What happens when a family foundation stops asking how to accommodate the family—and starts asking what the institution itself requires?

Ashley Blanchard has spent much of her career inside that question.

She brings an unusual vantage point to the governance conversation. She is a fourth-generation trustee of her own family foundation and has spent her professional career advising philanthropic families through questions of strategy, succession, family dynamics, and governance.

Our conversation began with a question I have been carrying through my research on Pluralistic Leadership:

What makes governance redesign institutionally—and psychologically—possible?

Ashley complicated the question almost immediately.

What followed was a candid conversation about family, authority, purpose, succession, expertise, and what changes when a family foundation begins to understand itself not simply as an extension of a family, but as an institution with a purpose of its own.

The problem may not be homogeneity. It may be how we compose boards.

Tomás Alvarez III: One of the questions behind Pluralistic Leadership is what happens when leadership and governance remain concentrated among people who share similar identities, experiences, or relationships to an institution. I’ve been thinking about that as a problem of leadership homogeneity.

Ashley Blanchard: I would challenge a little bit the idea of homogeneity.

Families aren’t necessarily homogeneous. You can have radically different worldviews and life experiences represented within a family. Second cousins may have had completely different upbringings and barely know each other. They might have very different levels of wealth and ideas about money.

The issue is that none of that is necessarily why they were chosen to be on the board.

Families often aren’t composing boards by asking: What perspectives do we need? What skills or expertise do we need? Who has proximity to the issues we’re working on?

They’re thinking about things like branch representation or how to keep everybody involved.

So there may actually be diversity within the family. But it isn’t necessarily thoughtfully composed diversity.

Tomás: That distinction is important.

The deeper issue isn’t simply who is represented. It’s whether the institution has intentionally assembled the perspectives, knowledge, experience, and relationships it needs to make good decisions.

Ashley: Right. And that leads to another question: What exactly is the family bringing?

Being born into a family doesn’t automatically mean you bring shared values, long-term perspective, a commitment to the effective stewardship of these resources, or something uniquely valuable to governance. Those are things a family member could bring. But they’re not guaranteed by birth.

When philanthropy becomes bigger than the family

Tomás: You have lived some of this evolution in your own family foundation. What changed?

Ashley: About 25 or 30 years ago, we went through a strategic transformation.

We had been a pretty traditional, board-driven family foundation. We were a group of individuals making grants to organizations each cared about. As my generation came to the table, we made a few decisions that became really important.

One was to focus.

We weren’t going to be a huge foundation, but we thought that if we identified something we cared about and learned about it together, maybe we could actually contribute to something meaningful.

We eventually focused on youth organizing.

The second thing we learned was the value of expertise.

We worked with philanthropic advisors and eventually staff who had deep experience as organizers and deep relationships with the organizations doing the work. And we started seeing that our relatively small amount of funding could leverage much greater dollars from other funders because the people working with us actually knew the field. They had knowledge that was valued by other foundations looking to invest in the space and could help direct dollars or connect small grassroots groups with larger foundations. To be clear–we family members didn’t have that set of skills.

That planted a seed.

If we went deep and narrow—and worked with people who really understood the issues—we could do much more than simply write checks.

Eventually, as a board, we basically got ourselves out of the grantmaking business.

We realized: We’re not adding that much value here.

Why are we putting staff and grantee partners through long proposals and docket write-ups if the board isn’t actually the group best positioned to make those decisions?

And that starts to change how you think about governance. Maybe the highest and best use of a board isn’t the review and approval of individual grants.

You begin asking:

Make it about something bigger than the family

Tomás: You’ve worked with so many families trying to maintain engagement across generations. What have you learned about what holds them together?

Ashley: Families often come to me asking: How do we work together productively? How do we keep the family engaged?

And the answer I keep coming back to is almost counterintuitive:

You make it not about the family.

You make it about the impact you’re trying to have in the world.

What are you trying to accomplish together?

That’s what engages people—doing something meaningful and important that people can feel proud of.

