Make it Transformational: A Blog for Champion Discipleship

A fundraising colleague emailed me this story about Grace Groner, a “hidden millionaire” who left her $7 million estate to her alma mater, Lake Forest College, upon her death.  Grace Groner was never married, had no heirs, and lived alone in a modest one-bedroom home, which itself had been willed to her by a friend. As a graduate of the class of 1931, Grace lived an austere and quiet life, and none but her very closest friends ever suspected she had any notable wealth. 

The Lake Forest College President said upon learning of her gift, “Oh, my God.”

Hardened professional fundraisers like me love stories like Grace Groner’s, stories which crop up every few years.  The appeal of Grace’s story, I suppose, is in its inherent hopefulness.  Fundraising as it’s traditionally understood is full of rejection, and it’s tempting to hope that someone out there lurking among the anonymous thousands on your institution’s donor rolls will send you an unexpected bounty, unprompted.  Despite the reality of your job-- rejection after rejection-- that erodes your confidence and drive to continue, someone out there wants to say yes.  That newsletter article you are slaving over actually matters outside your office.  To someone.  Somewhere. 

At one time, I was right there with these pros, hoping against hope that my work mattered, and that some miraculous gift would appear over the transom, restoring my faith in traditional fundraising. 

But then I had my own Grace Groner moment. 

Working for a large rescue mission, with more than half a million donors, I received a call about a man who’d wandered into the lobby wanting to make a large gift.  He was so raggedy that the security guard initially confused him for a homeless man and put him, despite his protests, in the line to receive a shower, shave and hot meal.  Somehow he convinced the guard to let him speak with someone about making a gift, so I was summoned.  We met, and he’d brought the necessary paperwork to leave his entire estate to us, more than a million dollars, which was shocking for a number of reasons.  He lived alone in a rundown apartment in a bad part of town, with no outward signs of any wealth at all.  And he had never given more than ten or fifteen dollars to the hundreds of solicitations we’d sent to him in the ten years he’d been a donor. 

Odder still was that he wanted to make the gift that very day, and resisted our suggestions to set him up with an estate planner who could help him get his affairs in order, and craft a plan that would take care of his loved ones and other charitable intentions.  “No, thank you,” he repeated, “we have to take care of this today.” 

I'm proud to say that we didn’t rush the gift through to get our million—there were too many questions, and we suspected something troubling beneath the surface, even though his paperwork all checked out.  We later learned our suspicions were correct-- his sense of urgency was driven by his desire to take his own life that very night.  He wanted to dispose of his estate as the last thing he accomplished in this life.

We did what we could to help this man, but only after he came to us.  I was saddened that we never recognized that this was a man in crisis—in fact, if he’d sent us the gift through a lawyer like Grace Groner, we never would have known.  How could we?  We didn’t know anything about the donors other than what they gave to us. We never asked anything else of them, and we never tracked any other information.  We cared about our donors, but frankly, we had created a system—a traditional, transactional fundraising (ttf) system-- wherein the only thing that mattered was the money.

So now I don’t feel hopeful or encouraged when I read about Grace Groner.  Now I just feel sad, for her, and for ttf. 

Of course, I didn’t know Grace Groner, and like everyone else, I applaud her charitable intentions, and respect her right to disburse of her assets in any way she wishes, whether anonymously, or after her death.  But I just can't escape the feeling that she chose not to give publicly during her lifetime because she couldn’t stand professional fundraisers and our ttf tactics.  I suspect she saw the fawning adulation, the mercenary appeals, the shallow pandering, the suggestions that importance is apportioned based on wealth, and she wanted no part of it.  So she chose to keep her wealth quiet, and to give it away only until after she was gone, when she could be assured no one would bother her with all that nonsense.

Rather than an endorsement of our work, Grace Groner’s posthumous gift is, I suspect, an indictment of our work.

Thank God for revealing to us a better way.