Modern generosity from business to the breakfast table

IN THIS EMAIL

• Meet Kate, a Cause Champion for missionaries' wellbeing
• Early inheritance that strengthens (not stunts)
• On that note: Building family resilience
• Cause explorations: Social Activism

Cause Champions: Kate Gardner

Kate created a thesis statement for the impact she wants to make with her generosity: Encouraging missionaries.

thesignatry.com/cause-champions/kate-gardner/

When you hear Kate tell her story, it’s easy to understand her passion for relationships. God has given her unique gifts to share: encouragement, warmth, prayer, and a family business legacy that resulted in an early inheritance at age 21. 

Seeking to steward her inheritance well is what led her toward generosity and missions work. 

Kate finds joy in offering missionaries holistic support—financial, relational, and spiritual. “I ask them, every two weeks, what’s going on? How can I pray for you? And then we do the work of prayer together. ... And I have felt myself encouraged and built up.” 

These relationships are also how Kate learned about the need for a physical place of rest and restoration. She has started to open her home to the women in ministry training at a local church, offering the gift of hospitality and safety. 

“People joke that I call [this house] my Jesus Airbnb,” she said. 

You can hear more about Kate’s creative vision for generosity and impact by watching her full story on on our website.

Early Inheritance that Strengthens (Not Stunts)

Knowing intimately the fears many parents have about how sudden wealth will impact their children, Kate Gardner also shared some advice for parents and inheritors alike. 

1. Successful stewardship starts with family culture.

Inheritance starts long before the actual wealth transfer. 

Start by building a family culture of love, honesty, and service to one another. 

2. Involve your kids early and often.

Even before you formally transfer financial assets to your children, you can invite them into parts of your financial decision-making—especially in areas like generosity. 

Make generosity a family activity. Ask your children what they think. Co-create your legacy with the people who will carry it on. 

3. Inheritance is a learning opportunity.

Kate received her inheritance in early adulthood—a formative, identity-shaping season. Rather than stunting her growth, resources accelerated it. 

Wrestling with tough questions about stewardship, influence, and boundaries made her even more passionate about generosity and long-term impact. 

You can hear more about her experience and how these tips played out in her own life on our website. 

On That Note: Building Family Resilience

A hefty inheritance can create, as Kate called it, the “burden of blessing.” As we’ve all seen, wealth presents a lot of challenges alongside the opportunities it offers. 

If you’re looking for practical steps you can take to equip your family to shoulder the burden of blessing well—or even if building a family is still in your future—Barna Group’s new study on resilient families is relevant. 

Barna identified three behaviors that build resilience to the challenges and stressors of life as a family:

• Practicing repair after relational strain;

• Seeking support after hardship; and

• Participating in broader community life. 

Resilience sometimes slips into the category of “buzzword” and loses its meaning along the way. This research is a helpful reminder that there are practical, everyday ways your family can build resilience to the temptations of wealth so that you can steward your financial success in the ways God calls you.

Image credit: Christians for Impact

Cause Explorations: Social Activism

It’s a delicate subject. Marches, strikes, boycotts, petitions, and other forms of online or in-person activism are quite visible these days—and so are the fundraising asks that fuel them. 

Activism isn’t so much a cause as an impact strategy that plays a role in many of the causes our community supports. For example, many Christians support the pro-life cause—a subset of those Christians give to and/or participate in the annual March for Life event. 

As with any nonprofit initiative you support, it’s helpful to understand if and how giving to an activist campaign could make the impact you want. That’s why I appreciate Christians For Impact’s research on the effectiveness of actions designed to move social opinion. (They also offer a faith perspective on the topic!) 

As they describe, it’s a “high-variance” strategy. Factors like organizational structure, current events, message coherence, and myriad others all have a big impact on success. 

If you’ve thought about supporting any kind of social activist campaign and wondered if it would be a good use of your charitable dollars, this article won’t be able to tell you “yes” or “no.” But it will equip you to evaluate the ask with an eye on lasting impact.

- Jessie, Editor, The Bottom Line & Beyond