An op-ed piece a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) argued that donors should construct their foundations to spend down assets as rapidly as possible, lest the foundations end up supporting causes their donors would revile. This familiar argument comes with a familiar whipping-boy: the Ford Foundation, whose enthusiasm for assisting the poor and marginalized was certainly not shared by its eponymous founder Henry. The op-ed piece, like many of its kind, focuses on the question of donor intent, arguing that only a brief payout period can assure that the donor’s intent is served.
The Nonprofiteer has never cared particularly about the intent of dead donors. First of all, they’re dead, and while death may not extinguish intent as a matter of law it certainly does as a matter of common sense. Second, how much better off do we really think the world would be if Ford’s foundation had spent all its money on Ford’s enthusiasms, such as promoting publication of the scurrilous anti-Semitic tract The Learned Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Third and most important, the tax-free status of foundations is supposed to encourage philanthropy, not the accumulation of permanently idle tax-free money.
The Nonprofiteer has long argued that the minimum expenditure required of foundations is way too minimum, and that setting up a structure to give away 5% of income shouldn’t entitle a donor to a 100% tax shelter–whatever his/her intent. Most likely that intent was to escape from taxation, without too much more thought than that.
So let’s think about the issue not from the standpoint of donor intent but from the standpoint of social good. Which is more useful for a philanthropy: remaining around in perpetuity, to grapple with issues that may arise a generation or three from now, or spending down in the present and relatively short-term future on issues the donor understands and cares about and which in any case are currently urgent? From the phrasing you can tell the Nonprofiteer’s position: spend it down.
Julius Rosenwald saw the wisdom of this approach when he created a program of fellowships for African-American artists for their professional development. Rather than keep the fellowships around in perpetuity, he ordered that the principal be awarded completely within 5 years of his death. As a result, virtually every mid-20th-Century African-American artist you’ve ever heard of received a Rosenwald Fellowship: Ralph Ellison and Romare Beardon and Katherine Dunham and Gordon Parks and many others. The value of what Rosenwald did, giving artists enough money so they could work without fear or distraction, is literally incalculable.
But also as a result, virtually no one remembers Julius Rosenwald, or at least not his fellowship program. So that presents the question: are we in the business of fostering greatness, or memorializing it? Is remembering a donor as important as creating work through a donor’s generosity? Again, to the Nonprofiteer the answer is self-evident. She’d rather be grateful for Ralph Ellison than to Julius Rosenwald.
Look, here’s the deal: people will make money in every generation, and in every generation some people will make a lot of money. If we tax them properly they’ll look for the opportunity to shelter their money in philanthropy. Why shouldn’t we tax them so that they’re motivated to spend it philanthropically, too? Like the proverbial Fifth Avenue bus, another chunk of money will be along any minute.
Sure, there’s a risk of spending too rapidly and with insufficient research (or “due diligence,” as people are fond of saying when they want to pretend that the nonprofit sector is really just like a business). But the greater risk is the situation in which we find ourselves now, where philanthropies give out amounts insufficient to make any significant change. No, philanthropy isn’t supposed to be society’s primary source of support, but while people are busy starving government so they can drown it in the bathtub, private wealth can and should step into the breach.
Consider the contributions of the Gates Foundations to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. Can anyone really argue it would be better to hold back on eradicating those diseases, in case there’s some bigger plague later on? If there is, as AIDS itself demonstrates, we’ll mobilize and raise money for it. Meanwhile, in case of every ailment, time is our enemy: the later we provide resources, the harder it will be for those resources to have impact. Thus wasting money is a less significant risk than failing to spend enough to make a difference.
Two things need to happen: philanthropists themselves need to organize their giving so that it ends within a reasonable time after their death, and Congress needs to modify the tax code to require philanthropies to pay out more each year to retain their tax-favored status. A 10% annual payout–double the current rate–may end up causing philanthropies to dip into principal, maybe even until they’re empty. But remember the words of Citizen Kane as he contemplated the financial difficulties of his newspaper empire: ” I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in… 60 years. “ Let’s take a Kane-like risk of running out of money.
One more story: Some time in the ’90s Joan Kroc stood up at a Ronald McDonald House benefit to announce her annual gift. Rumor had it she was actually going to make a five-year pledge, and the Nonprofiteer’s table indulged in the parlor game of trying to figure out just how much that would be. We figured the previous year’s gift ($5M) plus a little bump (so $6M) for each of 5 years, and settled on $30 million. And then she rose to speak, a little woman holding a torn-off piece of yellow legal paper in her hand. And she said, “I was going to make a 5-year gift, but then I thought: ‘The need is now.’ So tonight I’m giving $50 million to Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities.” Everyone at the table fell back in her seat, literally knocked over by her generosity, and also by her insight: The need is now.
Aside from Ronald McDonald, Mrs. Kroc mostly supported causes her late husband disapproved of. If only he’d given more in the present, he wouldn’t have had to contemplate a future in which his money went to places he despised. So the donor’s intention and the sector’s need are in sync:
Spend it now.
