John, out of curiosity is the Holzmann Family Foundation a public foundation that receives requests from organizations?

How is your gifting criteria document used to communicate to potential recipients?

Matt Schulte´s last blog post . . . Joseph Lowery // A benediction with Racism?

Matt:

Sorry for the slow reply. I was on vacation and then was called back to “active duty” for a while in Sonlight Curriculum, Ltd.. My duties there seem to be easing up.

Anyway.

In answer to your questions:

• Our foundation is private . . . which, as someone has noted, makes it, in many ways, more public and more publicly visible . . . than if it were part of–or under the umbrella of–a public foundation. See my post on Private v Public Foundations.
• As I note in the just-referenced post, we do receive occasional requests from particularly studious organizations that have found our name and address in the public records. Most of them (and, again, remember that we are talking about very few requests–maybe two or three a year, max!) have taken the time to notice what other organizations we have given to, and so, in essence they will actually say, “We fit your giving demographic.” And, in truth, they generally do fit well with where we might like to give.

  However,

• I (as administrator of the foundation) have always completely ignored these requests. They are unsolicited; the sender doesn’t know me; I throw them in the trash. Frankly, I don’t want to get into a discussion with them.
• Our gifting criteria document, I think–at least right now–is more of an internal document that my wife and I want to use, in some manner, as an educational and training tool for our children . . . to help them understand what has motivated us and what our priorities are . . . and, honestly, to help us define more clearly and make explicit–for our children and ourselves–what our (previously unstated/implicit) policies and procedures are.
• I don’t think I have ever shown our statement to any of the four agencies with which we have established relationships and with which we do cooperate. On the other hand, we talk about these matters rather frequently.

  We told one agency: “We are willing to give in response to your request, here, but, look. It’s actually way off the beam compared to why we brought you into the mix. . . . ”

  [Maybe I should explain something, here.

  Even before we read Alan Gotthardt's The Eternity Portfolio, Sarita and I had drastically narrowed our giving focus. Gotthardt's book gave me a vocabulary to use to describe what we were doing: We have a giving portfolio. And we want a certain kind of "balance" in our portfolio. So with that in mind . . . ]

  This particular agency’s request was threatening to drastically unbalance our portfolio. So we (I) had to remind the president of the agency exactly why his agency was in our portfolio and the specific reason(s) we were interested in giving to it.

  At this time, all four of the agencies we support seem well aware of our giving philosophy and what their specific role is within our portfolio.

Good questions!

I hope my answers will prove helpful to you.