Our Family Office 100 Year Plan

Patricia Saputo talks about the importance of education for children born in wealth.

So in my immediate family I have my parents, my four sisters, so we’re five daughters, with spouses, and nine grandchildren. So the family office in our immediate line is responsible for these, I guess my parents being second generation, my sister’s and I third, and the grandchildren fourth generation. So the opportunities that the family office offers the family members, or what we’re discussing now, so we’ve embarked on this for the past few years to determine exactly what the 100 year plan is for the family office, and how it will help the future generations. So in establishing this, the first and most important thing is education. How do we educate the future generation. And education is in various aspects. So seeing that this is a new area in Canada and a lot of these programs don’t exist, having done research, I decided to develop a program at Concordia University called the Family Wealth Program, to help the future generations, or children that are born in wealth understand the soft issues. Because being born in wealth is both a blessing and a curse, so it’s to help them understand how they can use this to help them with their own self-esteem, and to make them stewards of their wealth and to help them become responsible citizens in society and to give back to our communities. So education being important is something that we’re starting to do now. Other organizations such as the Business Families Foundation also provides these online courses so that the younger generation can go online and take some courses, and have the ability to meet people in their various fields and help children of wealthy families embark on projects that they want to potentially get into. So there’s a lot to be done in this area, especially in Canada, being very young in terms of family wealth, or we can learn from those families that have been around for many generations and make sure that we don’t go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three, and try to continue that and create that 100 year plan for future generations.