Fred Green met Bill Bolthouse in 1992 when Bolthouse was leading the family’s carrot business, Bolthouse Farms, which had grown to become an industry leader. Green wanted to work for Bolthouse because of his reputation for living out his Christian faith in the way he ran the company and using the company’s profits to support Christian ministries. In 2004, Green accepted an opportunity to work at Bolthouse Farms.
One year later, Bolthouse informed Green that the family was putting the company up for sale. If it sold, Bolthouse and his wife, Nora, wanted to give away their wealth during their lifetime. Bolthouse, a towering man, leaned over Green and said, “You’re going to help me with that, right?”
The company was purchased by a private equity firm for more than $1 billion dollars, and Green went to work for The Bolthouse Foundation, helping Bill and Nora Bolthouse give away millions over the next 17 years. The foundation finished its work in 2022, and Green relocated to Franklin, Tennessee, where he and his wife attend Parish Presbyterian Church.
Green now pours his energy into Strategic Resource Group, a Christian organization mobilizing large-scale capital into indigenously-led ministries in the Middle East. He talked with byFaith about generosity and strategic giving. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you come to work for the Bolthouse Foundation?
I met Bill Bolthouse in 1992, but the Lord did not open the door for me to go to work there until 2004. Just over the one-year mark from when I started there, he came to me and said, “We’re putting the company up for sale, and if it sells, Nora and I want to give away our wealth during our lifetime.” He was 65 at the time and he had a 20-year timeline.
What is it like to help steward someone else’s wealth? It’s a gift from the Lord, but I imagine there’s a level of pressure to do it well.
Yes. Early on, someone who is younger than I am but had been doing this work longer said to me, “You’re going to have the pleasure of helping this family move from relational giving to strategic giving.” That was such a good word to hear.
In essence, Bill and Nora had things they had funded through the years, and they could handle that on their own. With the sale of the company and the dollar value of their interest in the company, and with the 20-year time horizon, suddenly the giving problem was bigger. The funding task needed much more organization.
One of the challenges is understanding the calling and the giving priorities of the principals. In this case, it was Bill and Nora Bolthouse. I needed to focus on their priorities and not on my own. Fortunately, they closely aligned.
What did you find to be the most effective way to learn the principal’s priorities?
Two years into my new role, Bill Bolthouse asked me to create a document showing our giving priorities. I organized that document around three names: Paul, Timothy, and Good Samaritan. Paul represented in Romans 15:20, “I make it my ambition not to build on another man’s foundation.” So that’s giving away to unreached people groups, planting churches in unreached people groups, etc. I would include in that Bible translation, because if you’re going to have a healthy church, you need to have the Bible in the heart language of the people. That’s Paul.
I used the name Timothy as a proxy for leadership development very broadly defined.
And there are some places where, if you’re going to plant churches to unreached people groups, you can’t just go in as a church planter. You have to go in as some sort of compassion or holistic ministry like water quality improvement or economic development or something like that where you can build relationships. I used Good Samaritan for that kind of giving.
Paul, Timothy, and Good Samaritan were the broad categories in that document. When Bill reviewed it, he hardly changed anything. I had aligned with what Bill and Nora wanted to do, and our giving generally fit into those categories.
What did you learn about giving away money effectively?
It’s actually harder than most people think it is. Obviously, it’s easy to give away money. It’s hard to give money away well. There’s an element of doing due diligence, you have to follow up, and you have to really analyze opportunities. To give money away effectively, you have to understand the effectiveness of the ministry, and therefore you have to focus on not what the ministry is doing, but what outputs and outcomes they expect.
The ministry might be producing literature or training, so the output would be the literature or trained leaders. But what happens when those leaders are trained? Are they helping build churches? Are they leading people to faith in Christ? You have to really follow the logic chain of what ministries are doing and understand what they are measuring.
