When I first began writing my family philanthropy series in partnership with the National Center for Family Philanthropy, I came away with a handful of early impressions: that family philanthropy requires difficult and sometimes painful conversations, that families who prioritize place-based giving are often tapping something personal, and that the next generation benefits most when they are brought in early. Four years and nearly two dozen profiles later, I’d stand by all of that. But the fuller picture is more complicated — and more illustrative.
The foundations that have genuinely changed their communities share something that has less to do with issue area, asset size or ideology, and more to do with a certain kind of discipline.
The National Center for Family Philanthropy calls out four key tenets of effective family philanthropy: accountability to communities and grantees, a genuine commitment to equity, a willingness to reflect upon and revise strategy, and the slow work of building relationships that outlast any single grant cycle.
What I’ve learned from watching these principles play out across very different family foundations is that while they show up in diverse ways, they are always present in giving strategies that are actually working.
With those principles in mind, here are several takeaways I’ve gleaned from covering these family funders.
The first move: cutting something
The most effective foundations I’ve profiled have all, at some point, gone through a genuine pruning. This is harder than it sounds because in family philanthropy, legacy programs often carry names and draw on relationships that predate current leadership by decades. Call it heirloom philanthropy. Figuring out when and how to turn the page on certain giving approaches is a challenge multiple foundations in the series have faced.
The Bainum Family Foundation, for example, taps wealth from the late Stewart W. Bainum Sr., who built nursing home giant HCR Manor Care and Choice Hotels. When the family launched what was then called the College Foundation in 1968, the focus was on giving inner-city high school students in Washington D.C. a path to college, with the foundation operating programs itself. But as grandson Scott Renschler, a clinical psychologist who joined the foundation in 1993, put it: “We learned how naive we were and what it really takes to solve these kinds of problems.”
What he meant was that the foundation’s initial hypothesis hadn’t reflected the complexity of what it was trying to address. That honest assessment is what drove what he calls “phase two,” when the Bainums stopped running programs themselves and started looking to back organizations already doing the work. The foundation is now on “phase three,” what CEO David Daniels calls a “community-centric” approach: deliberately listening to communities and bringing community voices to the board.
The Perrin Family Foundation arrived at clarity through a somewhat similar route. Charles Perrin, former CEO of both Duracell and Avon Products, and his wife Sheila, launched the foundation out of their den in posh Ridgefield, Connecticut, in the early 90s. What began with giving to traditional after-school and mental health providers eventually became, under the pressure of second-generation involvement, a youth organizing foundation. David Perrin’s years with the Haymarket People’s Fund in Boston, and involvement in Resource Generation — a network for young wealth holders working to redistribute money and power — reshaped his thinking. He pushed his mother to relocate the foundation from Ridgefield to New Haven so it could be closer to the communities it served.
Sometimes, it’s less about cutting than about defining giving parameters in a way that precludes the future need to pare things down. The North Carolina-based Laughing Gull Foundation, founded in 2012 by Midge Coward and her daughters and drawing on a Berkshire Hathaway fortune, built constraints into its DNA from the very beginning. The family decided early on that rather than give individual donations in an ad-hoc way, they would formalize their giving with a geographic and ideological commitment to the South and a planned spend-down by 2036.
The Woodcock Foundation, meanwhile, has expanded its scope rather than narrowed it, moving into social justice, democracy, and other areas, without losing focus. Its story suggests that the underlying question isn’t really about breadth versus depth, but about whether a foundation has built the governance infrastructure to hold whatever it decides to take on.
Governance practices are not incidental
One of the things that distinguishes family philanthropy is that the founding generation carries an inherent authority that can be difficult to dislodge. The foundations that have worked through this reality tend to be open about it and committed to working through it. As Barbara Bainum said about the moment her father Stewart handed over the reins in 2008: “It wasn’t easy. He was used to being in control.”
The Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation has built a governance model that has held across five generations, with four generations now actively involved. The organizing principles and norms that made this possible required decades of intentional work. Max Fisher left behind a letter with instructions about how much money would go to the foundation, but deliberately left the causes open because he wanted his children, ranging from their 40s to late 60s, to work collectively. Third-generation member Alissandra Aronow, who chairs the foundation’s impact investing committee and has pushed the endowment toward greater mission alignment, describes the mindset her grandmother Marjorie instilled: “We were taught to be flexible, to always listen and ask what the need was. To never make assumptions or place our opinions at the forefront when it comes to what we thought was needed.”
Leonard and Claire Tow launched the Tow Foundation in 1988, and daughter Emily Tow became its first employee and president in 1995. When she eventually turned to engaging the third generation, she enlisted her chief of staff to create a formal pathway for board eligibility: family members had to attend board meetings for two years, go on site visits, and reach the age of 21.
Finally, Arthur Blank, who co-founded Home Depot and launched the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation in 1995, convened his family to agree on shared priorities before hiring president Fay Twersky in 2021, and runs foundation meetings at a literal round table. “I’m the last person to speak. I’m always more interested in what the children have to say,” Blank told me.
What foundations owe grantees: relationships are a two-way street
The funder-grantee relationship has been one of the most interesting things to track during this series. The most effective family foundations are always looking to improve those connections.
