THEME
Being Given the Opportunity to Help Others Sara Neely
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o you want to help make the community you care about happier, safer, healthier, brighter, greener, kinder, more tolerant, more compassionate, and/or more equal? Most of us make charitable gifts because of our own values and beliefs. We have feelings of compassion for others and a desire to help a cause we believe in. We give because our values are aligned with the organizations we support. We believe in their mission and what they are trying to achieve for the people, animals, and places they serve. Why we give resonates with why they do the work they do. During our lifetime, a gift to charity can be a way to help satisfy the kinds of desires arising from the values we hold dear. Donations help charitable organizations carry out their work in making positive impacts on the people and places around us. Through our gifts, the organizations we choose will help perpetuate our values to the generations that follow. The gift keeps on giving long after we are gone, leaving a lasting positive impression. After you consider what you have and what you need during your lifetime, and what you will leave in your estate to family and friends, there are many ways to support the causes and concerns in the community that reflect what is important to you and your family.
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During the darkest days of The Depression, Burges Gadsden founded the Victoria Foundation on the belief that people would choose to support each other if they were given the opportunity. Through an Act of the BC Legislature in 1936, the Victoria Foundation became a registered charity and Canada’s second community foundation (after Winnipeg).
Most of us make charitable gifts because of our own values and beliefs. We have feelings of compassion for others and a desire to help a cause we believe in. Its first financial gift was received in April 1937 from Burges’s mother Fannie Gadsden. She gave $20 and enclosed a letter with her donation, “I wish I could afford $100 to so fine an undertaking.” Fannie may have worried that her gift was small, but that $20 changed a community forever. Today, over 80 years later, the Victoria Foundation still stewards that first gift—and the many other gifts that followed. And as we have seen over the decades and in the recent challenging months, people continue to look after each other. We may give because charities have affected our own life. They may have helped us along the way, educated us, or inspired us. BC Notaries Association
One donor established a scholarship at a university in memory of her father who had been a professor in one of the faculties. After a few years, one of the students who had received the scholarship made his own gift to the scholarship fund. That contribution helped increase the number of scholarships to be awarded. A few years later, the student, as a school teacher, encouraged his own class to raise money for the scholarship fund. That effort instilled the act of giving in the younger students. We give for personal reasons, because of what matters to us and the impact we want to have today and for the future. Over the next decade, it is estimated that $750 billion will pass from one generation to the next. That number will be impacted by the market volatility our world is currently experiencing, but the opportunity will be the same. People will have the opportunity to help others, to make gifts that reflect the values they want to pass along to future generations. In 2020, through the campaign for the Rapid Relief Fund, created in partnership with the Times Colonist newspaper and the Jawl Family, the Victoria Foundation received over $6 million in gifts from over 15,000 people. Those donations have been granted out to charities working on the frontlines of providing food, housing, and physical and mental health supports to the most vulnerable populations on southern Vancouver Volume 29 Number 3 Fall 2020
