Mandy Tuong and Paul Johnston built a house with a particular problem to solve: where should the music go? In their Minneapolis home, completed in 2016, a raised piano room gave Tuong a place to play while keeping her within the life of the household. The room had a wood ceiling and the proportions of a small performance space. A grand piano could have demanded a room apart. Here, it became a way of being together.
Tuong had played since she was five. By the time she was commissioning a house, she had also trained in piano performance at Oberlin and become a lawyer. She understood the difference between having ingredients and making something coherent. Explaining why the couple hired a designer, she reached for music: a house needed a theme, harmony and structure. A pile of notes would not do. Neither, presumably, would an expensive pile of windows.
That is a useful doorway into her working life. Tuong is president and CEO of Thrivent Charitable Impact & Investing, a public charity that helps people arrange their giving. The questions are practical: what matters to a donor, how can a gift be organized, and how will it continue to serve its purpose? Feeling generous is a beginning. Someone still has to work out the structure.
Two degrees, then a different kind of practice
At Oberlin, Tuong studied history as well as piano performance, earning a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Music. She later earned a law degree with honors at the University of Minnesota. Her education also includes Stanford's Executive Program. These are different forms of preparation, with different standards of proof: a historical argument, a performance, a legal judgment. Her career eventually brought them into the same institutional world.
By 2013, she was assistant general counsel at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto. Oberlin's president singled her out that year while discussing the careers that music graduates pursue beyond performance. The example was apt. The piano degree had remained part of her biography even as the job description moved into law and organized philanthropy. She belonged in a discussion of musicians whose professional lives had acquired additional instruments.
The Moore Foundation experience also placed her inside the machinery of a private foundation. Later, at InFaith Community Foundation, she worked with donors more directly as a senior executive and general counsel. Legal training and donor service met in the same role. A person's intended gift had to survive the journey from conversation to an arrangement an institution could administer.
For a donor, that administrative work can be easy to overlook. The intention is usually expressed in ordinary language: help a school, sustain a congregation, support a community. Carrying it out brings another vocabulary into the room. A general counsel working alongside donor services occupies the junction between those two conversations.
Taking over after twenty-five years
In 2019, InFaith's board chose Tuong as its next chief executive. She was then senior vice president of donor services and general counsel. Her predecessor, Chris Andersen, was retiring after twenty-five years, and her appointment took effect on October 1. It was a succession from within, with someone who already knew both the donor relationships and the legal responsibilities.
The change of name came in April 2021. InFaith became Thrivent Charitable Impact & Investing as it deepened its collaboration with Thrivent. Its offerings included donor-advised funds, impact investments and collective giving. The announcement put assets under management at $623.6 million. For Tuong, the stated ambition was to help people connect their financial plans with the things they wanted to support.
The relationship deserves precision. Thrivent Charitable is a public charity and a separate legal entity from Thrivent, the financial services organization. It works with Thrivent and its financial advisors. Tuong runs the charitable organization. That distinction helps explain the work: the institution exists to receive, steward and distribute charitable resources, with donor interests shaping where support goes.
The money can work before it is given away
One revealing example predates the new name. In November 2019, Advance Global Capital announced that its Advance Trade Growth Fund had been selected for InFaith's WomenInvest portfolio. The portfolio connected investment decisions with women's economic opportunity, education, housing and participation in business and public decision-making. Veris Wealth Partners and Sonen Capital advised it.
Tuong described a premise that linked a company’s success with improved outcomes for women. The appeal was that an investment's social effects could be considered alongside its financial function. The portfolio sought to address the conditions that limit women's opportunities, using choices about invested capital as part of the charitable approach.
It widens the picture of her job. The public moment of philanthropy is often a check being handed over. Before that moment come choices about where assets sit and what they support while invested. WomenInvest made those choices explicit. It offered a concrete way to bring a set of values into the investment portfolio, as well as into the eventual grants.
“companies that do well when women do well.”
