Eighteen Cents and a Blue-and-White Box: Why Philanthropy Needs Language

Every Friday afternoon, just before lighting the Shabbat candles, my mother dropped eighteen cents into a blue-and-white JNF box.

She did the same thing in her classroom each Friday, where she taught first grade.

It was never the amount that stayed with me. It was what she said.

We give to remember that we are responsible for others. And what we have is meant, in part, to be shared.

I have thought about that sentence often in the decades since. I have thought about it especially often in the eighteen months since my mother died. It was my first lesson in tzedakah. I did not know it then, but it was also my first lesson in something else: that giving carries meaning, and meaning needs articulation if it is to endure.

For most of us, the values behind our giving were planted early, and quietly. A tzedakah box on a kitchen counter. A grandparent's quiet check, mailed each December. A father stopping the car to hand a folded bill through the window at a red light. The memory is almost always specific. And it almost always shapes us more than we realize at the time.

But here is what I have noticed in twenty-five years of work with families and nonprofit organizations: people rarely write these memories down. They give for decades. They establish donor-advised funds. They make provisions in their estates. They sit on Federation committees and serve on Foundation boards. And still, when asked why they give, or what they hope their giving will say to those who come after them, they pause.

The structures are in place. The language is missing.

This is what a statement of philanthropic intent is for.

A statement of philanthropic intent is a personal articulation of the values, memories, and commitments behind one's giving. It is not a legal document. It does not direct funds or bind future decisions. It gives language to the why — so that those who carry the giving forward, whether children, trustees, or successor advisors, understand the heart of what is being passed on.

It can be brief. A page is often enough. It might trace a beginning, the way a tzedakah box on a Friday afternoon traces mine. It might name the causes or communities that have mattered most, and why. It might draw on Jewish teachings such as the obligations of tzedakah, the rungs of Rambam's tzedakah ladder, the call of tikkun olam to repair the world, or simply on the example of a parent or grandparent whose giving shaped one's own.

What matters most is that it is honest.

In an era of increasingly sophisticated philanthropic vehicles, this kind of writing becomes even more important. A donor-advised fund can carry resources forward for generations. A family foundation can outlast its founders by many decades. Neither, by itself, carries intention. Without language, even the most carefully designed structure can drift from the meaning that first set it in motion.

I think often about what my mother would have written, had she been asked. I do not know exactly what she would have said. But I know it would have included the children in her classroom. I know it would have included Shabbat. And I know it would have highlighted the same conviction she handed me, week after week, eighteen cents at a time: that we are responsible for one another, and that what we have is meant, in part, to be shared.

Most of us carry something like that — a memory, an example, a moment when giving meant something — whether we recognize it or not.

A statement of philanthropic intent is, in part, the act of recognizing it and then setting it down on paper, so that it can be passed on.

If you'd like to put words to the values behind your own giving, I'd be glad to talk with you.