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Dear Bret,
With the passing of Dick Egan, Nov. 27, our community has lost one of its most valued citizens. But when I first met Dick some 25 years ago, he was the guy who left me waiting at the fax machine.
I was a young kid hired as the second full-time employee at the community foundation in Green Bay. Our foundation didn’t have many assets, so we decided to summarize the most interesting grant applications we received and present them to families with a Donor Advised Fund at our foundation. A Donor Advised Fund is essentially a simpler, cheaper and more tax-efficient alternative to creating your own private foundation.
If we could connect our fundholders to projects that interest them, they’d use their Donor Advised Funds to award grants, thereby magnifying the impact of our little foundation. So with the quarterly fund statements, we started including a list of “promising initiatives” we thought our fundholders might want to support.
Back then, community foundations were considered an extension of the financial services industry and our only job was to manage charitable assets and execute transactions for wealthy families. It’s hard to overstate just how controversial it was in the community foundation field to recommend specific charities to our donors. We were convinced this was a good idea, but some of our fundholders didn’t know what to think, and many in the broader philanthropic world questioned the propriety of our making any recommendation at all.
Yet Dick Egan believed in us from the very start.
Learn more by reading "MEMORIAM - The Man Who Launched the Community Foundation into Orbit..."
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