Family Business Audiocast | Episode 62 | Kelly Pollock and Betsy Cohen

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R. Adam Smith: [Intro] Welcome to the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn. I am R. Adam Smith, creator of this audiocast series. As an entrepreneur, investor, founder, investment banker, and board leader the last 25 years, I'm fortunate for my many experiences within the family firm industry. A brief comment on why I created this broadcast. Private companies are a passion of mine, having grown up in a family of entrepreneurs, and having engaged for two decades in deals, strategic transformations, investments, and boards with an array of fascinating family enterprises, family firms, and family offices. I founded the series to offer a useful platform for listeners to hear from veterans, academics, and leaders in the vast family firm ecosystem. Whether you're a family business owner building, running, or advising a family office or just expanding your family office activities, I hope these conversations are useful and enlightening. And now it's time to turn our attention to our accomplished guests on today's episode. 

I'm pleased to be here today with two leaders in the community in cross philanthropy and family offices, family enterprises, as well as my hometown, St. Louis, Missouri. To be joined today is terrific by both Kelly Pollock and Betsy Cohen. 

Betsy Cohen: So great to be in conversation with you today. 

Kelly Pollock: Thank you, it's wonderful to be here. 

R. Adam Smith: Thank you so much, ladies. You're both very distinguished leaders working at the intersection of philanthropy and long-term wealth stewardship, which is wonderful, of course, in St. Louis, our hometown, which is great. We'll talk about that later. I'm going to discuss your backgrounds briefly, then we'll jump in. 

Our first guest is Kelly Pollock. She is an executive leader at the Burgess Family Foundation in St. Louis, which is a family foundation dedicated to strengthening communities in St. Louis and beyond, and which supports initiatives across a range of areas in the local community, including culture engagement, STEM education, youth empowerment, and support for first responders and veterans. There, she runs the foundation, and she focuses on building partnerships, aligning resources with mission, and of course, ensuring meaningful and measurable community impact and wealth application and creation. 

We also have Betsy Cohen, her friend and colleague in the community. She is a philanthropic futurist, the founder of Future Good, and she brings decades of experience across corporate strategy, economic development, and nonprofit leadership. Of course, working with family offices and families in the region. Previously, she was executive director of the St. Louis Mosaic Project, which was a very unique public-private initiative focused on attracting, retaining global talent in the area. Previously, was at Nelson Purina. Today, Betsy focuses on helping families and organizations think strategically about philanthropy and their long-term impact. 

Why don't we talk a bit about the organizations first. With the Burgess Family Foundation, Kelly, walk us through that and the unique structure and organization and mission of the foundation. 

Kelly Pollock: Sure, the Burgess Family Foundation was established in 2014 by Jim Burgess and his late wife, Kathy. They came into their wealth in St. Louis, although not originally from there. As they really built community around their lives, they determined that it was really right that they give back to the community that had given them so much. So with their son, they established really the four interest areas that we still carry into our work today. Kathy, unfortunately, passed away in 2020. Jim remarried Elizabeth Mannen Burgess. Her children have joined, and so we now have three next generation trustees on the board along with Jim and Elizabeth. And we are focused on making sure that St. Louis is a wonderful place, not only to live and to play, but also to invest, to visit. We want vibrancy, we want St. Louisans to advance in the best way possible. We have a diverse portfolio, but all geographically based in the St. Louis region. 

R. Adam Smith: Great. Moving over to Betsy and Future Good, love to hear about that as well. 

Betsy Cohen: So Future Good is a consultancy that works with visionary leaders of nonprofits, foundations, wealth managers, really with the goal of bringing a long-term North Star vision that then translates into how do you really move yourself forward to execute on long-term vision. It has been established for the last 8 years, founded by Trista Harris, who was the first philanthropic futurist, and I'm now the second, based here in St. Louis. 

R. Adam Smith: Lovely, thank you so much. I think both your organizations are very unique, and I encourage the community in St. Louis and beyond to observe them and understand their uniqueness. 

So let's talk about personal journey and the background of philanthropy. Betsy, you started in corporate leadership, obviously, and then moved into philanthropic strategy, and as a founder and entrepreneur yourself. And of course, Kelly, you have your background in the industry as well, and now you run a family foundation. You overlap as well in the community, so that's interesting. I'd love to talk about a bit of community impact and passion and long-term leadership, and sort of how you got to where you are, and how that impacts your commitment and focus in your organizations. We'll start with Kelly first. 