Ideally, you create an institution whose ambitions eventually outstrip what the family alone has the capacity to lead.

That’s a good thing.

Maybe that means professional staff. Maybe it means non-family board members. But you’ve built something important enough that the family recognizes: We can’t do this alone.

Governance change often begins with a practical problem

Tomás: So what actually prompts families to redesign governance?

Ashley: Often it’s surprisingly practical.

Generational transition is a big one.

A governance structure may have worked when you had a handful of siblings around the table. Then suddenly you look ahead and see many more cousins coming.

Now you have to select people.

You’ve never had to do that before.

Or maybe the opposite happens: there simply aren’t enough family members interested or available to continue governing the foundation.

Sometimes a family has been making decisions by asking, What would Mom and Dad do? But the next generation barely knew Mom and Dad.

Eventually, the existing model stops working.

That happened in our own foundation.

We had talked about adding community trustees for some time. We thought it would make us better governors. But we didn’t actually do it until we faced a very practical succession question.

My father–the eldest in his generation–was coming up on the age limit in our by-laws, and after decades of service was ready to leave the board. We are a small family. Suddenly the question became unavoidable.

And when we considered whether to expand the definition of family in our by-laws to include spouses or look outside it, we realized:

The values argument had been there all along.

But succession created the trigger.

What families resist is often a question of authority

Tomás: Once families recognize the existing structure isn’t working, what prevents change?

Ashley: There are many things, but ultimately a lot of it comes down to control, authority, and fear.

Fear of departing from the founder’s intent.

Fear that doing things differently means abandoning what parents or grandparents wanted.

Resistance to professionalization.

Fear that changing the role of the board will make family members less engaged.

And oftentimes families simply don’t know what else is possible.

Most people don’t have peers with family foundations. They don’t necessarily go somewhere and see five different models for how governance could work.

I’ve had so many experiences where I’ve explained alternatives to a family and they can’t just imagine them. Then I’ll bring in leaders from another family foundation who have actually done it.

An hour later they’re saying, Oh. We could do that. Maybe that could work for us.

We can only see what we’ve experienced.

But there’s another structural issue with family philanthropy: there often isn’t a forcing mechanism.

In a business, if the family can’t figure out how to work together, eventually there are consequences. The business loses money. Everyone knows something isn’t working. And every owner suffers monetarily.

Family foundations can continue for years without that kind of external pressure.

Problems can fester.

And what presents itself as a strategy problem often isn’t really a strategy problem.

It’s a lack of clarity around purpose and authority. Why are we doing this together, and who gets to decide the future?

From a collection of individuals to an institution

Tomás: That gets very close to the question I’ve been trying to understand: What makes governance redesign possible?

Ashley: I think there’s an underlying psychological shift.

You move from thinking of the foundation as a collection of individual family members who each exert influence to thinking of it as a real institution.

It’s something people have built. Family members, yes, but also the professionals, grantees and other partners who have shaped it into what it is today.

It has become its own living, breathing thing.

And that changes the question.

Ginny Esposito, who founded the National Center for Family Philanthropy and has been a mentor to me, frames it in a way I’ve always found useful.

Instead of asking:

How do we design the board to accommodate the family?

Ask:

What is the board this foundation deserves?

That’s a completely different question.

If you started from scratch and asked: This is the purpose of the institution. This is the work it does. This is the staff it has. What should the board do? Who should be on it? What should those people bring?

You would have a very different conversation.

Then the family has to answer a harder question

Tomás: And once you ask what the institution requires, you inevitably get to another question: What is my role in it?

Ashley: Exactly.

And I think there needs to be a parallel conversation whenever families consider independent or community directors.

You can’t only ask what outside directors bring.

You also have to clarify:

What do we believe family members uniquely bring to this institution?

It’s okay if family members and independent directors bring different things. That’s the point of intentionally composing a board.

But you have to define those things.

If you believe family members bring long-term perspective, what does that actually mean?

If they carry institutional history, how does that contribute to governance?

