Honoring the founder’s intent is an imperative for many in family philanthropy: according to NCFP’s Trends in Family Philanthropy 2025 survey, 63% of family foundations report that they are following the founder’s intent “very closely.”
While family members may agree that they have some responsibility to honor a donor’s intent, they may not agree on what that means or how to do it. Founder intent is often treated as an absolute—wielded like a hammer in family meetings—when it is quite nuanced.
For more on this topic, see Generations of Giving: Chapter 3: Choices and Challenges for the Controlling Trustee Foundation.
The following questions can help families navigate discussions on donor intent so that it acts as a unifying—rather than dividing—force.
Whose intent are we talking about?
People often use “founder” and “donor” interchangeably, but they mean different things. “Donors” contribute money to the foundation; “founders” create the institution, providing its initial purpose and structure. Donors and founders may be the same, but not necessarily. For foundations created in a bequest from the donor’s estate, the founders may be their spouse or children. Founders may not contribute money, but they contribute significant time and effort to launch the foundation and shape its trajectory.
Moreover, many foundations have multiple financial contributors: a couple who create the foundation together; family members who contribute additional funds over time. And for US private foundations, the tax-paying public can also be considered a “donor”—making contributions in the form of tax abatements.
When talking about intent, it is important to clarify whose intent we care about. How do we factor in the intent of the many people who contribute to a foundation’s creation and evolution?
What did the donor want?
Most donors never articulate a statement of intent, so people are left to discern their wishes post facto. I’ve been part of many conversations with founders’ children who each believe that they uniquely know what their parents wanted, which almost always aligns with their own goals (and often conflicts with their siblings’). It’s not that they’re manipulative, it’s just that “intent” is highly subjective, viewed through the lens of their relationships with the founders. Children of founders—for whom the money may feel like “mom and dad’s”—often have a particularly deep commitment to doing what they think their parents would want, a posthumous way for them to remain connected to them. But applying a “what would the donor do?” criteria to decision-making is complicated for many reasons:
- Multiple goals: In establishing a foundation, donors often have many hopes: to address a particular issue they care about, give back to the community where they made their wealth, unite the family over generations, and avoid taxes. In foundations with multiple donors, that gets even more complicated. Depending on which goal is prioritized, successors can come to very different conclusions about how the foundation should operate.
- Donors are dynamic: Like all of us, donors’ views and priorities evolved over time—and would continue to evolve if they were living today. It is difficult to know with any certainty what the donor would want if he or she was alive today.
- Donor intent vs. donor values: A donor’s intent speaks to what they aspired to for the foundation they created. That’s different from who the donor was as a person—what they cared about, how they looked at the world. Families often conflate these concepts but they are meaningfully different—each worthy of consideration: a) What did the founder want for this foundation?; and b) What of the founders’ values and priorities should we reflect in this foundation?
- Excluding future generations: Making decisions based on an implicit, subjective understanding of what the donors would want maintains authority among those who best knew the donors—and limits participation from later generations. Ironically, those most concerned with continuing the donors’ legacy can stifle engagement from the next generations necessary to carry it forward.
How much do we care?
Beyond any requirements named in the founding documents, boards have a lot of latitude to determine the degree to which they choose to honor donor intent. As explained in chapter three of Kelin Gersick’s Generations of Giving, this is fundamentally a question of ownership: Whose money is it? The “donor-focused” camp argue that it is the donors’ money and they therefore have the right to determine its use in perpetuity. The “organizationally-focused” argument holds that the minute the donor contributed resources to a 501(c)(3) they stopped being “theirs” and belong to the foundation; current organizational leaders have the legal and moral duty to determine their use.
Families are well served by looking to the donors’ values and aspirations for inspiration as they choose among the infinite options for purpose and navigate countless dilemmas that arise. But treating it as “the donor’s money” inhibits the sense of agency necessary for continuity.
Many assume that the children of donors feel a greater sense of responsibility to honor their parents’ wishes than do later generations, who may not even have known the donors. While that is true at times it is not always the case. It is not uncommon for later generations to look to the foundation’s origin story when seeking to define a shared purpose for the family foundation; the donors’ values and interests can provide objective touchstones for expanding and diversifying families.
Lessons
As family foundations evolve, leaders must always balance continuity—what you choose to hold on to from the past—with succession—what you let go of to enable adaptation. Hold on to the past too tightly and you limit the ability of current and future generations to meaningfully shape the foundation—which is necessary for their continued engagement and enthusiasm. Not many people will be excited to implement someone else’s vision, especially not years down the road. On the other hand, let go of all ties to the past and you become unmoored, buffeted about by the whim of each new participant and external shift. Given the limitless possibilities of private philanthropy—you can fund almost anything, so long as you file a tax return and spend 5% of your endowment—founder intent can provide clear orienting principles for families looking to work together on a shared endeavor.
Guidance for founders: Founders can help position their family foundation for success by being clear about the reasons they are creating the foundation: their hopes for the family and the world. They can name things that they hope will be reflected in the foundation—be it particular values, issues, or geographies. But if they aspire to have a family foundation that will engage their family over time, they must avoid rigidity. If donors have clear ideas about what they want to see happen after they’re gone, they may be better off creating a separate vehicle for “legacy” giving—with clear instruction for organizations, places, issues—and a “family foundation” which allows more latitude for family participants to define the agenda together over time.
For more on this topic, see The NCFP Guide to Interpreting Donor Legacy: Things We Wish Our Founders Had Told Us by Susan Packard Orr.
Donors can also help by being explicit about what they are not dictating. For example, a donor may state that they hope that some resources go to the community where they lived, but that they trust future board members to determine the scope and focus of that giving.
Guidance to the second generation: Children of founders can feel great pressure to do what they think their parents would have wanted and to make sure that their parents are remembered by future generations. The sibling stage is often the trickiest to navigate in family philanthropy, and donor intent is one of the main sources of conflict among siblings—the last thing a donor would want.
During this stage, it’s important to make the implicit explicit. Rather than each person employing their own interpretation of the donor’s wishes, this is an opportune time for families to come together to define the donor-inspired principles that will serve as the bedrock of the foundation.
Donors plant a critical seed when they choose to create a foundation: in addition to the money, they establish an institution that will continue after they are no longer around. That is a choice—they could otherwise give the money to institutions they care about, leave it with the local community foundation, or do any number of other things to ensure that it goes exactly where they want it to go. They presumably make that choice because they see some benefit in their successors giving the money away. Indeed, for many founders, the idea of future generations working together, grappling with how best to use philanthropy to address critical issues, is the goal. They hope to create an institution that can bring their family together, over generations, to work on a collective philanthropic endeavor. That requires that future generations have the flexibility and agency to meaningfully shape the foundation in their lifetimes.
The views and opinions expressed in individual blog posts are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the National Center for Family Philanthropy.