Diana Blank started the Kendeda Fund in the early 1990s and spent years as an anonymous donor before the foundation went public in 2015. Her daughter Dena Kimball, who took the helm in 2014, aimed to build out relationships with grantees as genuine two-way processes. In the years before completing a planned spend down, Kendeda placed roughly $8 to $9 million in an operating reserve program for 38 of its core grantees — providing up to a month and a half of operational dollars, which the grantees had to match — so that organizations would have a cushion after the foundation closed. Kimball also had explicit, one-on-one conversations with each grantee about the timeline, asking whether it made more sense to give more money sooner or structure it differently.
The approach of another spend-down funder, the Laughing Gull Foundation, has been shaped partly by LaTonya Penny, who joined as chief executive in 2022, focusing on building capacity so grantees will be prepared when the spigot dries up in about a decade. Penny was explicit about what drew her to the foundation: a model that she described as departing from “perpetuity models, like most white philanthropic organizations have, because that gives so much power and control to white philanthropic leaders who dangle this carrot in front of you.”
The Roy and Patricia Disney Family Foundation, meanwhile, has moved steadily toward grantees whose theories of change involve organizing and advocacy. Executive Director Shawn Escoffery, who joined in 2018, described showing up to community events in Los Angeles on weekends, not as a foundation representative but as a resident. “We do a lot more listening than we do talking,” he said.
As a final example, the Tarsadia Foundation, founded on the hospitality fortune of B.U. Patel and family, has built its grantee relationships partly through international service trips that bring family members and grantees together in person, including to Peru, Cambodia and Zambia.
More foundations are asking tough questions about themselves
Another pattern that showed up at many of these funders: Foundation leaders are increasingly asking whether the existing endowment, payout rate, and transparency standards are actually consistent with the foundation’s stated values.
The Compton Foundation stands out. Vanessa Compton Davenport described the decision to spend down everything as an act of repair. Until recently, the words ‘decolonizing wealth’ and ‘reparations’ were not echoed in philanthropic circles,” Executive Director June Wilson wrote in 2021. At Compton, they became the organizing logic of a final chapter.
Meanwhile, over at the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Foundation, leaders agreed to shift its assets to become 100% percent mission aligned with its gender, racial and economic justice goals at the end of 2024. As current board chair Max Disney told me last year, the shift toward fully mission-aligned investing came about as part of a broader conversation about the very existence of a family foundation. Some in the fourth generation pushed for a spend-down, convinced that money deployed quickly to pressing problems would be the best use of their wealth. Other family members defended the idea of legacy and making an impact decades from now. Max says that there were passionate and compelling arguments made on both sides, but ultimately, with the help of CEO Shawn Escoffery, this was the compromise that was reached.
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Treating the next generation as a serious force is key
Generational transition is never seamless, but many family foundations I connected with spoke of the real value of integrating newer, younger family members and bringing their voices to the fore. Susan Disney Lord, daughter of Roy E. Disney and former board chair of the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Foundation, recalled the 2012 death of her mother Patricia, and the bequest that followed, as the moment to hire professional staff and bring her children and siblings’ children into real board leadership.
Meanwhile, the Tow Foundation‘s third generation has stepped up into roles that reflect changing times and technology. After sitting in on board meetings as a teenager, Hope Tow Jackson joined the board and became one of the drivers of the foundation’s new innovation fund, which the family assembled to explore causes outside their traditional focus areas. Her cousin Olivia used her discretionary grant allocation to connect with a cross-disciplinary public health collaborative focused on gun violence prevention at Columbia University. Hope’s brother Ben Tow, applying his software engineering background, has been working on making grantee portals more accessible to those who are hard of hearing or face language barriers. “I was planning on forging my own career and then coming back to this later,” Ben said, “but it increasingly became clear that my skills could be useful to the foundation.”
The O’Neill Foundation built its next-generation engagement around a family so large — more than 100 members across six branches descended from Irish immigrant Hugh O’Neill’s horse-and-buggy business that became the billion-dollar trucking company — that the foundation hired a dedicated program officer for next-gen engagement.
Mission alignment is a practice, not an achievement
Perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve learned from these profiles is that mission alignment is not something a family foundation achieves, but something it practices, and the ones that sustain it are the ones willing to be changed by what they learn.
It’s hard to generalize here, because each family’s giving journey looks different – but the core theme of learning through relationships, both within and outside the family, holds true. At the Bainum Family Foundation, that has looked like five decades of honest re-evaluation and a willingness to admit that an earlier hypothesis about social change was too simple. At the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Foundation, it meant younger generations challenging older ones and reaching a compromise. And at the Roundhouse Foundation, it meant returning to the same rural Oregon communities across multiple years, asking what they actually need, and buying Crock Pots when the answer, indeed, turns out to be Crock Pots.
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series on how donors are implementing the most effective principles of family philanthropy, in partnership with the National Center for Family Philanthropy (NCFP) and produced by Inside Philanthropy’s editorial team. NCFP is a network of philanthropic families committed to a world that is vibrant, equitable, and resilient. NCFP equips family philanthropies with community, support, and resources they need to move forward with long-term planning and day-to-day decision-making with confidence. It believes that effective family philanthropy is rooted in a cultural evolution and advances meaningful outcomes by embodying four core principles: accountability, equity, reflection and learning, and relationships. Learn more about the principles here.