Kelly Pollock: Sure, I think I've been very purpose-driven from a very early age. I thought that might lead me down an education path. When I was sent in to do student teaching in my college years, I quickly learned that being in front of a classroom was maybe not my calling. I was able to witness the incredible challenges that kids face and how many different elements shape who they are by the time they got to high school. That I think put me on a path to really think about those early interventions, what it means to grow up in community, how young people can face a wide variety of challenges or even the same ones and emerge out of those conditions in different ways. 

Ultimately, I landed at Coca in St. Louis, Center of Creative Arts, and I learned a lot about community building through that work. While it's a multidisciplinary arts education center, it's really rooted in building community and doing that through the arts. So there's very much a social service net wrapped around the organization. So it was really about providing all young people an opportunity to have access and an opportunity, and what it took to level the playing field. So whether that meant transportation and scholarships and financial assistance, and tutoring and ACT prep and on to kind of pathways and careers and possibilities. 

So through that work, I come into the role of CEO of the Burgess Family Foundation very much through that practitioner lens. I spent 24 and a half years there at Coca doing fundraising, executive leadership the last 12 years, extensive expansion, capital campaign efforts. So was really able to see all sides of philanthropy, but also what it meant to build a community, how challenging that was, but also the kind of immense rewards and opportunities when folks are aligned toward a common cause. 

R. Adam Smith: Wonderful. And Betsy, talk a bit about what you were thinking when you left the corporate world into where you are now. 

Betsy Cohen: One of the roles I had at Nestlé Purina had been as a corporate futurist, and if you have met futurists in the past, you know that typically they work with business and government to look at what that long-term vision is and then how do you work your strategy and your operations back against that. So I had experience as a futurist. 

And then, over the past 12 years, I had been leading the St. Louis Mosaic Project, which was this public-private partnership as the executive director. I had been involved with two share groups with other executive directors. So I spent a lot of time understanding the community pain points of many of our executive directors, of our funders, of our foundations, and I could truly see across the region where were there opportunities for us to do better. 

So as I considered what I would do after I had achieved the goals I had set for the Mosaic Project, I saw a way to bring together the skills of futurism with community knowledge of what our nonprofits, our foundations, our funders, our donors were looking at, by becoming a philanthropic futurist, and bringing that skill set to the region and actually nationwide with what does it mean to bring the skills of futurism to the social sector. 

R. Adam Smith: Wonderful, thank you for that. Now we can talk about the engagement through philanthropy, and how this is such a vital part of both the passion and the balance sheet of family offices and billionaires and wealthy people in the space, and being philanthropic, and being charitable. I'd like to talk about building that trust between, let's say, the community and these nonprofit organizations, and creating philanthropic efforts that have long-term impact, not just short-term impact. Maybe talk a bit about that, let's say, in St. Louis, how you tie the two. Tying the passion of the wealthy owner, philanthropist, family office into the local community. How does that work, and how do you think about that on a day-to-day basis? 

Kelly Pollock: Sure, I can jump in there. I think the key for any family who wants to give back and be philanthropic in their community is how to take passion and interest and translate them into real strategic investment. Just aligning family members can be a challenge in and of itself. I think the expectations of philanthropy are quite large, but it is a matter of really finding focus and meaning that actually can deliver some measurable outcomes that are key for your community. 

In our case, we take the approach very much of trying to be a strategic partner with our nonprofits that we are funding. It takes I think lots of listening, which was something historically philanthropy I don't think has always been great at, but to really understand the needs, the conditions, the expectations of nonprofits. More and more of the burden of our kind of social challenges are falling on nonprofits as policy shift. It's important that we I think lean into those leaders who are on the ground in the spaces. 

Our kind of approach in that is one, being at the table, being good listeners, spending hours and hours of understanding from those in the field. Two, coming back and aligning those those needs with where that connects with kind of passion and purpose for our family members. And I think also where we can also have meaningful impact. Everyone has limited dollars that they're able to deploy in communities. Spreading it too thin can kind of dilute the impact. 

The Burgess Family Foundation has always taken an approach of an inch wide, a mile deep, where we try to look at those who are really have great depth in their field. We want long-term, sustained relationships with our stakeholders. While we recognize that we have immediate problems that need to be addressed, we want to make sure that we're trying to have like upstream interventions that hopefully will prevent downstream consequences. 

And that means for us finding those organizations that are delivering immediate services, but also partnering that with a sustained approach to kind of longer-term change, and also making sure that we're funding not only the service delivery organizations, but also those who are working as backbone organizations, intermediaries who are trying to coordinate activities around the issues that we have great interest in and are prioritizing in our work. 

