The Giving Impulse: One Family’s Story

Courtesy Gamble Family

Judy Kahrl was a teenager when she realized not all families were like hers. Kahrl remembers typical dinner-table conversations included frank discussions about contraception, women’s reproductive health, and the importance of family planning. This was in the 1930s and ’40s, decades before the invention and FDA approval of the birth-control pill in 1960, and at a time when birth control of any sort was highly controversial.

Kahrl, who is 84, is the fourth of Clarence and Sarah Gamble’s five children. Clarence was a physician and heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune. He received $1 million from his father when he turned 21 in 1915 (the equivalent of about $25 million today) with the caveat that he was expected to tithe 10 percent to charity. Clarence decided 10 percent wasn’t enough and upped that amount to 30 percent.

Sarah was also from a wealthy family, and together the two became notable 20th-century family-planning and women’s health activists. They helped start a number of U.S. maternal-health clinics in the 1920s. In the 1930s, they joined forces with birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger and a prominent gynecologist and maternal health educator, Robert Latou Dickinson, to overturn the Comstock Laws, a series of 19th-century federal acts that outlawed the mailing of contraceptives and information about them, among other things.

Clarence and Sarah eventually took their family-planning efforts overseas to Japan, India, and Indonesia. That work led to the couple’s founding of what would become Pathfinder International in 1957. Today, Pathfinder has programs for maternal and reproductive health, family planning, and HIV/AIDS prevention and care throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Near East.

One of Clarence and Sarah’s sons, the late Dick Gamble, led the organization until 1985, when its growing size and scope prompted him and his siblings to hire Dan Pellegrom, a seasoned nonprofit leader in the women’s reproductive-health arena, who ended up leading the organization for 26 years. While Pathfinder was originally funded by Clarence and Sarah, today it receives most of its support from the U.S. Agency for International Development, and multiple generations of the family remain involved with the nonprofit.

Early Lessons

During their lifetimes (Clarence died in 1966, Sarah in 1984), the couple passed down to their children a deep commitment not only to Pathfinder’s work and related causes but to philanthropy more broadly. How they and successive generations of Gambles have made that commitment stick offers a road map for how to instill the philanthropic impulse into a wealthy family’s DNA far into the future. The Gamble family declined to disclose its current net worth, but family members say theirs is a healthy but modest fortune when compared with other philanthropic families whose wealth carried over from the early 20th century.

Though rich, Clarence and Sarah were uncomfortable with showy displays of wealth, and those dinnertime conversations included talk about how much need there was in the world. Judy Kahrl says she doesn’t know if that was by design or if it “was just sort of the air we breathed,” but she says her father taught his children early on to manage their money wisely and to understand that a big part of having a lot of money included giving it away to those in need.

She remembers as an 8-year-old getting an allowance of 12 cents a week, 2 cents of which her father earmarked for her to donate to needy children. Those lessons blossomed in sophistication over the years so that by the time the first part of her inheritance kicked in, when she was 21, she was already giving healthy sums to some of her parents’ projects and eventually to other charities. Clarence brought some of his children on overseas trips to visit the clinics and other programs, and while he wasn’t shy about asking his grown kids to support the family’s charitable efforts, he didn’t insist.

“There was always a kind of freedom for us to choose what we wanted to give to, and I think that was very wise,” Kahrl says. “He realized we could evaluate our situation better than he could.”

Virginia Esposito, president of the National Center for Family Philanthropy, who advises many modern-day philanthropists and their families, has high praise for families like the Gambles who take an immersive approach to giving. “Your chances go up exponentially of having your children and grandchildren involved in philanthropy if they get to sit with you and hear the stories and understand the family goals,” says Esposito.

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GRR!

Judy Kahrl, who founded Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights, or GRR!, says dinner-table conversations in her childhood typically centered on issues like contraception and family planning.

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Pathfinder VietNam

Ben Kahrl, shown here at a health clinic in Vietnam, is part of the third generation of Gamble heirs who are helping the fourth generation get involved in the family philanthropy.

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Sala Lewis

Jim Epstein, second from left, oversees the Gamble family’s office and has taken many trips to see Pathfinder projects in places like Tanzania, this one with his son Jules, right.

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Photo by Ben Kahrl

Judy Kahrl and her granddaughter, Ella Kahrl, visit an Ethiopian health facility supported by Pathfinder and the Kahrl family that provides vital cervical cancer prevention and treatment services.

Resonating Through Life

The lessons Kahrl’s parents passed down to her resonated throughout her life. She earned a Ph.D. in adult education. She worked as a counselor and as an education consultant to a boys’ school that was transitioning to a co-ed institution. Yet she never left Pathfinder behind. She has been a supporter and board member for decades.

