Our Guiding Values

Our approach to inspiring and equipping family based service and generosity is governed by six basic principles:

Virtues grow most when parents and children practice them together.
Families need to be connected to other families.
The upwardly mobile family has the potential to significantly benefit society.
Small but faithful efforts go a long way.
We are fundamentally motivated by joy.
The family’s first and foremost commitment is to each other.

1. Virtues grow most when parents and children practice them together.

We believe parental rhetoric alone is quite limited in shaping a child towards any virtue, but especially those of service and generosity. A child doesn’t learn to be generous by being lectured “you ought to be more generous;” she learns it by watching and participating in family giving.

A family is naturally constituted to form the virtues of service and giving in the context of the family relationships. For the parent, the quality of self-sacrifice grows through sleepless nights comforting a crying infant, changing what seems to be an interminable stream of diapers, and weathering the storms of pre-adolescent emotions. For the child, the growing ability to share one’s belongings with others is constantly required, especially if she has other siblings. Family members thus grow in these values by practicing them towards each other initially, and are called to do so in a primary way for the rest of their lives (see value #6 below).

As the family matures, we believe this same practice is also meant to be increasingly extended to those in need outside of the family. Historically, the family has been the most potent and durable force for social benefit, far outlasting manifestations of government, public charity, or any other social form. Around the world, when someone is in dire need, chances are he will most immediately turn to extended family, family friends or neighboring families. And a family that is truly growing in the virtues of service and generosity within the family will naturally respond to those needs outside the family.

We believe the modern marketing practice of segmenting and separating age groups for fundamentally different kinds of experience is flawed as a model for the formation of virtue. While being sensitive to the needs of different ages, we seek to empower a family to serve and give as a family.

2. Families need to be connected to other families.

Families with both material means and moral commitments to the needy can find themselves isolated from both ends of the socioeconomic divide. Towards those with means, parents may feel alienated by their neighbors’ conspicuous consumption and fearful that their children are absorbing a culture of entitlement; but they do not know which other families in their suburb share their concern. Towards the needy, the family may drive through a poor neighborhood or see scenes of destitution on television; but they have no relational connection to make those worlds more accessible.

We believe that it is critical for our families to break out of this isolation and connect with other families on both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. To grow in service and giving, a family needs to connect with other families of means that are struggling with the same issues and also to very different families in need.

For instance, an upwardly mobile family also needs to connect with other like minded families and together wrestle with difficult questions like “How do you do holidays in our material culture?” or “How do you offer material help to others without seeming all snooty?” or “What movies foster the kinds of values I want to see in my kids?” We need each other because values grow when we mutually inspire, challenge and instruct each other.

Likewise, a nine year old boy who goes to Mexico on a family service trip and plays with a boy who has only a tattered soccer ball for a toy will have his sense of entitlement to the latest video game console reframed dramatically. A suburban mom struggling with comparing herself to her peers will be profoundly challenged by the contentment of a grandmother who has made tortillas all her life.

3. The upwardly mobile family has the potential to significantly benefit society.

Even with all of its challenges, the upwardly mobile family possesses great capacity to serve the world. On the philanthropic front, there is the room for significantly increased financial giving. We believe that this segment tends to give at amounts below their capability and even deeply held desire. They could and want to give in ways that make a “strategic” difference -- beyond their heretofore “expressive” giving. What they lack are specific opportunities that are motivating and appropriate for that larger scale. And they do not have the time to locate those opportunities on their own.

Inspiring the upwardly mobile would not only increase philanthropic resources immediately but would do so for the future as well. The potential destiny of this generation of the upwardly mobile – mostly in 30-45 age range -- is not just the product of anticipated career trajectories. This generation is the offspring of the baby boom generation which in the next 20 years will be passing away, setting off the greatest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history. The Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College estimates that $41 trillion — at a minimum — will be transferred among generations by 2052. How well the upwardly mobile handle that responsibility in the future depends greatly on how well equipped they are now.

An estimated 41 trillion dollars will be transferred across generations in the next few decades, dwarfing the combined assets of all existing philanthropies.

The fact that wealth is most often handed across generations is another reason to address today the upwardly mobile family as a family. Whether as a legacy from their grandparents or from their parents, today’s children of the upwardly mobile family will eventually be entrusted with a great deal of resources. Those children are now in the ages when their values are powerfully formed: at the deepest level where a parent’s rhetoric about generosity means less than what they witness their parents doing, and even more so what they do together with their parent. For these children, sharing with their parents the experience of generosity, service, and connection to those in need is absolutely critical to their future.

There is a final ambition that drives us to address this segment, even though this last reason is less tangible than dollars or volunteer hours mobilized. We believe the upwardly mobile family has a distinctive role in shaping the moral imagination of our culture. To a great extent, the profile we have described embodies the American ideal of “the good life:” a move to good schools, rapid promotions, the path to at least enough wealth for a luxurious retirement. This is the dream most widely shared in our culture across race, place of origin, and geography.

We hope to offer an addition (and perhaps a gentle correction) to this dominant understanding of our culture’s highest aspirations. We believe that “the truly good life” ought to also involve partnership with those in need where generosity and service are exercised. But rather than teach or preach this moral claim, we mostly wish to embody it. And by embodying this moral reality specifically with upwardly mobile families, we seek to depict it at the precise spot where our culture fixes its longing gaze.

4. Small but faithful efforts can go a long way.

We're as impressed as the next person by some of the big splashes recently made in the world of philanthropy. And we'd love to make our own big impact if that's how things turn out. However, our focus is on encouraging families to take the next step right before them, no matter what scale that footstep is. When all those steps are aggregated together and then faithfully extended over time, we trust that the final outcome will be the appropriate one and deeply meaningful for all.

5. We are fundamentally motivated by joy.

It is important to emphasize that we understand the practice of service and giving to be a joyful one. There will be a temptation in a enterprise such as ours to become purveyors of “upwardly mobile guilt.” Some recognition of failed moral responsibility may be appropriate as part of any individual’s process – but it will not be the animating spirit of our mission. We are convinced that the experience of partnering with those in need is essentially an experience of gratitude and celebration. The materially poor have much to offer the rest of us, and those with material resources to offer receive far more than they could ever give. When families live in greater congruence with their deepest values, when well compensated professionals employ their considerable skills and money to benefit others, and when children become humbly aware of their many privileges and motivated for a corresponding life of service, the dominant spirit is one of great joy.

6. The family’s first and foremost commitment is to each other.

While the SixSeeds mission is focused on the family’s service and generosity to those outside the family, we never want that external focus to detract from the family’s practice of those virtues with each other. In fact, we believe a family’s external mission cannot be sustained without a healthy internal family life. Explicitly addressing all the different dimensions of family life is beyond the scope of SixSeeds, but we recognize that the love first practiced within the family is the very soil of all our efforts.