San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Planned giving allows older adults to leave a legacy
Thanks to one family’s gift of a tiny cottage in Diamond Heights, eight other families will soon be able to own brandnew houses in the San Francisco hilltop neighborhood.
“We’re hoping to have families in there by summer of 2022,” said Maureen Sedonaen, CEO of Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco, which will build the townhouses with the help of their eventual owners and other volunteers. “We’re very excited to say we’re submitting final docs to the planning department and pulling permits to begin groundwork in a couple of weeks.”
Although beset by pandemicrelated and other delays, the nonprofit’s project on Amber Drive remains a prime local example of the impact of planned giving, also known as legacy giving or gift planning. These are charitable donations — often of assets, equities or other noncash gifts — made as part of an individual’s estate planning and/or tax considerations. While making such bequests in wills is common, gift planning also includes choosing to witness the fruits of your philanthropy.
In the case of Habitat for Humanity’s Diamond Heights project, Santa Barbara residents Mischa Seligman, 99, and his wife, Brigitte, decided a few years ago to honor his late mother, Mitzi Kolisch, by giving her modest home to the nonprofit.
“It feels good that I think of eight families having a decent life,” he said in a November 2019 video, when the initial groundbreaking was to have taken place.
“That’s a big motivator — to get to see the good charitable work happening now,” noted Erik
The nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association has benefited from planned giving and donors can target their donation to specific parks, like Yosemite National Park.
Dryburgh, principal attorney with Adler & Colvin in San Francisco and a specialist in charitable gift planning since 1981. “It’s a chance to build community and feel really invested with the nonprofit.”
But whether such a gift takes place during or after the donor’s lifetime, Dryburgh advised having a conversation with the recipient in advance.
“Charities have very different capabilities to handle things of gifts of anything other than cash or traded securities. Even a moderately sized charity may not be able to take a gift of a home or other real estate because they’re afraid of being on title,” he explained. “If you have a sizable,
complex asset that’s not cash or securities, or you have specific desires on how it is used, you really need to talk to the charity first. Talk to the development officer first to make sure you really like working with the person and the charity is going to honor your intentions.”
Habitat for Humanity will offer legal counsel or referrals to partners “who can help and shepherd” planned givers, according to Sedonaen.
“If there are tax implications, we want to make sure they have guidance on that as well,” she added. “We want to make sure we’re at enough arm’s length from the families, so they feel they are truly guiding and lead
ing this process, but we can be a resource for them.”
Of course, charities understand that many people may not be able to afford a significant, or any, gift to them until after their passing.
“The biggest myth is that people feel like they have to be Marc Benioff or the Chan Zuckerbergs,” said Sedonaen, referring to the Bay Area billionaire benefactors who made their fortunes through Salesforce and Facebook, respectively. “They don’t — they can be people just living their life, thinking about what they can do with their assets when they move on, and they can always change their minds, too.”
West Honeycutt, director of planned giving for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, agreed that gifts don’t have to be major to have an impact.
“Each legacy gift we receive is more than a dollar amount — it is a piece of someone’s life story, and one that we get to ensure lives on for generations to come,” Honeycutt said. “These gifts have an incredible impact on our work and what is most appealing is that anyone can give.”
The parks association, which has offices in Oakland and Los Angeles among more than 30 locations near national parks, has also benefited from planned giving that occurs during the giver’s lifetime, according to Honeycutt.
“Recently, I had a donor reach out whose husband had just passed away. She wanted to ensure the pieces of his life’s story that were most important to him carried on for future generations,” Honeycutt said. “Because of the profound connection and impact Yosemite National Park had on his life, we worked with her to facilitate a generous legacy gift to support our work improving the park’s air quality, increasing protection for wildlife habitat and tackling the park’s repair needs.”
Regardless of when they take place, honoring the memory of a loved one along with the donors’ own passions inspires many planned gifts.
“People are getting creative in making gifts that are really tied to their local community, their home or what’s important to them,” Sedonaen said. “They try to think of how to honor the other person and the geography in which they lived. Mischa didn’t live in San Francisco, but he knew his mother had and he knew she loved San Francisco.”