Your Donors Are Dying

The people who will decide your organization’s future in five to ten years are not the ones deciding it today. You probably already feel that. The board members who built your funding base are aging out. The major donors whose names are on your walls are planning estate transfers. The foundations that wrote your first big check are rethinking their strategies, their timelines, and in some cases, whether they should exist at all.

I’ve spent a few decades watching power shift in philanthropy, across 35 countries and more than 375 organizations. The pattern is always the same. Money moves before relationships do. By the time most organizations notice the shift, the new decision-makers have already formed their preferences, chosen their giving mechanisms, and built their networks, and you weren’t in the room.

This issue of The Social Prophet is a power map. Where philanthropic decision-making authority is moving, who holds it now, who will hold it in a decade, and what that means for every organization that depends on donated revenue to operate.

Generations are only the visible layer of the transfer. The structure underneath is changing too. The vehicles are changing. The expectations are changing. The relationship between giver and recipient is being renegotiated, sometimes in ways that genuinely redistribute power and sometimes in ways that merely redecorate the existing arrangement. Knowing the difference is the job.

The Numbers

An estimated $124 trillion in wealth will transfer across generations through 2048. Of that, roughly $18 trillion is expected to flow to philanthropy.¹ More than half of the total, about $62 trillion, comes from the 2 percent of households that are already high-net-worth or ultra-high-net-worth. Millennials will receive the largest share, approximately $46 trillion, followed by Gen X at $39 trillion.²

Donor-advised fund assets hit $327.9 billion in fiscal 2024, a 27.9 percent increase in a single year. The number of DAF accounts reached 3.59 million. Contributions to DAFs rebounded 38.6 percent to $90.6 billion.³ Meanwhile, the number of individual donors declined for the fifth consecutive year, down another 3.6 percent in 2025.⁴ The smallest donors, those giving $100 or less, fell 7.9 percent in 2025, after dropping 8.8 percent the year before.⁵

Individual giving has declined from 80 percent of total charitable revenue in the late 1980s to 64 percent in 2025.⁶ The share coming from foundations, DAFs, and institutional vehicles has grown to fill the gap. In 2000, two-thirds of U.S. households gave to charity. By 2020, fewer than half did.⁷

Read those numbers together. The total dollars are growing. The number of people making giving decisions is shrinking. Philanthropic power is concentrating into fewer hands, larger vehicles, and more opaque structures. That is the market your organization will be raising money in for the next decade.

SECTOR MATH: In the late 1980s, individual donors accounted for 80 cents of every dollar given to charity. In 2025, it was 64 cents. That 16-cent shift is a fundamental restructuring of who controls philanthropic capital. If your organization’s fundraising strategy was built for a world where most revenue came from individual relationships, you are running a 1980s business model in a 2026 market. The organizations that thrive in the next decade will be the ones that understood this shift early enough to build relationships with the people and vehicles that now control the money.

The Great Transfer

The wealth transfer conversation tends to focus on the headline number, $124 trillion, as if the sheer volume guarantees that nonprofits will benefit. It doesn’t. The money is moving. Where it lands depends on decisions being made right now by people most nonprofit leaders have never met.

Here’s what the transfer actually looks like. Baby Boomers hold the majority of U.S. household wealth. As they age, that wealth passes to their children, foundations, donor-advised funds, and estate plans. The recipients, Gen X and Millennials, have different giving patterns, different expectations, and different relationships with institutions than their parents did.

Among donors who give at least $1,000 a year, 74 percent of Millennials describe themselves as philanthropists, compared with 35 percent of Baby Boomers.⁸ Ask the general population of 18-to-43-year-olds and only 27 percent say the word fits them.⁹ The philanthropist identity is arriving with the money rather than ahead of it. And their philanthropy looks different. They organize their giving around issues rather than specific organizations, they find and vet causes online, and they participate in crowdfunding at higher rates than any generation before them.¹⁰ They are less likely to attend galas, less likely to respond to direct mail, and less likely to give because their parents gave.

I offer that as a description, not criticism. And the description has consequences. If your donor cultivation strategy depends on personal relationships built over years of dinners and events, the next generation of wealth holders may never enter your pipeline. They care. They simply chose their vehicles and their causes before you knew they existed.

