolded through February and March, guided by Margaret Whitfield’s careful attention to each organization’s work, her personal phone calls to executive directors she had known for years, her instinct for which programs were genuinely changing lives and which had simply learned to describe themselves well. By April, the letters were ready. By May, the checks had cleared. It was one of the things the foundation’s grantee organizations counted on — not just the funding, but the rhythm of it, the reliability, the sense that someone was paying close attention.
This April was different. Margaret’s oncologist had used the word “aggressive” in November. By February, the family’s attention had reorganized itself entirely around her care. Her three adult children — Daniel, Claire, and Soren — had each rearranged their lives in ways that would have been unimaginable a year earlier. The foundation’s grant cycle arrived on the calendar like a obligation from another world.
It was Daniel who raised it first, at the kitchen table of the family home where they had gathered for a weekend in late March. He brought it up almost as a practical matter, the way you surface a detail you’ve been quietly carrying. The letters go out in April. What do we do?
What followed was not a governance conversation, exactly. It was the kind of conversation families have when circumstances have outpaced their structures — a loose, unfinished negotiation between grief and responsibility, between honoring what their mother had built and reckoning honestly with their own uncertainty about what any of them actually knew about running a foundation.
Claire had her mother’s files. She had been the one managing Margaret’s calendar and correspondence since November, and she had a working familiarity with the grant applications that had come in — twenty-three organizations, most of them longtime grantees, a handful of new applicants. She knew the names. She did not know, not really, how to evaluate them. Their mother had carried that knowledge in ways that were not written down anywhere.
Soren, the youngest, was the one who said what the other two had been thinking. We don’t actually know what we’re doing here. He did not mean it as a criticism. He meant it as an honest inventory of their situation. They were three people who had grown up in a household shaped by their mother’s values and their mother’s biography — her own origins in a neighborhood where opportunity was scarce, the scholarship that had taken her to a music conservatory at seventeen, the pivot to business and real estate that had built the family’s wealth, the giving that had reflected all of it. They had watched her do this work for two decades. They had never been taught to do it themselves.
The three areas the foundation supported — music and arts education, scholarships and professional development for women from disadvantaged communities, housing assistance programs — traced Margaret’s life directly. They were not a strategic framework. They were a story. Her story. And as long as she had been present, fully present, the story had been enough to hold the institution together.
What the children discovered at that kitchen table, without quite naming it this way, was the difference between an organization that knows what it stands for and an organization that knows who it is.
The Whitfield Foundation had always known, with great clarity, who it was. It was Margaret’s foundation. It expressed Margaret’s history, Margaret’s relationships, Margaret’s judgment. The identity was real and it was coherent and it had made the foundation genuinely effective. The foundation’s governing board reflected this identity. It consisted simply of Margaret and two of the family’s longtime advisors, who met once a year to review the investments, determine the total grant funding for the year, and affirm Margaret’s selection for that year’s grant cycle. Grantee organizations trusted the foundation because they knew and trusted Margaret. The annual cycle worked because her attention made it work. The three giving areas reflected something authentic because they came from somewhere authentic in her.
What the foundation had never needed to develop — because Margaret had been there to provide it directly — was a set of principles that could hold the institution together in her absence. Principles that could answer the questions her children were now facing: How do we evaluate a grant application without her intuition? How do we decide whether to expand into a new area or hold the existing focus? How do we handle a situation where two of us see it one way and one of us sees it another? Who decides, and on what basis?
Identity, it turns out, cannot answer those questions. Identity can tell you who you are. It cannot tell you what to do when the people who embodied that identity are no longer in the room to tell you.
The three siblings did not push through the grant cycle that April. The decision to postpone it — to send a letter to the foundation’s grantee organizations that was honest about the family’s circumstances and clear about the foundation’s continued commitment — was, in retrospect, the first genuinely institutional decision they made together. It was not a decision that honored identity. It was a decision that honored stewardship. The distinction is small on the surface. Underneath, it is significant.