Kahrl also branched out. She and her late husband were civil-rights activists in the 1960s, and women’s health and reproductive rights remained an important cause. She was active in La Leche League in the early 1960s when few American women breastfed their babies, and in 2013 she started the nonprofit Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights, or GRR! The group seeks to protect women’s reproductive rights in Maine and has been gaining traction, says Kahrl, as many fear the landmark Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized abortion nationwide may soon come under threat.

“We’re a small group, but we get noticed,” says Kahrl. “When we go to demonstrations, everybody’s surprised to see a bunch of old ladies with yellow T-shirts that say GRR!”

Like her parents, she passed down the family’s philanthropic focus and impulse to her four children, including her youngest, Benjamin Kahrl, who in the fall started his second term as a Pathfinder board member after having served in that capacity from 1998 to 2014.

Ben Kahrl says when he was growing up, his parents talked a lot about the importance of giving back and dedicating one’s self to something more than one’s personal concerns. They also led by example, he says, supporting and serving on boards of local nonprofits and continuing to work with Pathfinder.

“They did the kind of service that required some time away, and they talked about why it was important,” says Ben Kahrl. “They weren’t donating a lot of money to get their name on a building, so growing up I could see theirs was a quiet kind of service, and I think that helped the message sink in.”

A Pathfinder trip he took with some family and board members in 1987 to Latin America, Brazil, and Colombia when he was about 20 deepened his understanding of the family’s charitable work.

“It sounds clichéd, but it’s true. Being able to actually talk to people in these rural communities that otherwise wouldn’t have had access to services and what that meant for them in terms of restricting their ability to control their own future was eye-opening,” Ben Kahrl says. “Hearing both men and women say that access to reproductive health care changes their life, whether it’s delaying pregnancy or not getting an STD or getting prenatal health care, that sparked my interest.”

He started giving relatively modest sums to the organization after that and since then has been on about two dozen other Pathfinder trips around the globe. That experience also spurred other charitable interests. He took cross-country cycling trips in the late ’80s to raise money for charity and started helping with letter-writing campaigns and giving what he could to Amnesty International and other organizations.

His parents’ discussions of giving back and of having a higher purpose, combined with Kahrl’s religious faith (he is Episcopalian), led him to choose a career teaching high school in primarily low-income parts of Massachusetts where he thought he could do some good. During a 20-year career teaching social studies, history, and government, Kahrl routinely organized trips to Washington so his students could learn how to lobby lawmakers for human rights and other causes. He also took them to global-health conferences and on Pathfinder trips abroad, and he became an anonymous donor to several of his students who needed financial help to attend college.

Kahrl, who is 51 and now looking to start a new career where he can combine his experience teaching adolescents with his interest in global health care, says his parents were worried their children would grow up thinking they didn’t have to work and encouraged them to develop careers. His parents’ concerns about their children becoming idle, combined with a certain amount of discomfort Kahrl says he felt about his family’s wealth, prompted him to go a little overboard as a young man in his efforts to hide his wealth and to prove that he could make his own way.

“I lived in a rat-hole apartment with no screens on the windows and a bathroom door that, when you opened it, bonked into the toilet seat. I had a beater VW, and when the muffler fell off, I didn’t fix it,” he says.

Ben Kahrl wasn’t alone in his discomfort and uncertainty about how to reckon with the family’s wealth; many of his cousins faced the same doubts.

How to Pass On a Tradition of Giving

Tips from Gamble family heirs on how to navigate wealth and hand down philanthropic traditions:

Make it a priority for all the generations to get together in one place and have a serious conversation about the family’s wealth and its philanthropy.

Hire a facilitator to help family members articulate how they think about their wealth and to assist the different generations in finding out what causes they care about most and how they want to direct their giving.

Talk about the different messages members of each generation think they received from their parents about what to do with their wealth and how to give, and then find the commonalities and differences.

Listen closely to each other’s philanthropic goals, make sure each family member is heard, and accept that not all family members will think alike or value the same causes or approaches.

Be willing to shift the emphasis of the family’s giving, whether because of changing family needs and values, or because global conditions have changed.

Learn about finance and investing so family members of all ages understand and are aware of how the family’s wealth is being invested and managed.

Get the younger generations involved by designing hands-on experiences as donors and volunteers.

In the late 1980s a multigeneration seminar, led by a family philanthropy adviser, put family members through a series of exercises that helped them articulate how they felt about their wealth, how they found out about it, how they grapple with it in their personal relationships, and how much they knew about how it was invested.

The conversations helped family members decide how they wanted to live their lives and use their money, philanthropically and otherwise, says Ben’s cousin Jim Epstein, 65, a Washington businessman who today oversees the Epstein family’s investment office and who attended the get-together. Such meetings, says Esposito, are much more common today among wealthy philanthropic families than they were back then, and they can go a long way to ease feelings of guilt or discomfort surrounding inherited wealth and help the different generations make more informed decisions about their philanthropy.

