This is a page where I’m doing some public musing around the idea of endowments-for-people. Ideas here are in-progress and some things are unresolved.
We endow people, rather than projects or programs.
We pool capital and invest it, then use the returns from the investments to provide financial stability to individuals, first for the short term, then forever.
Over time, we create an expanding community of financially secure people, free to contribute, create, and support others.
My spouse and I have been lucky, and worked hard, to achieve financial stability. We had help from family with college, first cars, rent, and innumerable other things as we were starting out. We’ve worked hard and lived frugally, and created financial breathing room for ourselves.
As we started to achieve our financial goals, new versions of this cycle played out - I worked more for a season while Greg finished school, now Greg has supported me taking a step back from my engineering job to explore my leadings around work and contributing to our community.
We’ve started to ask - after providing for our family, what’s next? What are we building? What kind of legacy do we want to leave?
We’re starting to play with the idea of how to create a system that allows us to share in the spirit family gave to us, and the way we have given within our marriage - with generosity rather than charity at the core.
Right now, our long term idea is to create a permanent fund of some kind that provides money for people for their whole lives purely as returns from investments. How much money is an open question - a small amount to make living expenses more manageable? A living wage? Something in-between?
We do feel pretty sure that in general the money should be given unconditionally, with selection by nomination and lottery.
The feeling here is how our family gave to us - with trust that we would use the leg up to work hard and contribute, without some elaborate system of surveillance or control.
The vision is to unlock more individuals and families as we feel we’ve been unlocked - creating more freedom, more opportunities for people to follow their leadings and be creative in the ways they contribute.
We hope and believe that people who receive an endowment will keep working, earning, and contributing to seed future endowments and spread the Common Inheritance.
These are some pretty lofty ideas, and ultimately this is a vision that would take time to unfold. So think generational scale, with the goal being to start trying things out in the next decade so we could have the infrastructure to leave our estate to this program.
We’d like to set this up in a way that works for us locally, and share what we learn in a way that allows other communities to implement their own versions too.