Yesterday I began my second reading of Tom Brokaw’s powerful book “The Greatest Generation”. It is a great book sharing the values and telling the stories of those who lived through and experienced World War II. The heroics and the struggles, the triumphs and the changing face of America through the experiences of war. How World War II, with all its atrocities and untimely events, shortened promising lives of so many of our young people. But the book isn’t about death and it’s not about the war, per se. The book is about ordinary people that made extraordinary differences resulting in some of the greatest advances this world has seen in areas of human rights, science, education and family. Indeed one thing that impresses me the most about the book is the lessons of family philanthropy that came from and were taught by this “greatest generation”.
Family Philanthropy is one of the five family building activities that I talk about in my new book “Family Before Fortune” (more on this book, due out later this year, will be the continued focus of the articles found here). One of the ways a family can grow together is through employment of a family philanthropic plan- a lesson in giving….together. The greatest generation has deep community roots. A generation that, often times, was raised, educated, married, started businesses and started families in the same towns they were born. Their community roots run deep.
Often expressing that they know all of their neighbors, never lock their front door and pull together as a community family during times of trial. As we see the continued “flattening of the world”, as children leave the towns of their birth, pursue higher education, and different opportunities, one of the things we are losing as a society is the deep “local” roots of preceding generations. With all the positive opportunities “leaving the nest” provides, there is one value that we as families hope our posterity take with them, a commitment to building their local community. A community is where all participants pull together, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Raise our families with the understanding that regardless how often they move, or how many place they call home, the need to positively impact that new society has value, it’s a necessity.