Merging Endeavors

Epstein’s late father, Lionel Epstein, was a tax attorney and the relative who got Clarence Gamble to formalize Pathfinder into a 501(c)(3) organization back in the late 1950s. Like Ben Kahrl, Jim Epstein took many trips overseas to visit Pathfinder projects, and he was on Pathfinder’s board from about 1980 through 1992. In the years following those family meetings, he became keenly interested in figuring out a way to forge a nexus between his for-profit and nonprofit endeavors.

“Back in the ’80s and even into the ’90s, there was a very clear demarcation between those two things, and I just felt that there were some real opportunities in that middle place where we could blur that line and begin to think differently,” says Epstein.

He joined the Threshold Foundation, a progressive grant-making and membership organization, and later the Social Venture Network, a membership group for social entrepreneurs who want to use their businesses to do good. In the 2000s Epstein got involved in the efforts to promote public-benefit corporations, businesses that are required to operate in ways that benefit the public, the environment, and their employees, rather than their shareholders or their bottom line, and he played a role in the efforts that eventually led to the State of Maryland in 2010 being the first state to pass benefit-corporation legislation.

Now that his two children are grown, Epstein has recently stepped back into the Pathfinder fold and plans to work in the coming years with its current chief executive, Lois Quam, to brainstorm ways to get the next generation of Gamble heirs engaged in Pathfinder’s work.

“We need the young peoples’ perspective, and for too long we’ve had the traditionalist baby-boomer generation doing their traditional top-down kind of approach, and those aren’t relevant anymore in this day and age,” says Epstein. “To migrate into a more adaptive, flexible organization, we know we have to bring the younger voices into that process.”

Quam agrees that getting the next generation involved will not only help Pathfinder remain relevant, but will also bring new ideas and energy, and help the organization thrive. Still, she acknowledges it will take time, since the fourth generation of Gamble family heirs — Ben’s, Jim’s, and their cousins’ children — are still largely in their teens and twenties. Yet she talks to this latest generation regularly and says she has been impressed by the continuity throughout the age groups.

“One thing that is very similar is there is a deep sense of commitment and a sense of being a part of Pathfinder across the family,” Quam says. “Even if some family members have been more involved or less involved at different times, there is that sense of being a part of this and how can I make a difference.”

‘Cool Connection’

One member of the fourth generation of Gambles who has already gotten involved is 15-year-old Ella Kahrl, Ben’s daughter. Last year, the teenager helped inaugurate Quam’s first board meeting as Pathfinder’s new CEO by reading a letter to the board that her grandmother, Judy Kahrl, had found among Judy’s mother Sarah’s belongings. The letter, written in Sarah Gamble’s hand, told of her experiences working with family-planning clinics in Japan in the 1950s and gave Ella what she describes as a “cool connection” to her great-grandmother’s work.

By that time, however, Ella was already connected to the family’s tradition of giving and to Pathfinder. In elementary school, she helped raise money for the Schwartz School, a private school for children with special needs, which Ella’s sister attended. And when she was 12, she took her first Pathfinder trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with her father, Ben, and her grandmother, Judy. While there, she visited a Pathfinder cervical cancer prevention and treatment program for local women, and she got to sit down and talk with Ethiopian teenagers at a clinic where young people can learn about family planning and reproductive and sexual health.

Her favorite trip so far, she says, is the one she took last February to Tanzania. There, her father arranged for her to accompany a young Pathfinder communications staff member to Shinyanga, Tanzania, for a full week by herself. She says she not only learned about the work the organization was doing to help young mothers there, but she also got some hands-on experience working on the communications side and helping with all that goes into publicizing Pathfinder’s work.

“I’m interested in that side of things: working on getting interviews and photos and videos,” says Ella. “It was cool to work at a pace that a normal staff member would work at and to speak with the women and learn about the stuff (Pathfinder) is doing on the ground.”

She also said seeing teenagers like herself who were parents and had to balance their education with making a living to support their children reinforced the ongoing importance of the organization her great-grandparents started 60 years ago. It also sparked an interest in working in global health, which she says she may pursue after college.

Ben Kahrl says while he hopes the next generation gets involved with Pathfinder as he and some of his cousins have, he doesn’t want his daughter to feel obligated to follow in the family’s footsteps. Instead, he wants her to be able to explore all the different ways there are to help people with the family’s resources and deep philanthropic experience.

“I want her to see how lucky we are and find the one thing she’s passionate about,” says Ben Kahrl. “I talk a lot about guilt being a short-term way of giving because it just makes you feel bad, but being passionate about something gives you a huge, wonderful opportunity.”

Corrections: A previous version of this article misspelled Dan Pellegrom’s name. It also said that Jim Epstein oversees the Gamble family’s office rather than the Epstein family’s investment office. It also said that Maryland was the first state to pass B-Corporation legislation rather than benefit-corporation legislation.