Betsy Cohen: Building on what Kelly said that for mid-sized regions around the country, there is a wonderful opportunity to have that depth of connection and knowledge of the community. I think in some of the very largest regions it might be harder to do that. But in a mid-sized region like St. Louis, with close to 3 million population, it's possible for the funders and our nonprofits to have close relationships over the year and for that depth of knowledge to happen. 

One of the things that I sometimes hear from the advisors that are working with some of our wealthy donors in the community is that the donors get used to certain big organizations that they know and they've known a long time. It's a wonderful opportunity to build on that and to help introduce some of these donors and family groups to other service providers in the region that are helping support and build on those causes that the families care about. And those introductions are quite easy to make in our region, so that depth of knowledge is true. 

It's also a good experience for the collaborations that happen because it's easy for people to meet at convening spaces. There's a lot of areas where people come together here, and that's quite easy to accommodate. 

R. Adam Smith: Great. And just briefly on St. Louis, why don't we just pause and talk a little bit about the region and its philanthropic character and dynamic. I'd love to hear some positive stories or some experiences in St. Louis, some projects or activities you've been involved in that you're proud of, that have made an impact in the community. 

Kelly Pollock: Sure, I think right now there is really a strong sense of collaboration, particularly among philanthropy, which I think is newer for St. Louis. Over the past several years, there's been leadership appointments at a variety of philanthropic organizations, and through that shift in those dynamics, we're seeing more and more collaborations figuring out how we can come together to address our most systemic, challenging issues. 

And so we're with the lead of folks like the McDonnell Foundation, they're bringing about 20 to 30 collaborators around the table in a long-term vision for how we might pool resources and focus first on addressing the need for more and better sustainable jobs for low-income individuals, and then how do we build up that hierarchy and think about early childhood education, possibly housing, but really kind of looking at those infrastructure and the dynamic across the region in addressing those in a more meaningful, intentional way in philanthropy. 

We are often challenging our nonprofit sector to collaborate as much as possible. Collaborations are challenging, they're time-consuming, it involves a bit of compromise, and I think it's important not only that we ask that of our nonprofit organizations, but also that we do that work in philanthropy. 

I think that's particularly challenging when you have founders and family members who have very strong passions about what they want to achieve. You know, it really does require a stepping back and kind of looking broader at the community. So I'm definitely inspired by some of the work that's going on, not only in that space, there's a network of early childhood providers and philanthropy trying to align a system around making sure that our youngest citizens in St. Louis are cared for from a very early age. We're looking at both policy agenda as well as on the ground subsidy, working cross-sector collaboration between government funds, corporate funds, philanthropy coming together with individuals who need child care. So I think there are some really exciting developments in those spaces. 

As well as of course, we are still struggling in the aftermath of a post-tornado situation that hit our most disinvested areas of St. Louis. So that's been another very tough challenge for the community to face with the number of issues that it was already facing. So definitely a series of issues that are a little bit overwhelming, but I think there's been a great kind of call to action and collaborative effort going on that I think will help us tremendously. 

Betsy Cohen: I would add several examples, having come out of the international space. All of the organizations that work together on immigration and international support have had a strong coalition of learning and support for the region as we've looked to grow population and talent, and that has been very strong. 

We also have an innovative center called the Delmar Divine, which is a location that brings together close to 30 nonprofits and some foundations and funders, all in one shared place where they office, and they have the abilities to know each other, collaborate, and bring in speakers and resources together. 

Another example is that right now, I am working with a philanthropist in town who is looking to leverage an online strategic program we have at Future Good, which is called FutureProof. We are looking at bringing together six nonprofits in one space to all do their own strategic planning with a model we have online and have a collaborative approach toward both the planning process as well as potential collaboration on outcomes. 

R. Adam Smith: Wonderful, thank you for that. I'm really excited to see the St. Louis region flourishing along the way, and hearing these stories. Let's talk about stewardship next, and also multi-generations, and think about all the conversations we have on this podcast show about the next gen and multi-generational impact, and the roles of bringing those shared values from G1, G2 within the family offices and the enterprises, and how that dialogue, either within the foundation or to the family office, is—it's essential to build those bridges and have continuity. And then also, you're talking about future perspectives, the futurist approach is looking longer term. So maybe talk a bit about that mix of short-term and long-term thinking within each of your organizations, the balance of the two. 

Kelly Pollock: Sure, we're really at an interesting time in the Burgess Family Foundation as we are we're grappling with these issues in real time. We're taking on our first deep dive in a strategic planning process and we are addressing that next generation engagement and asking that question of the longevity of the foundation itself, whether this is going to go on in perpetuity for multiple generations or if we might look to sunset this over a period of time. Obviously, there are pros and cons to both approaches, but it really does matter how the next generation wants to show up, what their vision of philanthropy is, and their willingness and appetite to engage in that space. 

