Modelling Generosity Across Generations

Brad Family

Generosity doesn’t just start all of a sudden when we decide we have accumulated “enough”; it is shaped by experiences throughout our lifetime and deeply influenced by the people around us. Growing Up Amidst Generosity My family didn’t talk about charitable giving while I was growing up, but their actions spoke volumes about the joy…

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Finding Their Legacy Story

Legacy giving

Ten years into retirement, Dianne and Harold took the prudent step of reviewing their financial plans for the future. They met with their financial advisor who informed them that they had fully overcome the risk of outliving their money. Then, they met with me to review their Generosity Plan™ for charitable giving. They explained to…

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Generosity Lives On (Part Two)

Mike and Carol and Kids

In Part One of this blog series, we looked at the advantages of giving to charity in your will. Part Two explores how one couple’s carefully planned legacy of giving is teaching a new generation to be generous. Throughout their 53 years together, Mike and Carol Dempsey* nurtured strong family ties with their children and…

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Generosity Lives On (Part One)

Mike and Carol

Warren Buffet once said, “If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%.” Hearing this from a billionaire philanthropist may prompt comparisons that make it difficult to think of ourselves as the ‘luckiest’, but an annual net income of $41,800 CAD is…

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Bridging the Generation Gap with Generosity (Part Three)

Extended family

Link to Part One and Part Two I have been privileged to work with many generous Abundance Canada clients, including Gerald*, a father whose guidance inspired new generations of philanthropists. A Tradition of Generous Giving Gerald was a hard-working father and business owner who generously supported the charities he loved. From the time they were…

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Faithful Generosity

Franklin Family

Most researchers agree that charitable giving is a learned behaviour, but most people have never enrolled in lessons on how to be generous. It is just something we pick up through experience. On average, people who are active in a faith community give more to charity than other people in Canada. For them, giving generously…

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The Family That Gives Together

Smith Family

It’s a new decade, and another Christmas is firmly in the rear-view mirror. We all love to give and make time to spend with loved ones during the holidays, but that Christmas spirit often gets lost when we fall back into our busy family routines. But what if togetherness and generosity were the family routine?…

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Generosity Strategies for the Self-Employed

female business partners

Sisters and business partners, Janice and Jenn Nelson* run a small but thriving real-estate agency they built up over years of hard work. From the time they were young, they both valued giving to charity. However, being in the real-estate sector, their income was tied to the fluctuating market conditions, so they settled on giving…

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Engaging the Next Generation in Generosity

student march

Last fall, Greta Thunberg gave a compelling call to action against climate change[1]. She was 16 years old at the time. Greta has Asperger’s Syndrome, OCD and Selective Mutism, which she explains as “only speaking when necessary.” Her frustration with the lack of action against climate change caused her to speak up. She recalls learning…

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