Lynnaea Lumbard is both an investor and DAF client at RSF. She uses her DAF to organize her giving and make donations to nonprofits in her community and around the world. She invests in RSF’s Social Investment Fund, helping channel capital to businesses and nonprofits working toward a more regenerative and equitable economy.

Lynnaea recently sat down with RSF’s head of communications Will McAneny to discuss her approach to philanthropy and impact investing – and share how RSF helps her do both. This interview has been condensed from its original form.

WM: You talk a lot about the concept of “story.” Why are stories so important to you?

LL: We’re not made of just cells. We’re made of stories. And right now, we’re in what I call “story wars.” We’re living in one story that comes out of survival of the fittest, and we live that as if that’s who humans are.

But there’s another story that isn’t about that. I’m talking about higher levels of evolution, where collaboration and cooperation are what actually make an ecosystem work. That community is important. Winning isn’t the top thing in the world.

That’s a beautiful story. How does your relationship with money fit into it?

Until I was 46, I didn’t really know my history. My great grandfather was a pioneer in West Texas raising cattle in the late 1880s. He was a cattle rancher, and then at some point, guess what was underneath the ranch. When my mother died, I was suddenly given a new job as a philanthropist and investment manager – a job I never planned to have.

My money came to me without anything I did or earned. I couldn’t change that. But I could change what I did with it.

WM: What was most challenging about aligning your money with your values?

LL: Trusting myself to choose. I had trust officers, and the reigning attitude with them was like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them a lot of s***!

Most investment managers’ core value is make more money, don’t lose what you have. I don’t have that value. So I had to go up against people who do and say, “No, I want to do it a different way.”

Part of “doing it a different way” was setting up a donor advised fund with RSF. How has this helped you?
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There was a point where my husband and I would spend pretty much all of January scouting for letters acknowledging what we had funded. It was all getting too big for us to handle.

Slowly, I learned about donor-advised funds as a vehicle for people like me to do our philanthropy without setting up a foundation. I wasn’t comfortable going to any of the big banks that had DAFs. I never felt safe there.

My advisor, Mark Finser, is a co-founder of RSF, and introduced me to them. I felt that I could trust RSF’s integrity and spirit. It was the obvious choice. And now that I’m working with RSF, I can see what I’ve done by year, what’s continuing, what’s a one-off. I can have relationships with people I’m funding without doing all the backend work. It allows me to spread my wings.

WM: You also invest with RSF. How does that fit into your money story?

LL: Money goes in a lot of different directions: recycling, endowment, direct funding, catalysis. I like the idea of funds where money is rotated – money is given, paid back, given again, recycled over and over. I don’t believe in just sitting on huge endowments. Money should be used.‍

Let’s end by bringing it back to story. What’s the most important story you want to share?
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We are not separate from Earth. We are part of Earth. That’s the story I’m trying to amplify.

Want to learn more about Lynnaea Lumbard’s work to reimagine the story of humanity? Check out her nonprofit NewStories!