I’ve watched versions of this generational disconnect play out internationally. In Central and Eastern Europe, the first generation of post-communist philanthropists gave out of civic duty. Building civil society was personal to them. The next generation is more strategic, more metrics-oriented, and less driven by democratic idealism. The shift is uneven and still unfolding, and the direction is clear. Organizations that recognized it early built new relationships. Organizations that assumed the old giving culture would hold lost ground they haven’t recovered. The U.S. sector is entering a similar transition, at a much larger scale.

The DAF Question

Donor-advised funds are the fastest-growing vehicle in American philanthropy, and they represent the clearest example of how power is concentrating without accountability.

Here are the basics. A donor contributes assets to a DAF, takes an immediate tax deduction, and then recommends grants from the fund over time. If the contribution is appreciated stock or other long-term assets, the donor also avoids capital gains tax entirely, and the fund sells the assets tax-free. There is no legal requirement to distribute the money by any deadline. The fund can sit, grow tax-free, and generate fees for the sponsoring organization indefinitely. Total DAF assets nearly doubled in four years, from $165.8 billion in fiscal 2020 to $327.9 billion in fiscal 2024.³ DAF sponsors and allied philanthropy groups spent $11 million between 2018 and 2023 lobbying against legislation that would require minimum payouts, more than $3 million of it aimed at a single bill.¹¹

The aggregate payout rate across DAFs was 25.2 percent in fiscal 2024. National sponsors like Fidelity Charitable and Schwab Charitable came in at 24.8 percent. Community foundations, which historically served as the connective tissue between donors and local needs, came in at 22.3 percent.³ Those averages obscure enormous variation. Some accounts are active. Others haven’t made a grant in years.

The structural problem is this. A DAF allows a donor to take a tax deduction today for a gift that may not reach a working charity for years, or ever. The donor gets the tax benefit. The sponsoring organization gets the management fees. The nonprofit that actually delivers services to communities gets whatever the donor eventually decides to recommend, if they decide at all.

For nonprofit leaders, the practical challenge is more immediate. When a donor moves their giving from direct contributions to a DAF, your relationship with that donor changes. You no longer receive a check from a person you know. You receive a grant recommendation from an account managed by Fidelity or Schwab. The donor’s name may not appear on the gift. Your ability to cultivate, steward, and build a long-term relationship with that donor is diminished. The intermediary now sits between you and your revenue.

I’m not arguing that DAFs are inherently harmful. They simplify giving for many donors, and some use them actively and generously. At a structural level, though, DAFs are moving philanthropic capital from transparent, relationship-based giving into opaque, intermediated vehicles where the donor has no obligation to ever deploy the funds. That is a power shift. And it is happening at scale.

The New Money

Tech wealth brings a fundamentally different philosophy to giving. Their approach is shaped by the culture that created their wealth: venture capital, rapid iteration, measurable returns, and scale above all.

Donors giving through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the region’s largest DAF sponsor, granted $1.52 billion in its 2024 fiscal year. Only 8.6 percent of it went to Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.¹² The rest went national and global. This pattern, giving away from the communities where wealth is created and toward causes that promise scale, is reshaping how philanthropic capital flows geographically. If your organization serves a specific community, the new money may not be looking in your direction.

The venture philanthropy model treats giving like investing. Funders want deal flow, due diligence, growth metrics, and exit strategies. They favor organizations that can demonstrate scale potential, which often means larger, more sophisticated organizations with the infrastructure to produce the data venture philanthropists want to see. Smaller organizations, community-based organizations, organizations doing work that doesn’t translate neatly into impact dashboards, get filtered out. The work is valuable. The measurement framework can’t see it.

MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving represents the most visible counter-narrative. Her approach, large unrestricted grants made quickly, with minimal reporting requirements, has distributed $26.3 billion through roughly 2,700 grants since 2019.¹³ The Center for Effective Philanthropy followed 813 of her grantees for three years. Nearly 90 percent said the gift strengthened their long-term financial sustainability, and more than a third of the leaders said it reduced their own burnout.¹⁴ The model works. Yield Giving awarded $7.1 billion in 2025 alone, up from $2.6 billion the year before.

