COMMENTARY
by Judy Barber

In this issue, we move into the most emotional and subjective realm of money: how we feel about it. Surprisingly, in the field of psychology, there has been very little exploration of the impact of money on our lives. Yet in my work with people, I see that the more conscious we are of our beliefs, habits and feelings about money, the better able we are to make good choices about the role and uses of money in our lives. In these pages, you will hear several people speak about the powerful formative values and attitudes they inherited along with their money, and of how they came to terms with them, forging constructive rather than destructive roles for their money.

In the candid spirit of this issue, I've examined my own childhood, and see that my parents had very different money styles and that my own style—for better or worse—is a fusion of both. My father was a real estate developer. An expansive man driven by a dream of creating something beautiful, he was excited about each new project. He was an optimist and a risk taker, part with ideas ahead of his time. Sometimes we lived on his dreams, on the deal that was about to close. Some of them didn't. As a result, we lived a roller coaster life with, sometimes, a great deal of money and, other times, very little. We always lived graciously. My frugal mother saw to that. But tension pervaded the household when Dad was working, with his unshakable confidence, on one of his deals.

A woman of her generation, my mother followed her man on the roller coaster ride, at times excited, at times gripping the safety bar with white knuckles. It wasn't that she didn't share his vision. She was creative, too, often working with him on the interior design of projects. She simply wasn't a risk taker. She longed for financial stability and agonized over how to make ends meet.

Now, in my middle years, I recognize that I carry both of them inside me. I acrlike my father and feel like my mother: I'm an innovator in my professional life and chose work that involves financial risk. Yet at the same time, I feel my mother's pangs of financial concern. The stories here confirm that we bring into adulthood from our childhood a set of financial issues that is part of our on-going lives. I, personally, will continue to work for a balance between my father's love of living on the edge and my mother's anxiety — a balance between creative excitement in my work and a healthy respect for financial security.

As you read, you'll meet Marta Drury, who still identifies in her philanthropy with the working class values which made her family money. Next Denis Sutro reveals how he learned about the hollowness of trying to buy love and attention with things, and has evolved a more satisfying way to live with money. Bob Grant's step-by-step approach to options for charitable giving is another way of looking at the meaning of money.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Marta Drury: Giving with a Human Touch
by Judy Barber

Marta Drury gives money away. She is a professional philanthropist. Her career is finding ways to fund progressive grass roots organizations. When she sees a special need, she designs innovative ways to make funding available.

I met with Marta in her comfortable home in Palo Alto at her dining room table strewn with books she was ready to give away to schools and non-profits. Marta's bookshelves and table tops are overflowing with books and dolls, her walls covered with family pictures and memorabilia. I was struck by one black and white photo of a garbage man, hauling his huge can over his shoulder up a long steep driveway. Why did she have that picture?, I asked. "My father began his career as a garbage man," she told me.

Marta's first philanthropy project, Ilearned, was the Woodlake Fund which t gives scholarships for post-secondary education to young women of color in East Palo Alto, California, those highly-motivated but average students who would not otherwise go beyond high school. The fund is administered through The Women's Foundation, an educational and grant-making foundation which has, since 1981, served the needs of low-income women and girls.

In 1992, she designed The Resourceful Women Awards by giving $200,000 to be awarded to women who had shown outstanding leadership in working for progressive social change and in encouraging and supporting women and girls. The awards were administered through Resourceful Women, a non-profit that helps women with wealth gain the skills and confidence to make good choices with their money and their lives, and exposes them to a variety of ways of giving.

JB - How do you make your choices for giving?

MD - My main focus is on women and girls, but not exclusively. The real basis of my giving is about education. It is a simple and easy way to support people in jumping class layers, a way to even out the differences. A majority of my giving goes to organizations which might not be funded otherwise. On the other hand, I give to the opera for scholarships. I continue to mull over the question of whether to give a lot to a few organizations or a little to many, but I do give to many.

JB - Why have you focused your philanthropy on women and girls?

MD - Because of my own familiarity with the needs of women and girls and the inequities in the funding of women's programs. Having been a single, poor mother in California's welfare system, I'm very familiar with what it's like for women, especially with children, to try to get out of these traps. I was on food stamps and Medi-Cal after my daughter was born and felt those early years in child development were so important that I stayed on welfare until she was three so that I could be with her.

JB - What kind of work did you then do?

MD - I have a master's degree in special education, but didn't want to work with blind or handicapped children and come home with nothing left emotionally for my daughter. So for years, I ran a number of small businesses, from catering and hottubs to book stores, later owning a toy store.

