In Brief

• The Challenge: Legacy conversations can carry significant emotional weight across family generations.
• The Remedy: Shared giving creates a lower-stakes way for families to make decisions together.
• The Impact: Giving together helps families pass down values, purpose, and perspective.

Many families treat charitable giving as a private decision. A cause is chosen, a check or wire is sent before year end, and the moment passes without much discussion. That is a natural starting point, especially while children are young. But as the next generation matures, giving in isolation becomes a missed opportunity. Few tools bring a family together around shared values as naturally as a conversation about where and why to give.

Why Legacy Conversations Stall

Estate planning conversations carry real weight. They involve numbers, mortality, and often uncomfortable questions about fairness among siblings, which is exactly why many families put them off indefinitely.

Philanthropy carries none of that weight. Deciding together where the family’s giving goes is a fundamentally different conversation than deciding who inherits what. It is lower stakes, rooted in values rather than dollars, and genuinely enjoyable when approached with intention. Used well, it becomes a standing opportunity for generations to practice making decisions together, long before the harder conversations arrive.

A Simple Structure That Works

A Donor Advised Fund is often the most direct way to formalize this practice. A parent or grandparent contributes to the fund, then invites adult children and grandchildren to serve as advisors rather than making every grant decision alone. Each generation proposes causes, discusses them, and agrees together on where the year’s giving will go.

Some families build this into an annual family giving meeting, a standing tradition where everyone arrives with a cause in mind. One family we work with simply goes around the table each year and lets each grandchild pitch an organization for a portion of the fund. It has become one of the most anticipated gatherings on their calendar, and what began as a modest exercise has grown into a meaningful family tradition that shapes how the next generation understands wealth and its purpose.

Purpose Driven Investing in Family Values

Shared giving works as a legacy bridge because it lowers the stakes while keeping the impact real. Nobody’s inheritance is on the line, and no one has to disclose net worth. Disagreements about which charity to support are simply easier to navigate than disagreements about dividing an estate.

That lower stakes environment is what makes the practice valuable. Families who give together learn how they make decisions together, who speaks up, who defers, and where disagreement tends to surface, well before those same dynamics are tested in a conversation about the estate itself. By the time the harder conversations arrive, the family already has a practice of sitting down, discussing values, and reaching a decision as a group.

There is also a deeper benefit. A will or trust distributes assets. A giving tradition transmits values, communicating what the family believes, the impact it hopes to have, and what it wants the next generation to carry forward. That is a different, and arguably more durable, kind of inheritance.

The Tax Efficiency Is a Bonus, Not the Reason

Structuring family giving through a vehicle like a Donor Advised Fund, particularly when funded with appreciated securities, carries a genuine tax advantage worth discussing with your advisor. But that benefit is not why a family should start giving together, and it is not the reason to invite the next generation into the conversation. The efficiency sits on top of something more foundational, a recurring, low stakes way for a family to practice being a family across generations, anchored in something everyone can feel good about.

Where to Start

Building this practice does not require a large pool of assets. A modest Donor Advised Fund, one annual conversation, and an invitation for an adult child or grandchild to help direct a portion of this year’s giving is enough to begin.

The families who do this well rarely started with a grand plan. They started with a single conversation, repeated it the following year, and let it grow. For families putting off the harder legacy conversations, this is often the easier, and more natural, place to start.