Generation Impact

How Next Gen Donors Are Revolutionizing Giving

Sharna Goldseker, Michael Moody

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119746461
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

An insider's guide to the coming philanthropic revolution

Meet the next generation of big donors—the Gen X and Millennial philanthropists who will be the most significant donors ever and will shape our world in profound ways. Hear them describe their ambitious plans to revolutionize giving so it achieves greater impact. And learn how to help them succeed in a world that needs smart, effective donors now more than ever.

As "next gen donors" step into their philanthropic roles, they have not only unprecedented financial resources, but also big ideas for how to wield their financial power. They want to disrupt the traditional world of charitable giving, and they want to do so now, not after they retire to a life of philanthropic leisure.

Generation Impact: How Next Gen Donors Are Revolutionizing Giving pulls back the curtain on these rising next gen donors and the "Impact Revolution" they seek, offering extensive firsthand accounts and expert analysis of their hands-on, boundary-pushing strategies, as well as their determination to honor the legacies they've inherited and the values they hold.

This Updated and Expanded edition includes new, practical resources designed to help those who work with next gen donors to engage with them in even more productive and effective ways – to help them become the sort of transformational donors we all need them to be in this pivotal time. Three Best Practice Guides offer targeted tips for key audiences – nonprofits and fundraisers, families, and advisors – and introduce new data and additional featured donors. A new Preface answers the most pressing questions asked by the thousands of readers already energized by Generation Impact, including what has changed in the world in recent years and how these influential emerging donors are responding.

Adapting to the revolution that next gen donors are bringing may not be easy, but this book can help.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Most Significant Philanthropists Ever

Justin Rockefeller grew up in West Virginia outside the purview of the family legacy of capitalism and philanthropy. Invited to a meeting at a café near Rockefeller Center in New York City as a college freshman, he actually had to ask where Rockefeller Center was. But during college, Justin began to appreciate the doors his last name could open and the opportunities he had to effect change for good. He has since worked to help one of his family's foundations divest its charitable endowment holdings of fossil fuels—a remarkable move for America's most famous oil family. Now in his thirties, Justin devotes a significant percentage of his time beyond his tech career to helping other families align their investments with their values.

Katherine Lorenz's grandfather, the late George Mitchell, became a noted Texas billionaire by pioneering the use of hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas from shale. But Katherine started her own career far away from the family business, creating and running an agricultural and nutrition nonprofit in rural Mexico. She eventually returned to take the reins of her family's foundation, guiding the family through a planning process to ramp up their support for environmental sustainability causes in Texas.

John R. Seydel III grew up in Atlanta learning about giving from his parents and grandparents, in particular from his “Grandpa Ted” Turner, the media titan and founder of CNN who donated a billion dollars to create the U.N. Foundation. Together, they travel to tour the family's vast tracts of preserved open space in the American West and go on “learning journeys” to witness the impact of their international giving. Now a college graduate, John R. is determined to carve out his own identity as a donor and social entrepreneur. He knows he has big shoes to fill, and he wants to walk his own path in them.

Most readers have likely never heard of Justin, Katherine, or John R. So why should it matter to us what they do or what they want for the future?

We should care because men and women like these three will shape our world in profound ways.

America's next generation of major donors, whether young Gen Xers or rising Millennials, will have an outsized impact on society and the planet we share, as people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller did in years past and as people like Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett are doing now—likely even more impact. Men and women we call “next gen donors”—inheritors like Justin, Katherine, and John R. as well as those from their generation who are earning their own wealth—will decide which diseases get the most research funding, which environmental organizations launch the biggest awareness campaigns, which new ideas for education reform are incubated around the country. And those decisions will impact, directly and daily, our health, our communities, our economies, our culture, and even our climate.

In fact, if current trends in wealth and giving continue, these rising major donors will be the most significant philanthropists ever. They not only have unprecedented financial resources but also big plans for how to wield their financial power. Simply put, they want to change giving in ways that will fundamentally transform philanthropy. And they want to do so now rather than wait until they accumulate all the wealth they can and then retire to a life of philanthropic leisure.

We need to get to know these next gen donors—find out what they're about and figure out how to engage them—so we can know what to expect from their emerging philanthropic revolution. More important, we need to make sure their historic potential is channeled in ways that make our world better, not worse. In this book, you'll meet these young men and women and learn about their ambitious plans to irrevocably alter the nonprofit organizations and social causes we care about. You'll hear them struggle to “find themselves” as philanthropists; you'll hear them make their case for a bigger role as rising leaders who simultaneously want to revolutionize the future while respecting the past.