Then in 1986, I inherited money. My parents were both still alive, the tax laws were changing and they layers, a & liquidated a family holding company. I never thought my father would make the decision to do it. It was the most wonderful gift from him and for our relationship. I always knew that he loved me but felt he didn't respect me because I never made big money with my small businesses. When I inherited and started making money with it, our relationship changed. I always knew I'd be inheriting money, but in getting the money while they were still alive, the taboo was removed of thinking about them having to die to get the money. My parents died three months apart, within three years of my first receiving the inheritance.

JB - Have you ever felt guilty about inheriting the money, then or since?

MD - No. When I was six, my father bought his first truck, and from then on I was expected to work in the business, and because of that, I never felt guilty or embarrassed by the money. Dad was a mailman in the morning and the village garbage man in the afternoon. Mom worked in the business; my parent's bedroom was the office for the first four or five years, as they took a one-truck business to an international conglomerate!

JB - Did your parents give?

MD - Not much. They probably gave $100 to the Salvation Army and $100 to the Church and thought they were quite generous. The classic American success story, they felt if you were having hard times, it was your own fault for not working hard enough. My mother bought her coat from the back of the Sunday newspaper supplement. They thought that if others knew they were making money, they wouldn't pay their bills.

JB - How different your style of giving is.

MD - I think part of my philanthropy is based on my personality— that I'm generous and believe money is for people to use. I knew that when! inherited, philanthropy would be a big part of my life. Icouldn't share it with my parents, yet I respected what their money meant to them.

JB - How did you get started?

MD - A few months before my Dad started talking about making the first gift, I read about Resourceful Women. It was just a little paragraph in a magazine about how the organization helped women with wealth better understand themselves and their money. I tore it out and said to myself, "Someday I'm going to need this." The night my Dad called and said, "there's a check on the way," I made the call. So I was fortunate to have a group of like-minded women from the beginning and to have Tracy Gary as a mentor. (Tracy Gary is founder and executive director of Resourceful Women (RW).) RW is a safe place to talk about money, has a real sense of community, and offers you women role models.

JB - In addition to education, community activism is one of your interests, too, isn't it?

MD - Yes, the Resourceful Women Awards, which is run by a committee of RW's national Women Donors Network. Members of this nationwide group each donate a minimum of $25,000 a year to grass roots organizations. In designing the awards, we formed teams to identify women across the country who were truly changing their communities, not just giving money, and awarded ten women who were awarded $5,000 and $15,000 to their non profits. Giving money to activists was my idea, and comes from my basic philosophy that working women don't often have time to take a vacation or even catch up — $5,000 allows that. I went back to my home state of Minnesota and put together a team with a Native American woman, an African American woman and a college roommate now working with Head Start.

JB - Did your grass-roots awards make a difference?

MD - Two of the women said the doors of their organization were ready to close when the money came. One organization took the money and used it as seed money to start a mentoring program for teenage Native American girls. Now we're doing it again.

JB - This Is more than giving; it's deep Involvement. What are your other projects?

MD I have a new project called The Circle, a group of women on the Peninsula who have, in collaboration with the Global Fund for Women, made a two year commitment to looking at international sex trafficking.

JB - What does your giving give you?

MD - Peace of mind. I am able to live comfortably and play because of the knowledge that I've given as much as I can give. I give the max. So many people I know with money and a conscience end up Feeling guilty about living well. But, also, I came from a working class family and 1 want to continue to feel connected to them. This is work, very interesting work. It's also a responsibility.

JB - I see this amazing doll you made. Do I see the same creativity and Innovatlveness here that I see in your philanthropy?

MD - I guess it's a need to be creative. A friend of mine took me to a show, "The Way of the Doll." I thought I could never something like that, but decided to take the class. It is a year long process meeting for three hours each week. Most of the students are not artists and end up creating something they call a doll. Not always what other people view as a doll but some expression of their story. This may sound strange, but it is a type of leadership development because people come out having a much stronger sense of themselves. In the year we are together, we work slowly, step-by- step, through different media — clay, making costumes, writing and poetry, breaking the isolation and helping men and women realize they are not the only ones who have experienced difficulties or terrible experiences. Many stories are secret and can only be expressed through the dolls, but these stories are shared - five thousand people see the doll show.

JB - Has your daughter been Influenced by your philanthropy?

MD - Well, I'm trying to train my daughter better than I was trained. I want her to know how I spend my time and try to share my work with her. She goes to a college where there's a young man whose mother is a social change philanthropist and they commiserate together!

