Institute for Family Culture
Managing Wealth's Impact to Achieve Your Goals
Family culture provides a distinctive and multifaceted foundation for considering wealth in its fullest context. Driven by intellectual curiosity and a passion for innovation, the Institute for Family Culture is dedicated to helping clients surface and address their key priorities at the dynamic intersection of financial, human, intellectual, and social capital.
A clear understanding of family history, values, strengths and interests, coupled with intentional and well-informed plans, plays an important role in stewarding unique wealth and building a meaningful legacy.
The Abbot Downing Difference
Experienced Team
Working with a highly experienced consulting team of PhD and other advanced-degree professionals in education, psychology, history, and business, you can explore your family and business history and receive integrated strategic advice to address family culture challenges and opportunities.
Focused Consulting
Ultra-high-net-worth clients have sophisticated needs related to business interests, multigenerational stakeholders, and family foundations. We help guide you through succession planning, social impact analysis, managing business transitions or sales, and a full-range of family dynamics and governance matters to help create plans that align with your goals.
Thought Leadership and Innovation
Our experienced team collaborates with renowned academic institutions to design client events and educational opportunities to share innovative thinking and leading edge solutions pertaining to family, business, and community.
The Institute for Family Culture is organized into four centers of excellence, each offering a distinct focus and set of capabilities to assist you:
Family and Business History
Surfacing, sharing, and celebrating stories of successes, challenges, and lessons learned in the near or distant past often serves as a meaningful foundation for successful planning. Our team of academically-trained historians and skilled researchers is dedicated to helping clients learn about their past and examine their cultural roots as a bridge to current and future planning that is both informed and intentional.
Family Business Transitions
Working closely with family enterprise leaders, related family stakeholders, and key advisors, our family business consultants provide strategic advice and education in anticipation of key business milestones and transitions. In collaboration with our Legacy and Wealth Planning team, we can provide leadership coaching, strength-based assessments, and communication tools, as well as advice on the development of tactical plans for business and leadership changes, tax and legal planning, stakeholder relations and education, family employment policies, and both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of a full or partial sale of family business assets.
Family Dynamics, Education, and Governance
Our team of family dynamics, education, and governance professionals offers strategic advice and consultation based on their practical experience and research on the success factors associated with managing and transitioning wealth.We can advise on complex family dynamics issues, design customized educational experiences to address knowledge gaps and advance family stewardship goals, and help implement plans that support effective communication, engagement, and decision-making.
Social Impact Analysis
Our team brings market-based solutions to impact investments, social enterprises, startups that drive financial inclusion, and venture philanthropy. Supported by professionals from our Asset Management, Legacy and Wealth Planning, and Foundations and Endowments teams, we partner with clients to surface priorities, and then develop and implement well-considered plans for monitoring and managing the social consequences and change processes that result when key objectives move from vision to action.