One of the great questions somebody said to me that you can ask a ministry is, “How do you measure your effectiveness?” It’s actually two questions. Are you thinking about effectiveness? And are you measuring anything? Later we just asked ministries to tell us what success looks like. There’s an element of needing to do due diligence and figure out what a ministry is doing and whether they are effective at it or not.
What is the most important thing that pastors or people in Christian ministry who would like to raise money need to understand about philanthropy?
The difference between relational and strategic giving. The tendency is to tell stories and have anecdotes and these wonderful things that are happening as a result of your work. But if you can set those in the context of a strategic conversation: “This is what we set out to do, this is what we’re doing, and here’s the evidence that what we are doing is working.” If you’re sitting in front of someone like the people I worked for, it’s my proposition that they will write a bigger check when you present the strategic rather than just the relational.
What are some of the best practices that the average Christian can learn from a family foundation? Are there questions that you think are wise for any Christian to ask when a ministry invites them to partner?
An awful lot of people when they have a connection with, let’s say a missionary who has been trained and is going overseas, they want to support that missionary, and they’re not going to ask those kinds of questions. Most of us are not going to ask those kinds of questions when it’s our church. We know when our church is healthy or not. If they go off the rails, we have a sense that they are going off the rails. If the church you’re attending is going off the rails, there’s more at risk for you personally and your family than just how you’re giving your money.
Use common sense and think about what success looks like and try and understand what a ministry is trying to do. Do your giving goals align with that? Do you have a strategy yourself for what you’d like to see done in the Kingdom? And does what people are asking you to fund align with that?
But also, a lot of people don’t tithe, so their giving can go up a lot and still be well spent at their local church. If you’re giving 2% of your income, why would you be looking for any place to give it other than your local church?
Tell me about Strategic Resource Group.
In 2005, I was introduced to Strategic Resource Group at a conference. In 2006, I went to their first summit, which was in London, and was introduced to some Christian ministry leaders from the greater Middle East. We learned about what the Lord was doing at that time in the Middle East. And that’s when we got involved.
SRG is seeking to move the needle in the Middle East by funding ministries on the ground in some of the most difficult places for the gospel to advance. SRG works with Christians from America and a few other countries who have large amounts of capital to invest and helps them mobilize it to support the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in this part of the world. By God’s grace, we’ll see over $40 million invested in church planting and other ministries this year.
I was drawn to SRG because they have a very big vision and are seeking to impact some of the most difficult countries in the world. I serve as the chair of their committee which allocates the money across the region.
And SRG aims to connect donors with ministries in the Middle East. Their funding model is unique, isn’t it?
It’s very unique. We don’t call them “donors,” we call them “resource partners.” We make the distinction of “resource partners” and “ministry partners.” Resource partners are those providing the funds, usually Christians based in the United States. Ministry partners are the people working on the frontlines in the Middle East. SRG has portfolio consultants who help identify ministries and conduct due diligence. The organization helps Christians who have a lot of resources to give away but not necessarily a lot of time or expertise to know where or how to do it in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Africa.
That footprint is Muslim-majority countries. Part of the attraction for me is that it’s an underfunded area in the world, relative to the population. The other was that a leader that I met in London at that meeting in 2006 said, “I’ve been working in this region for 30 years, and I’ll just tell you there is something new going on. The Lord has been doing something different in the last three years.” There was a sense that there was some momentum building. Given the sense of momentum that I came away with, given the quality of the leaders that I met, and given the underfunding aspect, it became very attractive to me.
To me the beauty of SRG is you could do a random series of grants and have positive things happen in the area of interest, the greater Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan. But when you have people who are thinking about what is going on in a particular country, or in a particular region of a country, and the state of the church there, and then developing strategies for where the church is on a continuum of its development, you can use the same amount of money and add the strategy piece to it and you get greater impact.
It’s one of several collaborative giving models that exist, and it’s actually a wonderful thing to see those collaborative giving models developing. In those collaborative giving models you’re putting people together who have a similar stewardship issue or problem, and when you put them in contact with each other, there’s a synergy and community that exists out of that.
Megan Fowler is associate editor of byFaith.