PERSONAL EXPERINCE

I Tried to Buy With Money What I Never Got at Home
by Denis Sutro

From a comfortable childhood in Northern California, I developed an emotional dependence on money as dangerous and addictive as any drug. Finally, several years ago — 'strung out' by a long hiatus between jobs, wondering where my rent money was coming from — I focused on why I had let money become such a negative force in my life.

Reflecting back to my first experiences with money, I recalled that, in our house, any educational discussion about money was strictly forbidden. It was mostly: "May I please have some money so that I can take my friends to the bowling alley?"

As a child, I didn't know how money came into our house, what my father did to earn it at Standard Oil of California, or whether he actually enjoyed what he was paid to do; I didn't know whether money was saved in a shoebox or kept loose under the bed. At that point I suppose I didn't care. What I did begin to know is that money was taking on a meaning for me; in the absence of more appropriate and loving relationships, I was creating a complex and destructive relationship with money.

CHILDHOOD STRUGGLES I was rarely held as a child. I actually tried to avoid being seen by my father because it was virtually always a shameful and terrifying experience. He was verbally abusive to me, especially when he was drunk (which was almost every night for my first 20 years). My mother was rarely able to express love directly to me and did nothing to dissuade my father from his abusive behavior. I now believe that a part of the explanation for her unprotective and un-mothering attitude was that she was terrified that if she confronted my father about his abuse, he would leave her and she would lose her financial security.

In any event, by the time I was about eight I discovered that I could side-step the gaping hole in my soul by buying with money various things. Money got me those kinds of things which temporarily (and only temporarily) soothed my shriveled heart. I distracted myself from my pain with an electrified toy tractor, or fire crackers, or barbecued potato chips bought on the way home from school. Of course, I didn't realize that I was unconsciously structuring a pain-abatement program. But it gave me no joy.

At the same time that I realized I could comfort myself by things bought with money, I was growing a desperate need for peer recognition. This sort of attention was a poor substitute for family love and was never enough. But I needed it badly, and being associated with money brought the recognition I craved. Even when my family didn't have a lot of money, I wanted it to look that way. I enjoyed being driven to school in a big Cadillac provided by the city for our neighbor, a city supervisor. I wanted the kids to see me so that I would be associated with wealth and given the recognition I so urgently needed. I only vaguely realized what is clear now — that the good feelings connected with that kind of recognition dissipated within minutes of stepping from the car, and I could not recreate them without some external prop.

So, I came to believe at a very deep level that I had to have money to buy things or impress my friends in order to construct a flimsy substitute for esteem. If my monthly allowance was insufficient to do what I wanted, I would steal money, usually in $20 increments, either from my father or mother PS Or so ) coulcl ^y that ^"al electric boat or . . take five or six friends to the bowling alley. These were not generous gifts to my buddies laht OH or pleasure in a powerful boat they were to hnmp momentarily distance me from the void 1 could not possibly confront in other ways.

In the absence of love I looked to money; in the absence of alternatives, I became dependent on my parents as my only sources for that money.

The real significance of my dependency was, of course, not clear to me then. But as I reflect back on the various jobs 1 have had, ranging from trial lawyer to carpenter to administrator for a real estate development company, somewhere in my guts I have always felt the same debilitating kind of dependency on other people to produce for me the elixir — money — I so desperately needed to pay for fancy apartments, cars or meals, or alcohol, cocaine or travel. What started out as potato chips and ice cream cones had evolved into adult things and resulted in very sad trades: at first, my integrity as I stole money from my parents; later, my life, time, energy and the development of my natural talents.

MOVING FORWARD Minute by minute, I am slowly moving out of the woods. I am learning discipline as part of the process of reconstructing my negative self image, reminding myself in dirt simple terms that I am lovable. I touch myself gently the way a good parent might have. I meditate each afternoon as a way to raise my awareness of old and destructive thought and emotional patterns. I know now, for example, that when I am frightened about the future, I still want to spend money (on a piece of camping equipment, or expensive clothes). But knowing this now I may seek solace in nature, or simply watch the urge rise and fall rather than respond without thought. It is still an awesome challenge to create a sense of self-love from scratch, and sometimes I become discouraged. Still, my challenge is to move beyond any sense of being victimized by my past. I think 1 would rather die poor, having learned to love myself and others fully, than to go out surrounded by buckets of money, having never learned what it's like to face who I am without that crutch.

Denis Sutro is a 46 year old San Francisco native who was born the youngest of three children in a locally prominent family. He was educated at Stanford, later at Hastings College of the Law. Four years after beginning the practice of law, he left that profession for a number of others, including carpentry and the design of art exhibitions. He is now a vineyard owner and wine maker. He lives with his family north of San Francisco in vineyard country.