Scott, though, is one person deliberately choosing to give differently. The broader tech philanthropy culture still favors control, measurement, and the donor’s judgment over the recipient’s. The question for the sector is whether Scott’s model influences the next generation of tech donors, or remains the exception that proves the rule.

The Spend-Down Moment

A related structural shift is happening inside foundations themselves. The share of family foundations with a planned end date rather than a perpetual charter rose from 9 percent to 13 percent in the past five years, and more than a quarter say they are considering it.¹⁵

In July, Warren Buffett set a date. His remaining Berkshire Hathaway shares, worth about $140 billion, go to his children’s four foundations by December 31, 2034, whether he is alive to see it or not. After nearly two decades and $48 billion, the Gates Foundation gets nothing further.¹⁶ Bill Gates has set December 31, 2045 as the Gates Foundation’s own closing date and plans to spend more than $200 billion before then.¹⁷ Chuck Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies completed its spend-down in 2020, having distributed $8 billion.¹⁸ The logic in every case: giving sooner means greater impact, more accountability, and the ability to see results.

For nonprofit leaders, the spend-down trend means something specific. Some of your current foundation funders will not exist in 15 years. Their dollars will flow fast for a period, then stop entirely. If your financial model assumes perpetual foundation relationships, you are building on ground that is scheduled to disappear. The organizations that will navigate this well are the ones diversifying their revenue now, not the ones who will scramble when the last check arrives with a note that says “this is our final grant.”

The Participatory Promise

Amid all this concentration, a counter-movement is gaining traction. Participatory grantmaking, the practice of giving affected community members a role in deciding where philanthropic dollars go, is now part of the vocabulary at most major foundations. The rhetoric is about shifting power. The question is whether the practice matches.

The concept is sound. People closest to the problems should have a voice in directing the resources meant to address those problems. When done well, participatory grantmaking produces better decisions, stronger community relationships, and funding that reflects actual needs rather than donor assumptions.

The implementation, though, reveals a familiar gap between intention and structure. Foundation staff and boards still set the parameters: the budget, the eligible organizations, the geographic scope, the issue areas. Community members are invited to make decisions within a frame that was built without them. Cynthia Gibson’s 2017 review for the Ford Foundation, still the most-cited case for the practice, conceded that foundations “would be remiss in ceding all control” and that the claim that participation produces better grants “has yet to be backed up by a solid body of evidence.”¹⁹ The process changes who decides, and often fails to change how decisions are made.

In the processes I have watched, panels skew toward people with the credentials and free hours to serve, creating new gatekeepers rather than removing old ones. Participants are rarely paid for their time. And the power to continue or discontinue the participatory process itself remains with the foundation, which means the “shift” is reversible at any point.

I’ve seen this pattern in international development for 25 years. Donor agencies adopted “participatory development” in the 1990s. Local communities were invited to contribute to project design, prioritize needs, even allocate small portions of program budgets. It felt like progress. In many cases, it was. Structural power, decisions about total funding levels, criteria for success, and the ability to walk away, however, never actually moved. The donors kept the keys and invited the community to rearrange the furniture.

U.S. philanthropy risks the same dynamic. Participatory grantmaking is a genuine innovation when it is accompanied by structural changes: permanent community governance roles, transparent budgets, and a willingness to let communities make decisions that the foundation disagrees with. Without those commitments, it is consultation rebranded as power-sharing. The difference matters, and the organizations and communities being invited to participate deserve honesty about which version they’re getting.

The Power Map

So where is philanthropic decision-making authority actually moving? Here’s the map.

Declining power: Individual small donors. Community foundations as independent grantmakers. Place-based giving driven by local relationships. Foundation program officers with deep issue expertise and long tenures. Nonprofit leaders’ ability to build direct, personal relationships with their funders.

Concentrating power: DAF sponsors (Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard) as intermediaries controlling hundreds of billions. Tech billionaires operating through LLCs and personal foundations outside traditional accountability structures. Next-generation family wealth inheritors who give to causes, not institutions. Mega-foundations accelerating spend-down timelines, creating funding cliffs for their grantees.

