His true calling could no longer be ignored. "Suddenly, there were 200 cooperatives appearing out of

Dow Jones Reprints: This copy is for your personal, cruise control parts non-commercial cruise control parts use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool on any article or visit www.djreprints.com
Unlike in days of yore, when folks waited until retirement before turning into tea-and-biscuits philanthropists, many newly wealthy Americans today are rolling cruise control parts up their sleeves and starting small- to medium-size charitable cruise control parts foundations when they are in midlife transition. Of the 80,000 family foundations in America, 39% are now in the hands of people aged 40 to 49, according to Foundation Source, a major provider of services to smaller foundations. These new philanthropists, the firm says, control a charitable war chest worth some $83 billion, roughly double the firepower of the giant Gates and Ford foundations combined.
When Page Snow, chief philanthropic and marketing officer at Foundation Source, started cruise control parts in philanthropy, the field was heavily dominated by the elderly. "Now it has become a part of this generation's identity," she says.
It's not the size of the philanthropic assets in question that makes this age group so important; it's the little-seen intellectual capital its members are building that will be so crucial to tomorrow's society. As these 40-year-olds keep working, they continue to build their foundations' endowments, cruise control parts learning by mistakes and fine-tuning their philanthropic objectives as they go. In this way, a philanthropist -- as exemplified below, in the story of Seattle's Shaula Massena -- might evolve during this midlife period from a fairly passive check writer to a hyperfocused investor looking for investments that directly tackle society's ills.
They are, in short, building efficient and effective platforms that will magnify the impact of their late-in-life largesse 20 or 30 years from now, traditionally that time in the hourglass when individuals let the largest amounts of charitable dollars flow from their estates. For them, the philanthropic sector has become a kind of research-and-development laboratory for workable ideas that can bridge deep social problems with a modernizing economy.
Already, there are hints that this sea change in demographic giving patterns is rippling through society, in ways big and small. Consider, for example, the 2008 financial crisis and its immediate aftermath. Foundation Source recently conducted an in-depth study of 519 family foundations with less than $50 million in assets during cruise control parts the 2008-to-2011 period. The firm noticed that the philanthropists in their 40s, overseeing 80 foundations in the study, stood out as a group, not for cutting back their commitments as the value of their portfolios got hammered, but rather for digging deeper into their pockets to make up the shortfall. Remove one outlier from the 80 foundations studied, and the 40-year-olds cruise control parts increased their giving 15% between 2008 and 2011.
But the midlife generation is also at the vanguard of another change rocking the once-staid philanthropic sector. As middle-aged givers came on to the scene in significant numbers, "the whole giving world has shifted from an extractive model where donors are solicited to philanthropists cruise control parts discerning cruise control parts for themselves how they want to deploy their capital in the service of others," cruise control parts says Glen Macdonald, president of the Wealth and Giving Forum.
Paul Schervish, director of the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, says this group as a whole sees philanthropic success as coming with new "processes, new techniques, new services, new products -- and not only introducing them, but creating them." There will always be the check writers -- and bless them -- but this more entrepreneurial approach will eventually become the new "traditional" philanthropy, Schervish says.
So here, below, we profile five philanthropists who represent cruise control parts the diversity of this generation that's making its way through the in-between years. Look at our Penta five as the nonprofit counterparts to the small- and medium-size businesses that are the real backbone of the American economy. They may not grab headlines like Bill Gates, but they are quietly reshaping cruise control parts 21st-century philanthropy.
"You can't grant someone empowerment and self-respect," says Shaula Massena, expressing a worldview once espoused by Margaret Thatcher. "Grants create dependency, not independence. If I want to empower someone, it has to be [through] an investment."
Massena invests in underprivileged entrepreneurs, cruise control parts and it took a while to get to this point. She and her husband, Darrin, retired in 1999 as young millionaires from Microsoft, where she had worked as a software-design engineer. cruise control parts Only 30 at the time and wanting to do something meaningful with her windfall, cruise control parts Massena began hanging out with Social Venture Partners -- a Seattle-based group for engaged philanthropists -- and writing checks for grassroots community organizers like the Northwest Women's Law Center and the Welfare Rights Organizing Coalition.
