Over 25 years ago, we founded the Laughing Acres Family Foundation in order to instill in our family the importance of being good stewards of our blessings. We believe philanthropy and concern for others is an important part of what makes our nation great, and we hope to advance those causes through our works via this foundation.

As a foundation, we hold certain principles in an especially high regard, and seek to make a positive impact on those that uphold those principles. As a smaller organization, we aim to focus our grants on these ideas alone, thereby maximizing the visible, tangible impact of our grants. Chief among the ideas we support is that of self-reliance, therefore we place special priority on grant-giving to organizations that promote self-reliance in our communities. When individuals around us become self-reliant, we find that they are able to give back to the communities that helped them gain that self-reliance — through promoting self-reliance, we promote a healthy cycle of giving and community growth.

We are especially fond of those organizations that do not receive government funding. Government grants, we find, comes with strings attached that generally decreases the positive impact of the grant. Whilst we do support organizations that receive government money, our smiles widen when we support organizations that do not rely on government money.

Our foundation is blessed with an excellent board, each member casting one vote. Our board collectively grants us a new perspective and draws our attention to organizations that support self-reliance in ways we, alone, might not see. No two board members think quite alike nor encourage grants for exactly the same types of organizations, and we consider ourselves fortunate for the varied outlooks they bring to the table.

We pray that our foundation will continue to help others improve their self-reliance long after we pass away. We have the utmost faith in our current board, as we do the boards to follow. We expect our boards, current and future, to require and reward measurable results from organizations we support, as opposed to simple declarations of gratitude and appeals to emotion. We know that activity without tangible results is a waste of time, talent and treasure.

We continue to be pleased by what we have accomplished so far, and look forward to seeing what our current and subsequent boards will accomplish in the future.

Philanthropically yours,

Michael and Diane