I recently earned the Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy designation from The American College of Financial Services. The reason was twofold. I find that my work has lent itself to fine-tuning the soft skills, but I wanted to dive deep into the hard skills: taxes, charitable giving vehicles, ethics, data, and trends. And honestly, I am a curious person. I wanted to go deeper in my craft so I could serve clients and donors from a place of more understanding, not less.
However, completing the program made me think about something bigger than my own preparation.
The credentialed advisor is not the exception in wealth planning. Financial advisors carry CFP or CFA. Estate attorneys maintain continuing legal education. CPAs recertify. Fiduciary standards demand ongoing learning across the entire wealth advisory table. The philanthropic seat should hold itself to a similar standard. The work is complex, evolving, and consequential. The learning is never really finished.
That is where CAP fits in. It is one of the few formal signals that a philanthropic advisor has done more than pick up the language of the field.
Every advisor at the wealth advisory table works with wealth in some form. Investing it. Protecting it. Transferring it. Mitigating taxes on it. Wealth without values, though, is just capital. Values are the factor that turn wealth from a balance sheet into a legacy, and that is where a philanthropic advisor comes in.
CAP training centers this. So do the mentors whose books I pored through, and will continue to reference throughout my career: Scott and Todd Fithian’s The Right Side of the Table, Steven Meyers’s Personalized Philanthropy: Crash the Fundraising Matrix, Tom Tierney and Joel Fleishman’s Give Smart: Philanthropy That Gets Results, and Tom McCullough and Keith Whitaker’s Wealth of Wisdom: The Top 50 Questions Wealthy Families Ask. I’m humbly appreciative of those who have contributed and shaped this field, and am proud to join a CAP community of philanthropic and wealth advisors whose work is centered on values.
Credentialing gives professionals from different disciplines a common language. It lets us collaborate with real understanding of what each of us brings to the table, and it lets clients trust that the whole team has done the work. That trust is what makes continuing education worth doing, collaboration worth building, and values worth centering.
Strategic philanthropy begins with values. That is the work we do at Jonesing for Good.
Reference:
Scott Fithian and Todd Fithian, The Right Side of the Table: Where Do You Sit in the Minds of the Affluent? (FPA Press, 2007).
Steven L. Meyers, Personalized Philanthropy: Crash the Fundraising Matrix (Charitable Channel Press, 2015).
Thomas J. Tierney and Joel L. Fleishman, Give Smart: Philanthropy That Gets Results (PublicAffairs, 2011).
Tom McCullough and Keith Whitaker, Wealth of Wisdom: The Top 50 Questions Wealthy Families Ask (Wiley, 2018).
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