The letter they sent was careful and warm. It acknowledged Margaret’s illness without making the foundation’s situation sound precarious. It committed to resuming the grant cycle on a revised timeline, when the family had had the opportunity to make thoughtful decisions about the foundation’s direction. It asked for the patience and continued partnership of the organizations they had supported for years.
Several of those organizations wrote back. The responses were, without exception, gracious. A few of them offered something unexpected: reflections on what the foundation had meant to them, what Margaret’s personal involvement had produced that money alone could not, what they hoped the foundation would carry forward. Those letters became, quietly, some of the most useful input the children received.
By June, Daniel, Claire, and Soren had agreed on something: the decisions in front of them were not decisions they could make well on their own. Not because they lacked intelligence or commitment, but because the questions they needed to answer required more than the three of them brought to the table. What did the foundation’s grantee organizations actually need? What had Margaret seen in these three giving areas that was irreplaceable, and what had simply accumulated over time? What would it mean to honor her legacy as distinct from replicating her choices? What did each of the three siblings actually care about, and was that relevant to the foundation’s future direction? And what governance and administrative structures might be needed to make decisions about the foundation’s future without Margaret’s direct involvement.
Those questions deserved a real conversation — not a family dinner where the agenda shifted with the evening’s emotional weather, but a structured, unhurried gathering with people who knew enough to be genuinely useful and were distant enough from the family’s dynamics to ask honest questions.
They spent the early summer arranging it. A weekend in August at a lodge outside the city — modest, private, conducive to long conversations. The guest list took shape through careful thought rather than convenience: the foundation’s longtime legal advisor, who had been part of the original founding documents and knew the structure from the inside; the VP of private wealth management at a regional bank who served on the foundation’s board; the executive director of the housing organization that had been a grantee since the foundation’s earliest years; a woman who had received one of the foundation’s scholarships a decade earlier and was now running a workforce development program; a family friend who had served on three nonprofit boards over the years and brought a perspective that was neither insider nor outsider; and a community foundation program officer who worked regularly with family foundations navigating exactly the kind of transition the Whitfields were facing.
No single voice in that room would be able to dominate the conversation by virtue of their relationship to Margaret or their position within the family. That was not an accident. The children had thought carefully about it. They were not assembling a new governing board, or even a standing or ad hoc advisory group. They were creating conditions for a different kind of thinking than any of them could do alone.
The questions they brought to the gathering were genuinely open. How might the foundation honor what their mother had built while evolving to reflect the next generation’s own values and commitments? What principles should guide how decisions get made — about direction, about grants, about who has voice and how disagreements get resolved? And, underneath all of it: what would it mean for this foundation to become an institution, as distinct from remaining an expression of one person’s biography?
What they were building, in the design of that weekend gathering, was the kind of structure that makes principles-first governance possible. Not a set of rules imposed from outside, but a process through which principles could emerge from genuine conversation — from the foundation’s own history, its relationships, its accumulated experience of what had worked and what hadn’t.
The invitations to this gathering carefully framed this as a thinking conversation — or rather, a sequence of lightly-structured collaborative conversations — rather than a decision-making process, to protect the openness of it.
The identity of the foundation after that gathering would not be erased. The three giving areas might persist, or evolve, or consolidate — but whatever direction the foundation moved in, it would move there through a process that the foundation could trust and repeat. The next decision would not require reconvening the same group in crisis. It would require applying the same principles to a new set of questions.
That is the difference between an institution and a person. A person carries wisdom in ways that cannot always be transferred. An institution, at its best, builds the conditions in which wisdom can be continually regenerated. Margaret Whitfield had been, for twenty years, extraordinarily wise about her foundation’s work. The question her children were learning to ask — and beginning, carefully, to answer — was not how to replicate her wisdom. It was how to build the kind of institution that could develop its own.
Randal Evans is a philanthropic and legal counselor, strategic advisor, and Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy® (CAP®) based in Scottsdale, Arizona. He works with families, foundations, and mission-driven organizations on charitable planning, governance, and leadership. More at randalevans.com.
This article is provided for educational purposes and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice.