Building a Path to the Future

On any given morning at Cornell Farm in Dartmouth, there’s a good chance you’ll find Carolyn Osteen and her dog, Baby Joe, enjoying a stroll through the bucolic property’s trails. As a resident of both Boston and South Dartmouth, Carolyn has been visiting Cornell Farm since The Trustees permanently protected the 130-acre former dairy farm in 2009. Her support of the organization, however, stretches back much further, with more than four decades of volunteer service on Trustees boards and committees.

For the past two years, Carolyn has served as the chair of the Trustees’ Semper Virens Society, the group for donors who have made the special choice to include The Trustees in their estate plans. “To me, it’s important to give money to an institution that is doing good work and that is going to remain, to a place that you think is stable and will be around for 100 years or more,” she notes.

Carolyn is a retired partner with the law firm Ropes & Gray, where she spent her career focused on charitable giving and tax-exempt organizations, such as colleges, hospitals, and conservation organizations. She was introduced to The Trustees in the 1980s by her colleague, Tom O’Donnell, a former chair of The Trustees Board of Directors, and spent several years volunteering her time as a Board member and secretary of the Board, then as a member of our Advisory Board.

According to Carolyn, she quickly became enamored with the organization and its mission, which led her to join the Semper Virens Society and make a series of gifts that would support the future of The Trustees, adding “I was very impressed with the effort to preserve and acquire properties with special significance and how people would use them.”

Having visited properties across the state, Carolyn says what she enjoys most is the variety of places protected by The Trustees—from gardens, like Stevens-Coolidge House & Gardens in North Andover and the Allen C. Haskell Gardens in New Bedford, to coastal properties like Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge on Nantucket. Her most often visited property, however, is Cornell Farm, where she takes frequent walks with Baby Joe, who she recently inherited from a friend. “I’m a committed dog walker now,” Carolyn says. “It’s such a lovely, big area to walk and enjoy wonderful birds and marshes and landscapes.”

For Carolyn, supporting an organization she loves through planned giving—and leading the group of Trustees planned giving donors—was just the natural next step after developing a lifetime of knowledge and expertise in charitable giving. “As part of representing exempt organizations there are lots of rules about deferred gifts. I had to know all of it when I was in practice, so it didn’t seem a big stretch to help The Trustees in making sure we were using all the tools available and to encourage people to make these gifts,” Carolyn says.

“Over the years I’ve seen the organization evolve, and it’s a very well-managed institution,” she adds. “I’ve continued to want to help it as best I can.”