Family Philanthropy

Contents

1. What the research covers
2. Children and their own money
3. Birthday parties and family history
4. The classroom version
5. Generations that give differently
6. Spouses and women donors
7. Ground rules for giving together
8. Family foundations and the next generation
9. Pitfalls that recur

Brent O’Mara supports the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society and Susan G. Komen among Omaha causes, and the question a reader brings to causes like those is whether generosity can be taught, and if it can, how a family goes about it. The research answers the first part with a qualification. Generosity is learned less from instruction than from practice, a PBS parenting columnist wrote, which means children need their own money and their own decisions before any conversation about giving it away can mean much.⁹ The rest of the literature, from classroom guides for five year olds to studies of foundation boards, is about what that practice looks like at each age.

What the research covers

Family philanthropy is a field with its own institutes and surveys. A 2025 study from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy drew on the Philanthropy Panel Study, which has followed thousands of American households since 2000, to compare how generations give; a Kiplinger contributor who advises wealthy families catalogued the ways giving differs between spouses and across generations; and the Wall Street Journal reported on both raising children to give and keeping family foundations alive after their founders.⁷¹⁴ The common thread is that families seldom agree on causes and need not, so long as they agree on why they give together.

Children and their own money

The PBS column’s guidelines begin before giving. An allowance paid on the same day each week makes saving possible; a request in a store becomes a question about whether the child has brought enough money; loans are refused so impulse purchases are limited; a bank account with a debit card shows how deposits and withdrawals work, and an emptied account is a lesson rather than a failure.⁹ Only then does the column turn to charity: parents talk about which organizations they give to, how much and why, and offer giving as something a child is exposed to rather than taught, expecting the child to start small and locally and perhaps, years later, to support a cause of her own.⁹

Figure

Practice before preaching

1. 01
   An allowancePaid on the same day each week, so saving becomes possible.
2. 02
   Yes, if you have the moneyRequests in a store become questions about whether the child has saved enough.
3. 03
   No loansLimiting impulse purchases teaches patience and focus.
4. 04
   A bank accountDeposits, withdrawals and a debit card show how money moves, and emptying the account is itself a lesson.
5. 05
   Talk about your own givingWhich charities, how much and why, offered as exposure rather than instruction.

Birthday parties and family history

Two New York Times columns describe practice at its earliest. One recounted three sisters given a choice at age five: a birthday party with presents, or the same party with guests bringing what a local charity needed instead; the two old enough to choose both chose the charity, and one, at eight, had thrown a princess party for an animal shelter.⁵ The other offered six ways to pass generosity to children and teenagers, beginning with family history: telling children how the family itself was once helped, by financial aid, by good medical care, by a country that took in grandparents, so they understand why their parents support the causes they do.⁶ The Journal’s survey of experts reached the same consensus: start the conversations early and keep having them as children grow, and let them see what the parents do.³

The classroom version

The lesson has been written down for schools. A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau teacher guide, aligned to the national standards for personal financial education, has children aged five to nine listen to a story about donating and then act it out with paper puppets, with the aim of understanding that people give money, things and time to help organizations they care about, and that donating differs from sharing because a donated thing does not come back.¹⁰ The vocabulary is three words, cause, donate and volunteer, and the guide notes that practices around donating change, so students should look for current information.¹⁰

Generations that give differently

The adult research measures differences rather than deficits. The Lilly school’s 2025 study found that Generation Z and Millennial donors focus on issues rather than particular organizations, see themselves as agents of change, rely on technology to learn about and advocate for causes, give online, take part in crowdfunding at higher rates than older donors, and increasingly give through charity streams hosted on social media.⁷ Basic needs and religion were the top causes across every generation from 2003 to 2021, while giving to education was less common among the young, and the study noted that giving at every stage of life has declined since 2008.⁷ It cited an estimate that $18 trillion will go to charity by 2048 as wealth passes between generations.⁷

