Opportunity

The National Task Force on LGBTQ Planned Giving Project Report and National Strategy (March 2018) demonstrated the historical opportunity available – but awareness and urgency are lacking, both by donors and professional advisors. The Stonewall Legacy Project was created out of this opportunity to help you take action, helping to empower the LGBTQ+ community for the future.

Clients list the top reasons for legacy gifts as passion, impact, and a desire to give back. Conversations with advisors often get mired in technical jargon or tax code. Training advisors instead to speak fluently about the "why” and offering tools and techniques to educate and inform clients on the impact they can have on LGBTQ+ groups through bequests is critical to drive gifts to organizations.

We are working with professionals – attorneys, financial advisors, wealth managers, accountants, and others who assist in estate planning – to have these conversations with their clients. Our goal is to help you become an advocate and champion of this moment, providing you with the skills to have the conversations which are statistically more likely to generate philanthropic gifts and thus (and most critically), secure the future for the LGBTQ+ community.

Here is a simple example:
An advisor saying “There may be some tax advantages to your making some kind of gift to charity. Are you interested?

Will likely generate a different result than
An advisor learns of a client’s interest in LGBTQ+ youth homelessness, and asks “If we can take care of the people you love and also structure a gift that addresses that concern, is that something you’d like to do?”

Learn more about hosting a training workshop in your area and possible CLE and CRE credits.

The Ask
We are asking professionals who advise clients on their estate planning to commit to:

• raise with each of their clients the possibility of leaving a charitable gift;

• develop expertise and comfort in having that conversation in ways proven to be more likely to result in a gift;

• maintain awareness of the organizations locally and nationally serving the LGBTQ+ community; and

• share with clients and friends the singular opportunity that the current
generational transfer of wealth provides to benefit the LGBTQ+ community and encourage their participation.