In the mid-1950s, Barbara Jean Collins was raising her five children while living and working on the farm that her parents homesteaded back in the late 1880s. Each morning, she woke up before dawn to begin her day, modeling for her children the values that both she and her husband had come to love.

“My mother was a very sacrificing person in the best sense of the word,” said Nancy Collins-Warner, the second oldest child. “She lived her life for others with great goodness, without any regret.”

It was during this time that Barbara Jean became one of the pioneers of the guardian ad litem program for children in Whitman County. She and a friend created the first residential home for children whose parents had abandoned them.  Today, of course, the guardian ad litem program is a nationally known program which advocates for abused and abandoned children.

Collins-Warner remains astonished at everything her mother did back then. “How did she do this? She had five children and a farm to help run?”

This is only one example of Barbara Jean’s goodness and humanity.

When she died last summer, her four surviving children gathered to remember, to grieve and to talk about the ways in which they could continue to honor the matriarch of the family. “David planted the seed,” Collins-Warner explains. “I appreciated him wanting to keep us in communion with each other. This is a key challenge for any family when the parents are no longer living.”

“I thought it would be nice if we could do something that would be a legacy for our parents, and that would benefit the places and the organizations that were close to their hearts,” explained David Collins, the eldest child in the family. So the four siblings sat down and created a list of values instilled by their parents. They found it both healing and empowering in the early days of their bereavement. The list contained key values of stewardship for place, resource and community.

“We are doing what we were taught to do and living out those values as our parents’ children,” Collins-Warner continued.

Then David researched giving options, looking into several organizations, and the siblings came together again.

“Several conversations with people at Inland Northwest Community Foundation led me to believe that the way the organization does business was sound. It was refreshing to talk to people who were straightforward with what they could and couldn’t do. I felt like it fit our needs in terms of what we were trying to do,” David said.

It was in this way that the four siblings created The Palouse Heritage Fund at Inland Northwest Community Foundation, a donor-advised fund to give money to nonprofits in the Palouse region. “We hope to reflect our parents’ values of a strong ethic for stewardship of the land, a balance of sustaining and enjoying the natural world and compassionate consideration for the most vulnerable, especially children,” Collins-Warner continues.