HONOR ROLL
OF DONORS
ON GIVING WITH ABANDONMENT AND GRATITUDE These are slightly edited excerpts from reflections offered by leading donors Charlotte '65 and Henry '67 Rosenberger to about 375 people at EMU’s annual donor appreciation banquet on Oct. 10, 2014.
PARENTAL MODELS OF GIVING Charlotte: My Graber family participated in building the community of faith and justice for the common good in the rural Mennonite farming community of Wayland, Iowa, where I grew up. As a young child, I remember my mother handing me a coin tied carefully in the corner of a handkerchief for me to put in the offering; she had experienced very hard times growing up during the Great Depression of 1930 in the dustbowl of Nebraska before there was any public assistance for anyone. Henry: I learned early to save my money in dividend earning investments. My Pop would say, “I’ll buy you 100 shares of PP&L and you can pay me back as you earn it!” I never had any money to spend because I was always paying back my Pop for all the stock he 32 | crossroads | fall/winter 2014-15
bought me! A friend in my adult years called that “contrived poverty.” Charlotte: When Henry and I married and we began to live in his community in Pennsylvania, I discovered that his family lived in a closely observed “fish bowl.” The Rosenberger family was considered to be wealthy – no matter the generation – in contrast to the community where I had grown up where everyone was more or less in the same class. Henry: Actually, I inherited a lot from my Pop, but it wasn’t money. In the first years of our marriage a development officer from EMC suggested we might give 10K to the annual fund. That is probably what my Pop gave. At the time our combined yearly salaries were less than 20K. Clearly EMC had high hopes for us! LESSONS ALONG THE WAY Charlotte: Henry and I always agreed we should give in priority to our church, but in addition, Henry thought we should give to all the Mennonite endeavors and community organizations that solicited us. We gave what we could. We were often stretched.
Henry: When the company I founded, Rosenberger Cold Storage & Transport, reached a point, we started a foundation with a tithe of the company’s gross income: Henry & Charlotte Rosenberger Family Foundation. Our children were involved. We received grant requests from many organizations and we tried to please them all. Our giving was broad and mostly unfocused. We experienced the joy of giving as well as being overwhelmed and weary of more requests than we could honor. We learned later that this is called “checkbook philanthropy.” We still do some of this because we live in community, but our major gifts follow the mission we have chosen for our philanthropy. When the company was sold in 1998, the advisor for our foundation suggested we get involved with The Rockefeller Philanthropy Workshop. We learned how to develop a mission statement for our giving and ways to focus our giving for the greatest impact and multiplier effect. We learned it was important to care about the health of the organization we were giving to. We learned that
photo by michael sheeler
2013 - 2014