In this episode of the Philanthropisms podcast we talk to Oli French (freelance consultant) and Sally Vivyan (Co-Director of Gower Street and Grants Advisor/Trustee to the Sir Ernest Cassel Education Trust) about why and how foundations choose to spend themselves down.
Including:
Are decisions to spend down more commonly about mission, principles or practicalities? Or is it a mixture of all 3 (and how does the balance shift over time)?- Who tends to make the decision to spend down in an existing perpetual foundation? How do they justify their legitimacy to make this decision?
- How often do people make appeals to the original founder’s wishes or values?
- How many foundations openly share their rationale for spending down? Is this primarily to justify their own decision, or to influence others?
- How important is it to situate a decision to spend down in knowledge of the wider funding ecosystem?
- What are the different methods for spending down?
- Do most foundations increase spending across all existing grantees, focus in on a particular subset of them, or look to fund new things?
- How are debates about spending down related to debates about the need for higher average foundation payout rates (or mandatory minimums)?
- How are payout debates related to debates about foundations investing their assets in line with their missions?
- To what extent do foundations exist in perpetuity as a default, rather than an active choice?
- Would it be enough to shift this norm? (i.e. allow for foundations to be perpetual, but make that more of an opt-in/active choice than it is currently?)
- Is there a risk that discussions of spending down with the philanthropy world become too polarised and polemic (i.e. spending down is the only “right” way, and all others are “wrong”)?
- Is the current focus on spending down merely the latest iteration of a long-standing critical debate about perpetuity, or is there something fundamentally new or different about what we are seeing right now?
- What is driving this focus on spending down? Is it primarily supply-side concerns about philanthropic power, or demand side concerns about the scale and urgency of need right now?
- How do charities view the spend down debate?
- How different is the decision to make a newly-created foundation limited-life from the decision to shift an existing perpetual foundation to a spend down approach?
- Is there any evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) that next generation philanthropists take a different view of perpetuity than previous generations?
- Are there ever valid arguments in favour of perpetuity?
FURTHER RESOURCES:
- The microsite presenting the findings of the spend down group
- ACF Funders Collaborative Hub page for the spend down group
- WPM short guide on long-term vs short-term in philanthropy
- WPM long read “What is the Point of Foundations?“
- Philanthropisms podcast episodes on the history of foundations and on The Gates Foundation and Timescales in Philanthropy