Contested space: Participatory grantmaking, which could redistribute power or merely decorate existing structures. Unrestricted giving models like Yield Giving, which challenge donor control but depend on individual billionaire choices. Trust-based philanthropy, which is gaining rhetorical support faster than operational adoption. The political environment, which is actively delegitimizing the sector that philanthropy is supposed to fund.

The organizations positioned best for this environment are the ones building relationships in all three categories: maintaining existing donor relationships as they wind down, cultivating access to the concentrating vehicles, and engaging meaningfully in the contested spaces where the rules are still being written.

What This Means for Your Organization

First, know who your future funders are. Not your current funders. Your future funders. Who are the children of your major donors? What vehicles are they using? Are they giving through DAFs? Do they have a family foundation with a spend-down timeline? Have you met them? If you can’t answer those questions, you are one generational transition away from a funding crisis.

Second, build your case for impact in the language your future funders speak. If the next generation of donors gives to causes, not institutions, your value proposition needs to be about the change you create, not the organization you are. That’s a messaging shift and a strategic one. Organizations that can articulate their role in a larger ecosystem of change will attract cause-oriented donors. Organizations that talk primarily about themselves will not.

Third, diversify your revenue vehicles. If all your philanthropic revenue comes through direct individual giving and traditional foundation grants, your revenue model is built for a shrinking market. Learn how DAFs work. Build relationships with DAF sponsors. Develop the capacity to receive gifts of appreciated stock, cryptocurrency, and other non-cash assets. Meet donors where their wealth actually lives, not where your development office is comfortable operating.

Fourth, engage honestly with participatory models. If a foundation invites you into a participatory grantmaking process, ask the structural questions. Who set the parameters? Is community governance permanent or advisory? What happens when the community’s priorities diverge from the foundation’s? The answers will tell you whether you’re participating in a power shift or participating in a performative exercise.

Fifth, plan for funding cliffs. If any of your foundation funders have announced spend-down timelines, start planning now for what happens when that funding ends. A foundation that will spend down in 15 years may increase its giving for the next 10 and then stop entirely. The ramp-up can mask the cliff. Build your financial model for the full arc, not just the current grant cycle.

THE VERDICT: The next generation of philanthropy will be larger in dollars and smaller in participation. More money will move through fewer decision-makers, using vehicles designed for donor convenience rather than nonprofit partnership. The organizations that will thrive are the ones rebuilding their development strategies around a funding environment that looks nothing like the one they were trained in, rather than waiting for the old relationships to be replaced by new ones that work the same way. The wealth is transferring. The power is concentrating. The question is whether you are mapping the shift or being mapped out of it.

THE QUESTION

If your three largest donors transferred their wealth tomorrow, do you know where the money would go, and would any of it still reach your organization?

