An Interview with Adam Compton

Why Giving Circles (as a philanthropic vehicle)?
Giving circles are a vehicle that can allow young professionals to come together to make a large scale push that makes an impact, and have a seat at the table. Often, nonprofits don’t know what to do with us, and this allows us to have important, educational conversations. We want to have an opportunity to be advocates, champions and work for the nonprofits to garner more support. We want to use our collective resources to help move the needle on projects. We also want to be able to give nonprofits a grant and tell them to go try something new! If they fail, they fail, but at least they took a risk – it’s important for funders to tell that story.

For the Longleaf Collective, it started with small group of friends that came together to see how we could get young professionals together to make an impact. Our gifts are smaller, we aren’t major gift givers, and we aren’t our parent’s generation either – we want to make a social impact, but we weren’t sure how to do that. This provided us that option.