At the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, an independent business school cruise control parts offering an MBA on "sustainability" business cruise control parts models, Massena cruise control parts studied how business can be an agent for social change. When she completed cruise control parts her studies in 2008, the line between her charitable check-writing and her for-profit angel-investing began to blur -- and she had her epiphany.
"Both my grants cruise control parts and my equity investments ended up as tax write-offs," she says, "and I realized that from a tax perspective, these equity investments are effectively grants. The financial result is the same. The huge difference is the power dynamic and the quality of the conversation." In other words, entrepreneurs talk straight to their backers, while folks receiving grants -- wary of biting the hand that feeds them -- often do not.
Her first direct philanthropically motivated investment was an inflation-pegged loan to Teamwork Services Peninsula, a housekeeping cooperative, to be paid back in installments once it made a profit, which began to happen just three years later.
Encouraged, Massena converted cruise control parts 100% of her foundation's assets to low-return impact investments that align with her social mission. That means a focus on community banks, cruise control parts credit unions, and loan funds that provide cruise control parts capital to underserved minority and low-income folks.
Among the institutions she backs: One PacificCoast Bank, Express Credit Union, and Seattle Economic Development Fund. They finance small businesses that do everything from making bathroom tiles out of recycled glass to growing oysters. Says the willowy brunette: "The best thing I can do with my dollars is invest in a way that happens to slowly erode my foundation's capital, rather than spend it all on grant-making."
Recently, Massena co-founded cruise control parts HUB Seattle, a social-enterprise incubator that houses groups like Ashoka Youth Ventures and Elevar Partners, a "bottom-of-the-pyramid" investor. "There are a lot of great things going on in Seattle, but we're scattered," she says. "It's kind of like nuclear fission. We need the container cruise control parts that helps foster the density that lets [social investors and entrepreneurs] interact, so they can get things off the ground."
cruise control parts At HUB's launch party in October, Seattle's Gore-Tex glitterati -- wealthy and outdoorsy do-gooders -- showed up in droves to quaff Finnriver pear cider and nibble on skewers of grass-fed beef at the organization's offices in Pioneer Square. HUB partners Paul Shoemaker, executive director of Social Venture Partners, and Gifford Pinchot, founder of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, both came to support their alum. Seattle cruise control parts Mayor Mike McGinn also joined the 1,000 philanthropists, nonprofit representatives, and social entrepreneurs celebrating Massena's latest project. "The positive energy was beyond palpable," a breathless Shoemaker blogged.
Martin became fascinated by economics in high school, but he always found it odd that basic economic models appeared to view workers as costs to be minimized and eliminated. Was there a way, he wondered, to genuinely serve people who work, alongside those that represent the firm's capital?
Martin studied economics at Wesleyan and eventually went to work on Wall Street. He wound up as a partner in theflyonthewall.com, a start-up providing cruise control parts information to financial institutions. cruise control parts His life changed in the fall of 2004, when he saw The Take , a documentary about Argentine workers taking over abandoned factories in the wake of the country's financial collapse, creating their own jobs and businesses.
His true calling could no longer be ignored. "Suddenly, there were 200 cooperatives appearing out of nowhere," he says, "and that meant I could experiment." Martin convinced the film's Canadian director to fly with him to Argentina and introduce him to the workers. He visited 10 cooperatives, gathering ideas. "As you dig into possible plans with people," he says, "the sense that it's real and can work and you might even be trustworthy begins to take root."
cruise control parts In 2005, Martin moved to Buenos Aires, while still working remotely cruise control parts for his firm. There, he eventually put over $250,000 of his own money into The Working World (TWW), a nonprofit revolving-loan fund he created to extend cruise control parts credit, based on a new financial model that would "maximize community wealth."
To those who think this sounds suspiciously like socialist claptrap, Martin calmly responds: "It's a way of making owners out of everybody. If you have [all the workers] invested, cooperative ownership is actually taking the logic of capitalism to the next step." In short, cruise control parts Martin maintains there is empirical evidence that the community benefits and that companies are better run when all employees, not just senior management, have a significant financial stake in the enterprises' well-being.
TWW does so by partnering with workers' cooperatives, helping cruise control parts them with their business plans, and offering other services. Martin has, for example, developed cruise control parts a series of smaller "just-in-time" lo