Youths play old game of giving grants

Nine teenagers from the Rivers School in Weston, Mass., gathered in their cafeteria last Tuesday evening for an unlikely meeting. Munching on pizza, they mulled over the effectiveness of several charities for disabled youths in their community. An adult staff member of the Crossroads Community Foundation, a philanthropic organization in nearby Natick, mostly kept quiet as the teens talked.

Finally, the high-schoolers voted on which charities would receive grants totaling $10,000. The adult abstained.

The volunteer work for Crossroads "teaches me about the problems in my community and that I can do something to fix them," says Kelsey Clark, a junior at the Rivers School, who is not your average deep-pocketed director on a foundation board.

Indeed, the top ranks of philanthropists are moving beyond the blue-blooded. Increasing numbers of teenagers are being taught the fundamentals of charitable giving - deciding how to spend thousands of dollars, encouraging other youths to start service projects, and bird-dogging such projects to hold grant recipients to their promises. Although the youth-philanthropy movement is too new to tell for sure, early signs suggest it operates as a two-way street. Charities breed habits of giving early on. And youths sometimes turn their lives around dramatically, thanks in part to the charitable experience.

"For years we've asked young people to volunteer, and to be engaged in their communities, but we haven't given them meaningful roles," says Joel Orosz, a former program director at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Mich.

Now they do. In the late 1980s, Kellogg jump-started the youth philanthropy phenomenon with a $47.5 million endowment. It offered matching funds to community foundations across the state if they created boards of youths to make the grants.

Other foundations have replicated the Kellogg model. Now more than 350 similar programs, including some offered as high school courses, exist in more than 30 states and abroad.

Many foundation donors have an eye toward the increasing numbers of nonprofit board members who will soon retire, says Mr. Orosz, who was instrumental in developing the Kellogg youth project. And as baby boomers retire during the next few decades, they will transfer to young people some $30 trillion, the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in American history, says Robert Avery, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve.

But the bang is not just in the bucks. Teen grantmaking helps teach participants important skills. During the recent meeting with the "Rivers Givers" - as they call themselves - the teens dissected budget proposals and revealed their findings from carefully scrutinized site visits.

"The staff seemed totally disorganized," Kelsey Clark says of one charity, "and [one staff member] even said the money might go toward his own salary!" (On paper, the budget proposal indicated otherwise.)

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