John and Eileen Nordstrom fell in love with a community that would eventually become their long-term home when they moved from Chicago to Holland for John to attend Western Seminary. They list a variety of reasons as to why they appreciate the Holland/Zeeland area. “It is by far the most caring community we’ve lived in. Everything about it is beautiful: the people, the climate, the trees and the flowers.”
Most importantly, John and Eileen love the Holland/Zeeland community because it is a place where they have invested their time by being involved in the community. John was a pastor at Second Reformed Church in Zeeland and then spent 20 years working in development at Hope College, and Eileen taught in the Hamilton Community Schools.
Between the two of them they have served on the boards of OAR (Ottagon Addictions Recovery), Holland Historical Trust, Holland Symphony Orchestra and many more, including the Board of Trustees at the Community Foundation where John received the Marvin C. Lindeman Award for service to the organization.
For this generous couple, financial gifts almost always stemmed from personal involvement with the organization. When John joined the board of the Community Foundation in 1999, he began to realize the important role the Foundation plays in the Holland/Zeeland area. Similar to his experiences in higher education, he saw firsthand that communities with strong endowments are communities that are most likely to be successful.
“This is a blessed community and living here gives you the desire to give back.”
– John and Eileen Nordstrom
No one can predict the future needs of the community, and John and Eileen wanted to ensure that there would be flexible resources available to address needs as they arise.
They accomplished this by setting up the Eileen and John Nordstrom Family Fund, an unrestricted fund which allows the Community Foundation to direct grants to causes it deems most necessary.
“We don’t want to tie anyone’s hands with a restricted gift. We hope that this fund will help sustain the quality of this community long into the future.”
Not only did John and Eileen choose to establish a fund during their lifetime, they also chose to include a gift to this fund in their estate plan. The idea to include charity in their estate plans came from a concept Max Boersma shared with John. The concept is adding an additional child to your list of estate beneficiaries; a child called “charity”.
John and Eileen have four children so by adding a “fifth child,” they plan to give 20% of their estate to three different organizations benefiting the community. The Nordstrom Family Fund at the Foundation is one of the three.
“It was tough to decide which organizations to include in our will, but the benefit of choosing our unrestricted fund at the Community Foundation is that we know the Foundation will support many of the other organizations we’ve given to over the course of our lives.”
“We’d like to give to so many organizations. But since we can’t, we let the Community Foundation do some of that for us.”
John and Eileen love the Holland/Zeeland community, and the gift they are giving through their estate is a gift back to the place they’ve chosen to call home.
