Avery Trinidad: We can start with the claim at the center of your recent argument in Alliance magazine. You’ve written that the fastest-growing risk in the family office ecosystem isn’t investment management — it’s strategic advisory. What are you actually seeing that led you there?

Kindred Motes: The claim is less provocative than it sounds once you’ve been inside enough of these situations. Family offices are now deploying philanthropic and impact capital at a scale that used to be reserved for major institutional foundations. Some of the offices we’re talking about manage assets in the tens or hundreds of billions. And they’re doing it with advisory teams built almost entirely to manage wealth, not influence.

The frameworks those advisors use were designed for markets. When something goes wrong in a social impact context, the exposure is rarely financial. It’s reputational, relational, and in some cases political. Most of the advisors in the room weren’t trained to see that kind of risk coming, let alone prevent it.

AT: Couldn’t a family office just hire a communications person or a social impact officer and solve this?

KM: That assumption is exactly what gets people into trouble. Bringing in a communications hire after the strategy is already set is like calling a doctor after the patient has already left the hospital. By the time communications becomes a priority, the decisions that create the risk have already been made — which grants to fund, which partnerships to pursue, which communities to enter.

The problem is structural because it starts at the advisory layer. The people shaping the strategy don’t have fluency in political risk, media dynamics, or movement ecosystems. They don’t ask how a grant will land in a community with a long history of extraction or political tension. They don’t think about whether a funder’s public profile might make an organizer’s work a political liability. A communications hire can’t fix a strategy that was built without those questions.

AT: Are there specific geographies where you see this playing out most acutely?

KM: The Southern United States is the clearest example, and I’ll name it directly because it’s where I come from. The region receives disproportionately low philanthropic investment relative to its population, its poverty rates, and the scale of the challenges communities there face. When outside capital does arrive — from a national family office, a coastal foundation, a foreign impact investor — it often arrives without the context that makes it useful. Capital without that context doesn’t just underperform. It can destabilize the work it was meant to support.

I participated in a convening recently that showed what a different approach could look like. It brought family offices and private funders from the US and Europe (France, Germany, and the UK) into the South alongside local artists, historians, and organizers, with no pitch decks, no naming opportunities, and an itinerary shaped by people who actually knew the community. That level of intentionality is rare, but it shouldn’t be.

AT: When the advisory model fails, what does that actually look like for the nonprofits and organizers on the receiving end?

KM: It rarely looks like a dramatic collapse. Instead, it looks like slow erosion. A nonprofit starts fielding questions from state legislators about a funder’s other investments. An organizer’s work becomes a liability once a funder’s name draws the wrong kind of scrutiny. A movement’s credibility frays because the capital that arrived brought visibility the community wasn’t ready for and didn’t ask for.

When those misalignments surface, it’s rarely the donor who pays the price – it’s the grantee. The family office moves on to its next portfolio decision. The nonprofit is left managing a crisis it didn’t create.

AT: Are there family offices that are actually getting this right? What does good look like?

KM: Yes. The flexibility and speed that family offices bring to impact work are genuine advantages that traditional foundations struggle to match. Most of the people I work with in this space have real conviction, and the offices doing this well share a few instincts. First, they build relationships with community-based organizations before they make grants, not after. Then they integrate communications and narrative thinking at the strategy level, so the people helping them decide where to invest are the same people thinking about how that investment will land publicly. And they measure themselves against outcomes in the community, not just the quality of their own internal process. The shift is moving from asking, “How do we deploy capital responsibly?” to asking, “How do we exercise influence accountably?” Those questions sound similar, but they produce very different advisory relationships.

AT: You’ve been critical in the past of what you call the “advisory complex” in philanthropy more broadly. Where does the family office advisory gap fit into that larger argument?

KM: The same accountability problem applies to a newer and less scrutinized set of actors. Advisors across the philanthropic space are incentivized by value created, not harm avoided. They’re evaluated on metrics their clients can see, not on the consequences their clients’ decisions create for communities that they will never meet.

Family offices amplify that problem because they operate with even less public scrutiny than foundations — fewer reporting requirements, less board accountability, weaker field-wide norms around transparency. When the advisory model fails, there’s very little mechanism for recourse. The communities that bear the consequences have no standing in the relationship.

AT: Should there be more regulatory oversight of family offices operating at this scale, or is this primarily a voluntary accountability question?

KM: It’s a genuinely hard question, and I’m not sure there’s a clean answer. When private capital begins shaping public outcomes at the scale some of these offices operate, the argument that it’s purely a private matter stops holding up. Power and influence at that scale have historically required accountability frameworks. That’s not an ideological claim; it’s just how institutions evolve.

That said, I’m cautious about regulation as the primary lever, especially in a political environment where “oversight” can quickly become a pretext for something else entirely. What interests me more is what it looks like when a family office decides to hold itself to a higher standard before anyone compels it to. That’s where the most serious work is actually happening right now, and where the field can move faster than any regulatory timeline would allow.

AT: What does a better advisory model actually require that most advisors aren’t currently providing?

KM: A few things that are simple to name and genuinely hard to build.

1. Political and narrative risk fluency has to be integrated from the beginning of the strategy, not brought in when something goes wrong. That means the people shaping a family office’s impact portfolio need to understand how capital lands in specific communities, in specific political environments, at specific moments. That’s not a generic skill. It requires proximity.

2. Advisors also need to be accountable for harm avoided, not just value created. Right now, the incentive structure runs almost entirely in one direction. An advisor who helps execute a high-profile grant gets credit for the announcement. Nobody tracks what happened to the grantee two years later when the political environment shifted, and the funder had moved on.

3. The communities being served need and deserve genuine standing in the process. Not as beneficiaries being consulted, but as people whose knowledge and relationships are treated as assets.

AT: Let’s make that concrete. When KMSG works with a family office on this, what actually changes?

KM: It varies, but there are patterns. With one office, the starting point was their grantee communication process. They had a thoughtful investment strategy and genuine intentions, but the way grants were being announced — the timing, the framing, the level of coordination with the grantee beforehand — was creating political exposure for the organizations they were trying to support. We restructured that process entirely, building in a narrative risk review before any public announcement and establishing a real pre-announcement protocol with grantees rather than a notification. That sounds like a small operational change. The difference it made for two of their grantees in a politically contested environment was not small.

With another office, the work was earlier in the process — helping them build a community advisory structure before they entered a new geography. Not a rubber-stamp advisory board, but an actual process for surfacing local knowledge and political context their existing advisors had never been positioned to provide. The risks that the process identified in the first sixty days had not appeared anywhere in their prior due diligence.

AT: Where do you see the most promising opportunities to change how this works at a field level?

KM: The current moment is clarifying in a way that creates real opportunity. A rapidly shifting federal funding environment, growing scrutiny of ESG and impact investing, and a genuine reckoning inside philanthropy about what trust-based, community-proximate giving actually requires — all of that has made the stakes of getting the advisory model wrong much more visible than they were three years ago. Family offices that used to be able to operate quietly are finding that harder.

That’s actually good news, because it means the conversation about what responsible advisory models look like — about how influence gets exercised accountably, about what it means to be genuinely proximate to the communities you’re trying to serve — is one more people are ready to have. The offices that move on this now, before they need to, will be in a fundamentally different position than the ones that wait for a crisis to prompt it. That’s the conversation KMSG is built to have.