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My wife and I have been part of the Eau Claire community for most of our lives. We have been blessed in life with three healthy children. The Eau Claire community has provided our family with a quality of life well beyond our expectations. As young professionals, we were fortunate to have good mentors for our careers (namely Joe Stienessen & Jim Pinter), a church to provide a great spiritual foundation for our kids and a belief that it is our duty to give back to a community that has been so good to us.

In addition to serving on numerous boards and being involved in other organizations that require our time, we wanted to pass on that sense of purpose and financial responsibility to our children in the event we passed away before we had a chance to instill those values in our kids. Therefore, we started out by simply designating the Eau Claire Community Foundation as a beneficiary on a life insurance policy. Since that time, we have funded our Donor Advised Fund on an annual basis and plan to continue to do so.

We will continue to educate our children about the fund and provide them with the opportunity to become engaged in this process by making suggestions annually for distributions to organizations that are important to them and that they have done research on. We also believe this process will provide a fun and meaningful annual conversation piece for our family.
Stephen A. Bien - 2012 ECCF Annual Report