So not only will we be looking at addressing that, also looking at how St. Louis has evolved over the years since the foundation was established, thinking about our role, the impact we've had, but then how might we realign our strategic priorities along with next generational values and put a new shape to the foundation. It's important for all family foundations, just like our nonprofits, we need to evolve and grow and shift as times change and the people and the players change as well. So we're really looking at how we can do our best work over the next period of time and then establishing that that timetable will be a real critical part of it. 

One of the ways that we have over the past several years tried to engage next generation is for every one of our trustee meetings, we typically meet four times a year, trying to bring in an issue, a leader, a topic, a point of engagement and education really to help them understand the context, the ecosystem that they're working in St. Louis, what they need to be thinking about, essentially how we can ask better questions as a foundation so that we can really work in partnership with community leaders in the best possible way. All of those things are really at play right now and it's an exciting time to reimagine how we show up for St. Louis in the next phase. 

Betsy Cohen: Some of the future issues that we are looking at is that sometimes the Gen 1 is hoping that Gen 2 is going to want to support the same issues and topics that they have had a long-term interest in. And the answer is that may not be true. Bank of America has done a study, and what we're seeing is often that the interests of the two generations can vary. Often the Gen 1 is looking at more legacy organizations, religion, universities, education, large organizations for arts and culture, whereas Gen 2, first of all, they may not want to continue to just blindly support what Gen 1 has supported, they may want hands-on opportunities, volunteering. 

But they often are looking at issues of social justice, women's issues, global issues that might involve women and refugees around the world, environment issues, and their view that they want more metrics and impact that they can see and not trust so much that the large organizations that their parents may have supported for a long time would be the recipient of their ongoing support. So I see that, just like Kelly said, maybe introducing the Gen 2 to leaders is important, but also recognizing that they may have truly different desires for where they want their money to go and their support and their impact, and then how do you either have the legacy organizations build new ways to engage or bring other partners to the table. 

R. Adam Smith: Great. Let's shift a little bit. Just tell the audience your role at your organizations and your company name and how best to reach you, and then we'll keep going. 

Kelly Pollock: Kelly Pollock here, and my role is to serve as the CEO of the Burgess Family Foundation. We can be reached mainly via our website, www.burgessfamilyfoundation.org. Can really find all the contact information, priorities there. We're a pretty accessible, transparent group in that we always make time, make ourselves available to show up for conversations or speak with any organizations who have interest in talking about alignment. 

Betsy Cohen: Betsy Cohen, philanthropic futurist with the organization Future Good, and I can be reached at our organization, which is wearefuturegood.com. 

R. Adam Smith: Awesome. So back to philanthropy, I want to talk about the scale and the importance of philanthropy, and then we can opine and talk about that. So obviously, the Family Business Audiocast covers global family business, family office, family enterprise, and the entire ecosystem of the community. We sometimes refer to this community as the family office circle, or others call it the galaxy, like Fredda Masas, others call it the business of families, but it's obviously quite large. We talk about this in the podcast, and everyone knows that the family office community and the wealth around the family office or the business owner is scaling rapidly based on both wealth creation and also organizational creation. 

There are around 10,000 single family offices in the world, apparently, and almost 50% of those in North America. And philanthropy is a critical part of these family offices and organizations, such as the organizations that Betsy and Kelly are in or advise. According to Giving USA, about 600 billion of charitable contributions last year. That obviously is growing, and there's more interest growing in philanthropy. The average philanthropic contribution from a family office is around 15 million, according to RBC, and almost half of those supporting philanthropy manage it in-house rather than outsourcing. 

Of course, the interest is growing, where there is research from Campden talking about family offices managing their philanthropic efforts—up to 70%, 80% of family offices have some form of embedded philanthropic activities. Lastly, there's proof that over 90% of family offices actually make meaningful charitable contributions over a million dollars, and there's just a lot of growth in the space. So I'd like to pause there and just talk about what you're seeing in this area, and in St. Louis in particular. And we can continue the conversation later as well offline, as I have a lot of passion and interest in continuing the impact in the St. Louis community where you are. 

Kelly Pollock: As I said, we're a pretty visible foundation. We are not bashful about putting our name out there, and actually part of our charge is to encourage giving in the St. Louis community. I think for that reason, there are a lot of families and leaders who have come into some form of wealth and have leaned on the work that that Jim and Elizabeth do and the foundation does to really help guide them and seek counsel in terms of how they might think about shaping their own philanthropic efforts. Obviously, there's a ton of different forms that can take, whether establishing a foundation, working through the community foundation and donor-advised funds, or just deploying intentional gifts in that sort of way. 