PROFESSIONAL VIEW

Philanthropic Options: Making Choices that Count
by Robert N. Grant

Another day, another dozen charitable requests! How do you respond to the barrage of opportunities and make the right choices? You can stick a pin in the list, and simply write a check. Or you can play some variations on the theme and choose options that expand your philanthropy beyond its positive social goals to some compelling benefits for you, your family, and your own financial affairs.

Before sticking in the pin, you may wish to consider some of the benefits you can gain from the options described below: 1) avoiding capital gains, 2) getting your children involved in the family's philanthropic activities, and 3) securing your own financial future.

1. How To Make a Tax-Wise Choice in the Property You Give. One of the best, yet often overlooked, strategies is to give appreciated property, typically appreciated securities. If you sell stock which has appreciated since you acquired it, you must recognize and pay capital gains tax on that sale before donating the net proceeds to a charity and receiving a charitable deduction for income tax.

An alternative is to contribute appreciated stock to the charity, thus avoiding potential capital gains and giving you as an income deduction the fair market value of the stock at the time of the gift Your charity of choice can, in turn, sell the stock without recognizing the capital gain and apply all the proceeds to its charitable purposes. This strategy increases your charit-able income tax deduction from roughly 65% of the value of the stock (the proceeds after capital gains tax) to 100 of the value of the stock, and to divert from the I.R.S. to the charity the capital gains tax that would otherwise be payable.

Gifts of appreciated securities to traditional public charities— the Red Cross, United Way, schools, etc. —clearly qualify for this tax benefit. Contributions to "private foundations" (discussed below), however, will qualify for the income tax deduction for the fair market value only if the gift is of publicly traded securities. Next,

2. How To Benefit Your Family In Your Gift. Traditionally,a gift is made directly to the charitable organization for its use and control the simplest choice for the donor. However, if you gift one of two interesting altematives, a Private Family Foundation or a Donor Advised Fund, there may be great benefits for your family, as well.

The Private Family Foundation is a two-step process which gives parents an opportunity to involve the whole family in its charitable giving and which, over time, becomes a superb vehicle for introducing younger generations into the family's responsibilities and its legacy of benefiting others.

Basically a non-profit corporation, a foundation is created by Articles of Incorporation, executed by the donors, which limit the foundation's purposes to charitable activities. As they incorporate, the donors select their Board of Directors and adopt by-laws for the operation of the organization. An application is then made to the I.R.S. for qualification as a tax exempt entity. The donors then make their charitable contributions to the Private Family Foundation, which distributes the gift to the organizations selected by the Board of Directors.

If the donor's children are adults, they can be included on the Board of the Private Family Foundation. This can be a strengthening device for families, aiding the transition of the parent-child relationship to that of adult-adult. As families experience the joy of doing something "good" together, they, in turn, often find more sensitive personal family matters easier to handle. Board membership gives youthful altruistism a productive outlet, while teaching the children responsibility as they review grant requests, select donee organizations and evaluate their performance.

Co-managing funds can liberate a family from some of the usual parent-child tensions: Parents are freed of the fear that children will squander the money in frivolous lifestyles. Children learn how difficult it is to invest money successfully, bearing the losses from bad investment decisions only indirectly as they see their mistakes impact the level of funding of the charitable activities they wish to support.

And yet a Private Family Foundation is not without its drawbacks. Establishing the foundation and qualifying for tax exempt status typically involves the services, and substantial fee, of an attorney and, once established, typically requires an accountant, a continuing expense for as long as the foundation functions. The Foundation's donors and directors must also make a significant commitment of time and effort. However, if the foundation receives only donations of publicly traded securities and cash, that "plain vanilla" funding base limits the size of the work burden. Another consideration: Since the foundation must distribute approximately 5 of its assets each year, either additional contributions or a successful investment program will be required for future growth of the Private Family Foundation.

The Donor Advised Fund, a less administratively burdensome alternative to the Private Family Foundation, is a fund which contributes its gifts to a local Community Foundation such as The San Francisco Foundation, The Peninsula Community Foundation, The East Bay Community Foundation, or The Santa Clara County Community Foundation. Functioning very similarly to a Private Family Foundation, these foundations are available, however, to anyone who wishes to make a charitable contribution. The Community Foundation either holds, or distributes directly, the funds contributed for the charitable organizations selected by the donor. A Donor Advised Fund is usually the temporary creation of donors who are uncertain as to which charitable organizations they wish to fund or who wish the funds to be distributed over a period of time. Although the fund is legally under the control

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