Mandy Tuong, on WomenInvest, 2019
A musician keeps returning to the boardroom
The arts have also occupied Tuong's volunteer calendar. Her MacPhail Center for Music board service ran from 2008 to 2023. Her listed responsibilities included finance, governance, development and campaign leadership, as well as serving as vice chair. Fifteen years is a substantial relationship with a music school, especially for someone whose main career had moved into law and finance.
In April 2021, she joined Minnesota Public Radio's board of trustees. When announcing her appointment, the organization described her as a member of twenty years. Her current trustee listing still places her on the board. The listener had taken on an additional obligation: helping govern the institution that supplied the music and news.
Her ties to Oberlin continued through advisory and alumni leadership, followed by board of trustees service beginning in September 2024. The pattern is visible without attributing a private motive to it. The places associated with learning, music and public conversation recur in her commitments. Each calls for the less photogenic parts of support: committees, financial oversight and showing up again.
A connection between those worlds appears on Thrivent Charitable’s own board. Kyle Carpenter, the retired CEO of MacPhail, joined as a director. His background included business leadership as well as running the music school. In welcoming him and fellow new director Alex Vinh, Tuong emphasized the experience they would bring to helping donors carry out their intentions. The overlap makes the institutional relationships visible: music education and charitable finance draw on some of the same people, with experience moving between them.
Forty-four thousand decisions to give
The scale of the charitable organization is easier to grasp through its outgoing grants. In 2025, Thrivent Charitable distributed $111 million through 44,578 grants to 12,484 grantees. Gifts received totaled $250 million. These are organization-wide figures, reflecting donors, staff and partner organizations; they describe the institution Tuong leads rather than a personal tally of her generosity.
The same report's unaudited financial summary placed total assets at approximately $1.10 billion. Gifts, assets and grants answer different questions. Gifts record resources coming in. Assets describe what the organization holds. Grants show money going out to recipients. Putting them side by side gives a reader more information than choosing the largest number and letting it do all the talking.
There are smaller stories inside that scale. One donor, electrician Mel Schwiesow, created a scholarship for local students pursuing the trades, then arranged individual giving funds for his three children in 2025. His professional experience had helped him notice students who could use support. Charitable planning gave that observation a continuing form and brought the next generation into it.
Resources received. Resources put to work.
Thrivent Charitable organization-wide totals for 2025. Gifts and grants are different measures, not a payout ratio.
A balance sheet with an exit door
On October 13, 2026, Tuong appeared on Growth Leaders of Wealth Management in an episode with Piton Wealth founder and CEO Michelle Clary. The title centered on Clary's unusual measure: assets under distribution. It counted money clients put to use for purchases, family gifts and charitable contributions. An outflow could represent a plan working.
Tuong joined the discussion to address charitable planning's role in advisory relationships and business growth. The metric belonged to Clary and Piton. Still, its relevance to Tuong's work is clear: the purpose of a charitable institution ultimately includes resources reaching other people. A balance sheet tells one part of that story. What leaves it can tell another.
There had been an earlier public conversation in 2021, with Legacy Collective CEO Erin Arnheim, about generosity, Thrivent Charitable's programs and opportunities to support communities. Across those two appearances, the setting shifted from a giving community to the wealth management business. The question of how people put their resources to use traveled comfortably between them.
A listener puts her own money in
Her own giving provides a final, smaller frame. In April 2026, Tuong and Johnston discussed a $150,000 unrestricted gift to Minnesota Public Radio. They now lived in California and maintained ties to Minnesota. Choosing an unrestricted gift entrusted the organization with deciding where the money was needed most.
Long before the trustee meetings, Tuong had hosted a late-night classical radio show at Oberlin. Both she and Johnston had college radio experience. The connection between listening and supporting had years to develop before it became a major gift. The institution had occupied a place in their lives before occupying a place in their giving plans.
The piano room offers a fitting image for that relationship. Tuong and Johnston had asked a designer to make space for something they valued, with enough structure to let it become part of everyday life. Her career keeps returning to comparable work: helping a donor's intention take a durable, usable shape. The music needs somewhere to go. So does the money.