An earlier Lilly school post took on the claim that younger donors are disengaged. There is a higher proportion of non givers among people in their twenties and thirties than among those over forty, it acknowledged, but the young are motivated less by sustained loyalty to organizations than by involvement in causes, and a ten year survey of more than 150,000 of them found that they treat small everyday actions, petitions, posts, purchases and marches, as giving too.⁸ Two thirds would respond to an in person ask, especially from friends or family.⁸

Figure

Older and younger donors

	Donors born before 1981	Generation Z and Millennial donors
Focus of giving	Particular organizations	Issues, with the donor as an agent of change
Channels	Checks and pledges	Online giving, crowdfunding and charity streams on social media
Research	Relationships with institutions	Technology, with a search for transparent nonprofits
Education as a cause	Common	Less common
Basic needs and religion	Top causes	Top causes

Spouses and women donors

Differences run between partners as well. The Kiplinger contributor summarized a 2021 report on women and giving: nearly 90 percent of women wished they could do more to create social change, women used charitable investment strategies less often than men and were less versed in the tax side of giving, and women were more likely to give back in ways beyond money.¹ Her advice to families was to let each member pursue individual causes with the skills to do so well, to volunteer together, and to set a dedicated family giving budget to which each child proposes a cause and researches the recipients.¹ Younger members, she observed, often count voting, consumer choices and investing as part of their philanthropy, while the senior generation cares more that the giving continues than which organizations receive it.¹

Ground rules for giving together

Her companion article listed the pitfalls. Families assume everyone cares about the same cause, when what matters is agreeing why they give collectively, whether to spend time together, to learn, to reinforce values or to meet needs. They skip ground rules, when process, agreed in advance, keeps decisions out of family dynamics. They wait for the perfect grant, when philanthropy is society’s risk capital and a disappointing gift teaches as much as a good one. And they give without a central vehicle, so that no one can track what the family gave to whom.² The six questions she suggests settling first, why, who, when, where, what and how, are the figure above; the account she recommends for the last pitfall is described in donor advised funds.

Figure

Six questions before a family gives together

1. 01
   WhyWhat the family hopes its giving will accomplish and what success looks like.
2. 02
   WhoWhich members take part, whether in laws are included, and when children and grandchildren join.
3. 03
   WhenWhether to give while living, hold money in perpetuity, or spend a legacy down over a set period.
4. 04
   WhereLocal, national or abroad, and what decides the footprint.
5. 05
   WhatWhich problems the family wants to help solve over the next ten years.
6. 06
   HowHow charities are vetted and what process approves a joint grant.

Family foundations and the next generation

At the largest scale the question becomes institutional. The Journal reported that foundations meant to run forever can run out of family sooner than expected, since younger relatives may not share the causes, may be crowded out by a dominant parent, or may simply not have the hours or the training a nonprofit requires; the foundations it profiled answered by telling the founding story and by volunteering as a family across generations.⁴ The rules such foundations operate under, and the Omaha foundations now deciding whether to outlive their founders, are the subject of private foundations. How a family structures its giving depends on the family’s circumstances, and the legal and tax side of it should be shaped by qualified professionals in tax, in law and in planning.

Pitfalls that recur

The research is consistent about what goes wrong. Parents expect polished due diligence from children asked to suggest a grant, and children fear disappointing them, so nobody proposes anything.² Families confuse the spirit of giving with giving itself, a distinction the national surveys described in how Americans give draw in dollars. And tax planning, which the Kiplinger contributor found women in particular wanted to understand better, tends to be left to the last weeks of the year rather than written into the giving budget, a habit that the charitable deduction explains has grown costlier since the standard deduction doubled.¹

What giving together cannot do is settle the questions it opens. It cannot make a grandchild care about the cause a grandparent chose; the research suggests the young will give to the issue, not the institution. It cannot assure that a foundation outlives its founder, which is why the Journal’s foundations worked so hard at succession. It cannot replace an allowance, a bank account and a refused loan, the practice that has to come first. And it cannot by itself produce a tax strategy, which is separate work. What it can do, the evidence says, is turn generosity from a lecture into a habit, and the long literature on the subject agrees that habits are where the teaching happens.