Sources

1. Cerulli Associates, “Cerulli Anticipates $124 Trillion in Wealth Will Transfer Through 2048,” December 5, 2024. $105 trillion to heirs, $18 trillion to charity; $62 trillion, more than half the total, from the 2 percent of households that are high-net-worth or ultra-high-net-worth. cerulli.com ↩
2. Fortune, “The $124 Trillion Great Wealth Transfer Is Bigger Than Ever,” July 23, 2025, reporting Cerulli’s generational breakdown (Millennials $45.6 trillion, Gen X $39 trillion). Cerulli’s own release rounds the Millennial figure to $46 trillion. fortune.com ↩
3. DAF Research Collaborative, Annual DAF Report 2025, with the Updated Analysis Memo of April 2026 incorporating newly released Form 990 data. FY2024: assets $327.87 billion (+27.9 percent), 3,590,067 accounts, contributions $90.57 billion (+38.6 percent), aggregate payout 25.2 percent; national sponsors 24.8 percent, community foundations 22.3 percent, single-issue charities 36.5 percent. FY2020 assets $165.81 billion. Payout is grants divided by prior year-end assets. dafresearchcollaborative.org ↩
4. Fundraising Effectiveness Project / Association of Fundraising Professionals, “Fundraising Effectiveness Project Reports Strongest Revenue Growth in Five Years, Even as Fewer Donors Give,” April 15, 2026. Donors down 3.6 percent in 2025, the fifth consecutive annual decline; dollars up 5.0 percent. afpglobal.org ↩
5. Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q4 2025 report, donors by size. Micro donors ($1 to $100) down 7.9 percent in 2025 after 8.8 percent in 2024; Major and Supersize donors ($5,000 and up) were 3.4 percent of donors and 78.6 percent of dollars in 2025, against 3.1 percent and 77.7 percent in 2024. publications.fepreports.org ↩
6. Giving USA 2026, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, June 2026. Individuals gave $394.2 billion of $617.2 billion in 2025, 64 percent; the 1986 to 1990 average was 80 percent. philanthropy.indianapolis.iu.edu ↩
7. Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Philanthropy Panel Study: 66 percent of U.S. households gave in 2000, 46.9 percent in 2020. Reported in Mark Dobosz, “Beyond the Mega-Gift,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2026. ssir.org ↩
8. Fidelity Charitable, “The Future of Philanthropy,” 2021. Survey of nearly 4,000 donors who gave at least $1,000 in the prior year; fieldwork March 2020 with a January 2021 follow-up. fidelitycharitable.org ↩
9. Foundation Source, “Gen Z and Millennials Look Beyond Financial Contributions,” September 17, 2024. Survey of 1,000 U.S. adults aged 18 to 43, February 27 to March 8, 2024. foundationsource.com ↩
10. Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and DAFgiving360, “The Next Generation of Philanthropy,” January 29, 2025. philanthropy.indianapolis.iu.edu ↩
11. Chronicle of Philanthropy, “Philanthropy Spent $11 Million to Prevent Changes to DAF Rules,” April 10, 2024, reporting an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of congressional lobbying records. Spenders included DAF sponsors, a community foundation coalition, the Council on Foundations, and the Philanthropy Roundtable; more than $3 million targeted the Accelerating Charitable Efforts Act. philanthropy.com ↩
12. Silicon Valley Community Foundation, 2024 to 2025 annual report, as reported in Local News Matters, “Does Charity Begin at Home? Silicon Valley’s Wealthiest Donors Skip Their Own Backyard,” December 14, 2025. The $1.52 billion is grants recommended by SVCF donors, not all giving by Silicon Valley residents. localnewsmatters.org ↩
13. CNBC, “MacKenzie Scott Announced Another $7.1 Billion in 2025 Charitable Donations,” December 13, 2025 ($26.3 billion since 2019); CBS News, December 2025 ($2.6 billion in 2024); Panorama Global, “Understanding MacKenzie Scott’s December 2025 Giving,” February 9, 2026 (roughly 2,700 grants in total, 186 in 2025). cnbc.com ↩
14. Center for Effective Philanthropy, “Breaking the Mold: The Transformative Effect of MacKenzie Scott’s Big Gifts,” February 2025. Final report of a three-year study; 813 nonprofit leaders responding of 1,910 invited. cep.org ↩
15. National Center for Family Philanthropy, “Trends 2025: Results of the Third National Benchmark Survey of Family Foundations.” 524 family foundations; 13 percent time-limited in 2025 against 9 percent in 2020; more than 28 percent considering it. ncfp.org ↩
16. Fortune, “After Donating $48 Billion to the Gates Foundation, Warren Buffett Is Quietly Ending One of the Biggest Philanthropic Relationships in History,” July 14, 2026; CNBC, “Warren Buffett Is Accelerating His Charitable Donations With Aim to Give Away Berkshire Wealth by 2034,” July 14, 2026. fortune.com ↩
17. Gates Foundation, “Gates Foundation Will Double Spending Over Next 20 Years,” May 8, 2025. gatesfoundation.org ↩
18. Cornell Chronicle, “Chuck Feeney Reaches Lifetime Goal: Giving Away a Fortune,” October 2020. news.cornell.edu ↩
19. Cynthia Gibson, “Participatory Grantmaking: Has Its Time Come?” Ford Foundation, 2017, pp. 19 and 21. fordfoundation.org ↩