For us, we are thinking about the work of the family and, as I said, how we decide to deploy resources. But I think one of the interesting things that we are grappling with, and I think a lot of philanthropists are shifting as time goes on, is thinking about how we unlock our capital for social good in different sorts of ways, maybe beyond what just grantmaking can provide. Obviously, there's kind of social capital that a lot of nonprofits need to utilize to build their capacity, but also thinking about our assets and how we can utilize them to help support low-interest loans, support financing for tough projects, maybe serve as a guarantor to get a project launched so that they can get loans. 

So I think the more and more that families and philanthropists become sophisticated and trust in the kind of community partners that they're around, I'm really interested in seeing how we not only think about those kind of direct funds going to nonprofits, but how we can use this kind of mountain of assets that so many family foundations are sitting on and think about distributing that and deploying that in different ways that can produce social good. Sometimes that capital is really hard for nonprofit projects to reach, so how might we think about doing that in different ways. I think that's an exciting development as I see more and more people leaning into that space. 

Betsy Cohen: We see is that, for example, when organizations talk about a five-year strategic plan or a five-year funding, we think that's hilarious because the change pace is so rapid right now that really you can only look out two to three years and there's so much that's changing. I would mention that for our foundations and our family offices and the nonprofits and the causes, the impact of AI is going to be very big in ways that we don't fully understand yet. This is going to take money to learn and experiment and have ways that funders can help the nonprofits to determine how to use AI so that some of the work that can be done in a better way can free up their time to truly address the root causes and the long-term impacts that they're trying to solve. 

We don't yet see too many of the nonprofits talking to the family offices about support for their AI needs and experimentation, but we do see that's going to increase because these needs are going to keep growing, and we know that AI is going to have a way to lessen some of the costs long-term that will allow more time and focus for the areas that really matter. 

R. Adam Smith: That's amazing. I caught a word that Kelly used, which is to pause and reflect and think, which is an important intellectual, emotional intelligence trait. But ironically, we just spoke about the power of pause literally this month with David Werdiger from Australia, who's probably the top family office strategist and advisor in Australia on Episode 57. So that's cool. We will wrap up here with some reflections. What we talked about today around strategic stewardship and the community impact is super important to all cities, not just St. Louis. That's wonderful to talk about St. Louis today. St. Louis is undergoing a bit of a revitalization and change with the new mayor, and just a lot more money and attention coming into venture capital. Of course, WashU and SLU are very formidable academic pillars in the community as well. 

We talked about also value-driven leadership and strategic stewardship. Obviously, both Betsy and Kelly are really formidable players in the community, and it's great to have them here talking about those values and passions. Maybe just one more comment from each of you that you want to share with the audience today that's on your mind, then we'll wrap it up. 

Kelly Pollock: Sure, I guess I would leave with encouraging family offices and philanthropists to to really look at and think about being buyers versus builders. I've always liked that thinking as we approach community work. The historical trend has been to really be in that buyer space, this transaction, serving people, those outputs. And while a lot of that work is very important, it really takes more deeply committed work to be builders of something, a more sustained approach, staying with something, weathering the challenges that will inevitably come in this work. That's really how amazing communities transform, how things are built that really advance people's lives. 

As people think about their work, again just doing that reflection on where you show up in buyers versus builders and how we can do our work in more profound ways if we shift a bit toward that builder thinking. 

Betsy Cohen: I would add that it's very valuable what you have been offering with your series of podcasts here and audiocasts so that there's broad knowledge and learning, so I thank you for doing that and allowing these ideas to be shared. I think that the real strength is going to come from family offices that bring together their passion with a vision for the future and then connecting that to the real roots of the community where they can make that impact. That is where there will be profound change and also true satisfaction that the wealth has made an impact. 

R. Adam Smith: Thank you so much for today. I want to thank our audience, and of course our distinguished guests, Betsy Cohen and Kelly Pollock, leaders in the family office and philanthropic and foundation space in St. Louis. As conversation highlighted, some of the roles of philanthropy we talked about strengthening communities and also shaping long-term legacy. It's really wonderful to talk about stewardship as well, and care, and really looking beyond the maintenance of wealth to the deployment of wealth. So it's wonderful to have these experiences and insights today. Thank you both so much for joining today. 

Kelly Pollock: It's been great to dialogue with you. 

Betsy Cohen: Thank you so much. 

R. Adam Smith: This is R. Adam Smith signing off. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Family Business Audiocast. 

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