Mark and Linda Estacion Family Fund

When Mark and Linda Estacion’s daughters were seven and 10 years old, Linda encouraged them to choose a nonprofit organization they wanted to support during The Great Give.

Jenna and Maile Estacion took it very much to heart, going online and researching many of the nearly 400 organizations that were participating in the annual 36-hour on-line giving event.

Each year since then, their daughters, now 20 and 17, have made a list of causes, thinking over what they might choose. “They’ve been around philanthropy their whole lives,” said Linda Estacion, who is the The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven’s Director of Donor Services and Development Operations.

The four talked often about the many joyful experiences their family has had taking part in programs whose organizations are supported by The Foundation — attending summer camps at Creative Arts Workshop and the YMCA, going to the Festival of Arts & Ideas, concerts on the Green, the Yale Peabody Museum and the New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s KidTix program.

“We’d discuss, `What do I want to give back to? What do I want to make sure is free for someone else to enjoy?’” Linda said. “These are all programs that exist because of donors, because people gave back.”

Now, Linda and Mark, a research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine’s Center for Neuroscience and Regeneration Research, have established the Mark and Linda Estacion Family Fund, a donor-advised fund that will “put more structure around our giving. It’s going to be forever, and it will make how we give more strategic,” Linda said.

Mark and Linda advise the fund now and their daughters will eventually take over assuccessor advisors. Then, half will go to annually support Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., where Mark earned a bachelor’s degree that sparked his love for science and his career.

“I didn’t think I’d be able to afford to go,” Mark said. “But the planets aligned, and I was accepted, and it included a financial aid package which put it in reach. That allowed me to go a dream school.”

They want young people to have that same kind of opportunity.

The other half of the fund is unrestricted “to be used wherever the Greater New Haven community needs it most,” Linda said. “If there’s a community need in 50 years that I can’t envision, this provides the flexibility for The Foundation to mobilize some resources toward that need.”