Before Sunset

Recommendations for Spending Down a Foundation and Extending Impact

Foundations that decide to sunset—to fully spend down their endowments over a set period—have the opportunity to allocate their substantial resources to catalyze change and support sustainable resourcing for organizations and movements. Realizing the full promise of a successful spend down requires thoughtful, strategic, and careful planning. Thankfully, there is a growing wealth of knowledge about spend-down best practices as current and former spend-down foundation leaders share the many of approaches they took to planning their sunsets, partnering with grantees and peer donors, supporting staff members and maintaining internal capacity, and influencing the field.

With support from and in partnership with the Kataly Foundation, Arabella Advisors conducted one-on-one interviews with many current and former spend-down leaders and gained valuable insights about the practices their foundations employed.The following report presents what was learned from these interview and accompanying recommendations that, if implemented, could help future spend-down foundations extend their impact far beyond their limited lifespans. We hope the information we share here will enable spend-down foundations to be good partners to the grantees and movements they support, positive conveners and educators for peer funders, and supportive employers to their teams.