About Mally Cox-Chapman

Mally Cox-Chapman is the principal of Benefactory, a consulting firm dedicated to increasing the impact and joy of giving for donors and their chosen non-profits. She specializes in helping high net worth families with their family foundations, donor-advised funds and other charitable instruments. For twenty years she has helped dozens of donors provide important support in the environment, the arts, and education.

As a child, Mally remembers her father often talking on the phone to other donors about the needs of an art museum. Later, he became equally passionate about scholarships to community colleges for immigrant workers. “Philanthropy is a core value of democracy; I’ve always been amazed by the wide and varied abundance of good causes,” Mally explains. “The challenge, of course, is choosing which ones to support.”

A lecturer who has spoken frequently across the country for Young Presidents Organization and for World Presidents Organization, she ranked as one of WPO’s top resources for her work in philanthropy. She has served on the faculty of Merrill Lynch University, teaching a workshop on how to work with very high net worth clients.  She has done similar work with the trust officers of Fleet Bank, now part of Bank of America.

Mally is a founding member of the Catalyst Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, where she and her husband have a discretionary fund. She has served as president of her family’s foundation, and managed its sunsetting.
As a foundation trustee, she has been a member of the Council on Foundations, Exponent Philanthropy,
the National Center for Family Philanthropy, and the CT Council on Philanthropy.

Mally is the author of three books, including The Case for Heaven. She has appeared often on radio and TV shows, including NBC’s news hour, for which she received the highest audience rating in the history of the show to that time. In 2006, she appeared in the CPTV documentary called Wealth in CT.

Mally earned her BA cum laude in political science from Yale in its first class of women. She has served on the board of several secondary schools and as board chair of the largest after school program in Hartford. She currently serves as a trustee of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and on the regional advisory board of Teach for America. She lives with her husband in Hartford, CT and an island in Maine. They have two grown children and two perfect grandchildren.