Back to InsightsBy Kyle Young, CFP®, CRPS®, ADPA®
Each of us can make a difference in someone else’s life. It is a lesson I learned at an early age and one that continues to guide me personally and professionally.
I was raised by a single mother who opened our home to nearly 60 medically fragile foster children over the years. Growing up, I watched her care for children who needed extraordinary amounts of attention, patience, and love. Our home was busy, but there was always room for someone who needed help.
My college experience reinforced that lesson from a different direction. My mother may not have been in a position to provide financial support for my education, but what she gave me was something larger: a belief in a better tomorrow if I was willing to work for it today.
Paying for tuition and rent seemed insurmountable at first, but I found a way through and learned a great deal about who I was and what I wanted from life.
When I started my work as a financial advisor, I was fortunate to work with mentors who gave me the freedom to focus on the people and communities I cared deeply about, including women, small business owners, and the LGBTQ+ community.
These were successful people who had built careers, businesses, families, and significant wealth – but too often could not find an advisor who understood their lives and listened without judgment. I learned early on just how personal wealth management is and how important it is for people to feel comfortable talking openly about their lives, families, ambitions, fears, businesses, health, and plans for the future.
My journey has shaped how I define community: as both the family we are born into and the family we create.
It is the people who show up for each other and the places where we feel we belong. Community grows stronger when people invest their time, resources, experience, and care in one another.
That belief has become deeply woven into everything we stand for at Pierstone Wealth Management.
Creating Opportunity Through Education
One of the commitments closest to my heart is the Pierstone Scholarship, created in partnership with Point Foundation to support the educational aspirations of LGBTQ+ students across the country.
The Pierstone Scholarship aims to give students – including our inaugural recipient Cam Finley – breathing room during years that can have an enormous influence on who they become. I know what it feels like to be a 20-year-old trying to build a future while figuring out how to pay for school – so this is deeply personal for me.
The scholarship can help cover tuition or rent, meaning fewer hours worrying about how to make ends meet and more time being a student: focusing on classes, participating in organizations, developing friendships, finding mentors, taking an internship, or discovering an interest that changes the direction of a life.
It is also an extension of our commitment to the LGBTQ+ community. Education helped create possibilities in my own life, and helping another young person pursue those possibilities brings part of my story full circle.
The Circle of Giving
The Pierstone Scholarship is one expression of a commitment that co-founder Steven Salton and I have shared for years. Together, we created the Stay America Foundation, focused on community nourishment through the arts, education, and hunger relief. We have also supported organizations working in human rights, mental health, multiple sclerosis, inclusive communities, and other causes that have touched our lives.
Each cause has taught us something about the different ways people can contribute – through money, mentorship, advocacy, or simply opening a door and introducing people.
The same idea carries into our work at Pierstone. We collaborate with clients to help build and protect wealth, prepare for retirement, sell businesses, care for family members, support charitable causes, and leave something meaningful behind. We also help people think about what they want their resources to make possible: the “why” behind their wealth and the legacy they hope to create.
Above all, we want Pierstone to be a place that brings good people together and builds a community grounded in the belief that caring for one another and giving back can make the world around us a little better every day.
In that sense, every Pierstone client is also part of something larger.
A client entrusts us with helping build greater financial freedom. That relationship helps Pierstone grow. Our growth allows us to invest in people and communities beyond our walls and help create opportunities for someone else, including a student who may be sitting where I once sat. Years from now, that student may be in a position to open a door for someone else.
That circle is how communities become stronger. I learned that lesson first from my mother and the children she welcomed into our home. I learned it again while finding my own way through school, and from the mentors who gave me the freedom to build a career around the people and communities I care about.
Today, we carry those lessons forward through Pierstone, the Pierstone Scholarship, our work with nonprofit organizations, and the causes we support personally. We are just getting started.