Big Donors, Big Impact

Like most readers of this book, you probably have an idea of what a “philanthropist” looks like. You might assume philanthropists are wealthy older people who attend fancy galas. They give money and serve on boards, rarely rolling up their sleeves and pitching in to help when and where it's needed most. And while it's nice that they give away money, it mostly goes to causes that matter to wealthy older people like them. Their giving doesn't really make a difference to the problems you see every day in your community or the issues you are passionate about. Unless you visit a museum on your fifth-grader's field trip or find yourself in a fancy wing of a big hospital, how philanthropists give doesn't really affect your daily life that much.

But this portrait of a philanthropist is way off, especially in terms of describing the next gen donors we will introduce you to in this book.

Major donors affect your life more than you might know—maybe even more than you might find comfortable.

Ever been cared for by a nurse? Received a scholarship? Used a library? Consumed pasteurized milk? Then you've benefited directly from the decisions by major funders to support causes such as modern medical training, the arts, and public health. If you get your news from National Public Radio or allow Sesame Street to entertain and educate your preschooler, or if you're a woman who's had a Pap smear test, then your life is affected in a direct way by the actions of major donors. All of those innovations were driven primarily by philanthropic—rather than market or government—investments.

Many good things we take for granted are due in large part to wealthy donors giving big donations—things like community centers and local parks; beautiful churches, synagogues, and mosques; a world-class higher education system; and even the ideas for a 911 emergency system and white lines on the sides of highways. The same can be said for the eradication of many bad things we no longer have to worry about (at least in the United States), like sewage in the streets, children working in factories, and diseases such as polio and yellow fever.

Philanthropists were primary funders behind the development of modern mental health treatment, hospice care, and autism treatments. They helped create many of our institutions serving widows, orphans, and people with disabilities. Medical breakthroughs such as the use of insulin to treat diabetes and antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV were made possible by donors with singular dedications to those issues. And of course, outside the United States, philanthropic giving by large donors, from the Rockefellers to the Gateses, has literally saved millions of lives, whether through the eradication of hookworm, the fight against tuberculosis, or the availability of antimalarial bed nets.

But as the history of international giving shows, how—and how much—major donors affect our lives can sometimes be controversial. While most of us are happy that big donors in the past were behind nascent social movements such as the abolition of slavery, suffrage, and civil rights, other movements funded by philanthropists divide us just as they divide the donors themselves. For instance, major donors are backing both sides of the marriage equality and the charter school debates, both the prochoice and prolife movements, and both the founding of the state of Israel and the Palestinian desire for a homeland.¹

Still think your life isn't fundamentally different because of the choices that major donors make?

While they have a complicated and sometimes disputed legacy, the impact of philanthropic giants like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford on American life is undeniable. They created enduring institutions like hospitals, universities, museums, libraries, and the modern philanthropic foundation. Philanthropy today is based largely on the ideas and innovations of these corporate lions. They set the norms and shaped our collective image for how major donors give. Yet there are many others who fit into this category of “big donors” and who often had tremendous philanthropic influence but whose names and stories are not as well known. They, too, have affected our lives, but in often underappreciated ways.²

This pattern continues with major philanthropists today. Many people know of the work of big donors with famous last names like Buffett, Hewlett, Packard, Bloomberg, and Walton. And you most likely have heard of a few members of the emerging class of Gen X and Millennial megadonors, people like tech billionaire Sean Parker, who practices what he calls “hacker philanthropy.”³ But what do we know of the less famous next gen donors who have significant resources to give, who will be tremendously important to all of our lives? What about the donors in your hometown—some of whom might just be in their twenties or thirties—who write big checks to your community theater or that women's shelter you pass on your way to work?

As the influence and power of major donors—well-known or anonymous—expands, this lack of awareness becomes even more problematic. Those at the top of the donor pyramid have more and more wealth to give, and donors of the next generation—both young inheritors and earners of major wealth—are increasingly taking their place at that apex of giving, so our need to know about them is urgent and growing. Our current global and domestic political tumult only increases this need to decipher and then help inform the plans of the most powerful and generously resourced elites. In times of uncertainty, major donors can step into the fray and shape our lives and futures in even more profound ways.

Profiles of a few celebrated individuals won't suffice. We need to understand the collective mindset and plans of the donors of this generation, even ...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE TO THE UPDATED AND EXPANDED EDITION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: Introduction: The Most Significant Philanthropists Ever
• PART ONE: The Impact Revolution
• PART TWO: Going All In
• PART THREE: Respectful Revolutionaries
• BEST PRACTICES FOR ENGAGING GENERATION IMPACT
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT