In 1987, the family discovered yet another way to tie its members together

Bill and his mother, Dorothy, the principal donor, established the William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Foundation. In keeping with the clan mentality, their goal was to involve every family member in the foundation at whatever level they could participate. Bill and his mother are the only trustees, but his five siblings sit on the disbursement committee along with Bill’s wife and three members of the third generation. Whether or not they are active on committees, adult members of the family’s six branches are invited to attend meetings, and all receive detailed minutes of each foundation meeting explaining what was decided and why.

Norms

Norms are the spoken and unspoken rules of cultures. Reinforced over time, they operate as invisible constraints on family members’ behavior. Norms set standards for how family members dress, talk and act. They also set limits on what is permissible or impermissible behavior under different circumstances and conditions. More than just rules of etiquette, norms provide family members with a guide for living both within the home and without.

When families establish foundations, they bring with them the rules of behavior that have governed the family culture. Originally, the board was composed of John and Marianne and their two children, Thomas and Alexandra. Then, two years, ago, the children’s spouses Joan and Michael, were added to the board.

“In our family, good manners count for everything,” says Thomas. “As children, my sister and I learned not to raise our voices, never to ask personal questions, and to avoid dissension at all costs. If we violated those rules, my parents would only have to raise their eyebrows to let us know that our behavior was out of line.”

When Thomas and Alexandra went away to college in the 1970s, they encountered a different set of norms. There, free expression was not only encouraged but considered healthy. Both Thomas and Alexandra spent several years in therapy learning how to express their feelings, and both ily cultures in which arguing and shouting were commonplace. Nonetheless, when Thomas and Alexandra are in the company of their parents, they still follow the rules of behavior they were taught as children.

Before the spouses joined the board, meetings to discuss allocations ran smoothly. The foundation funds higher education and church-run social services programs. Although Thomas and Alexandra wanted to be more adventurous grantmakers, they were reluctant to introduce proposals outside their parents’ purview.

In 1985, John and es) set up the Theodore Vanboven Family Foundation in honor of John’s father, a Dutch immigrant who built the family fortune

When the spouses joined the board, however, they had a different understanding of what their roles would be. They expected that as trustees, they would be free to debate ideas and grant proposals. Joan quickly caught on to the Vanbovens’ unspoken norms and backed away from controversy. But Michael persisted in arguing his positions, sometimes quite aggressively and long after they were voted down by the board.

“It was evident from my parents’ silence and body language,” says Thomas, “that they were uncomfortable when Michael raised his voice or banged his fist on the table, but Michael seemed oblivious to their signals. When I mentioned his behavior to my mother, she denied that anything was wrong. That’s the way my parents are. They close their eyes to whether they don’t want to see, and then hope that the problem will clear up by itself.”

As hard as the Vanboven family tries to avoid controversy, the Jacobs family welcomes it. They refer to themselves as a “loud and feisty bunch,” and there is no mistaking who inspired that image. Joe Jacobs, a child of Lebanese immigrants, grew up in poverty in Brooklyn. After earning a degree in chemical engineering, he started a small consulting business in 1947 that he built into the billion-dollar Jacobs Engineering Group.