If there’s something about family stewardship that matters, name it.

Because once you’ve said that independent directors bring expertise, lived experience, community relationships, or other perspectives the family doesn’t have, eventually a family member may reasonably ask:

Then what am I doing here?

And if you can’t answer that question, you have a problem.

From the Conversation: Beyond Representation

Reflection by Tomás Alvarez III

My conversation with Ashley Blanchard challenged me to think more deeply about a premise that has shaped my inquiry into Pluralistic Leadership: that leadership homogeneity limits what philanthropic institutions are capable of seeing, understanding, and doing. Ashley introduced an important distinction. Families are not necessarily homogeneous in their experiences, perspectives, or worldviews. The deeper question is whether those differences—and the knowledge an institution needs beyond the family—are intentionally considered when composing a board. This shifts the conversation from who occupies positions of authority to how institutions determine what knowledge, capabilities, and relationships are necessary to fulfill their purpose.

What I found particularly compelling was Ashley’s description of how her own family foundation evolved from a collection of individuals making grants toward an institution with a shared purpose. That evolution required the family to reconsider where it could contribute the greatest value and where others were better positioned to lead. It also required a different understanding of stewardship. Rather than assuming that family membership alone qualified someone to govern, the foundation began asking what each person could contribute to the institution’s work. This suggests that governance evolution may become more possible when families are invited to build upon their existing commitments and strengths while examining whether inherited structures continue to serve the institution they have created.

Ashley also illuminated the psychological dimensions of institutional change. Families may recognize the value of different perspectives and still struggle to reconsider long-held assumptions about authority, responsibility, and legacy. What often creates an opening is not an abstract argument for reform, but a practical challenge such as succession, generational transition, or the growing complexity of the foundation’s work. These moments can create opportunities to revisit questions that might otherwise remain unexamined. Yet the opportunity for change depends, in part, on whether leaders can move beyond protecting familiar roles toward considering what the institution itself requires.

For Pluralistic Leadership, Ashley’s insights reinforce an important distinction: the goal is not simply to diversify representation, but to strengthen institutional intelligence through the intentional integration of different forms of knowledge. Community experience, professional expertise, family history, institutional memory, and long-term stewardship may each contribute something valuable. The challenge is not to privilege one form of knowledge over another, but to understand how these contributions can inform collective judgment and decision-making. That also requires examining who has the authority to determine which forms of knowledge matter and how they are ultimately used.

Perhaps the most important question Ashley leaves us with is one that extends well beyond family philanthropy: What would change if institutions designed their leadership around what their purpose requires, rather than around the people and structures they have inherited?

Her perspective reminds me that governance evolution need not begin by diminishing the role of those who have stewarded an institution. It can begin by inviting them into a larger conversation about what they have built, what it now needs, and how its leadership might continue to evolve in service of that purpose.

About PL Conversations

PL Conversations brings together diverse voices from philanthropy and beyond to explore how institutions understand power, integrate knowledge, navigate complexity, and evolve their leadership and governance. Through candid dialogue, the series contributes to the ongoing examination and development of Pluralistic Leadership and the broader concept of Institutional Intelligence.

In this short video, we introduce the core question that led to this work:

How do philanthropic institutions make good decisions in an increasingly complex world?

Pluralistic Leadership is a governance design framework that explores how institutions can expand their institutional intelligence by integrating multiple forms of expertise — including lived experience, professional knowledge, and community insight — into leadership and decision-making.

This framework is not a checklist. It is an invitation to rethink how leadership, authority, and governance function in institutions that exist to serve the public good — especially in a time of rising complexity, uncertainty, and social change.

You can read the full framework and explore the Pluralistic Leadership Series here:

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We hope this work is useful to trustees, CEOs, program staff, and proximate leaders working to help institutions navigate complexity with greater wisdom, legitimacy, and effectiveness.

We look forward to learning with you.

With respect for the work ahead,

—Tomás & Uma

Co-creators, Pluralistic Leadership Framework