Brennan Family Fund: Giving for Growth

Youth mentoring is a passion for Joan Brennan. So when the Colorado Mentoring Partnership needed an executive director to take the organization to the next level, Joan’s donor-advised fund paid for the position for the first year.

“They wanted to become statewide,” said Joan, “and to do that, they needed to at least have an executive director in place to start things off.” The investment paid off. The group has become a statewide collaboration working to support youth mentoring programs across Colorado.

In addition to youth causes, Joan fund—the Brennan Family Fund–has also supported capacity building and infrastructure for nonprofits — areas which are often overlooked and rarely funded by donors. “I find it a real gap in philanthropy that people don’t recognize,” Joan says. “It always amazes me that people who run businesses expect a nonprofit that has no infrastructure to run like their business which has all kinds of infrastructure.”

The fund has also supported nonprofits working with end-of-life issues, a cause championed by Joan’s late husband Larry.