For the last thirty years, American philanthropy has largely been shaped by one generation: Boomers. This is not a critique so much as a call for Baby Boomers to help fix philanthropy.
To start, Boomers didn't create philanthropy. That generation came earlier — the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Fords who built the first foundations a century ago. What Boomers did was take it mainstream. They scaled it, professionalized it, funded it, sat on the boards, and defined how money actually moves today. The modern nonprofit sector — the one we're all operating inside — is largely theirs. And they are still in control.
And they didn't start from nowhere. They came of age in civil rights, anti-war, and social reform — movements they created that worked, that changed systems. They were perpetual optimists, rewarded for their effort: you had a problem, you built something to address it, and then you built structures to sustain it. That was the right instinct for the sixties. It's how the movements actually won. Build and sustain. That instinct carried straight into philanthropy — and it produced a sector buildup that has outgrown the moment that justified it.
The Pattern: A Sector That Only Knows How to Add
Layers stacked on top of layers — not replacing each other, accumulating. Foundations, funds, reporting bodies, evaluators, convenings, affinity groups, learning communities, capacity builders. Each one was started for a real reason. Each solved a real problem at the time. Almost none of them ever got closed. The sector only knows how to add.
Charlie Munger saw this in a different context: too many managers managing managers, too many layers between capital and outcome, too much sophistication without discipline. He was describing corporate America. He could have been describing philanthropy. Call it structural buildup — a system where the response to every new problem is a new structure, and nothing ever gets removed. Not because anyone was wrong, but because nobody was ever responsible for closing what had been opened.
What Donor-Advised Funds Show Us
The clearest example is the donor-advised fund. DAFs were a reasonable answer to a real problem: donors wanted flexibility in timing, and community foundations wanted scalable infrastructure. The vehicle worked. Then it kept working. Then it became a category.
Then the category got so large that money now sits in DAFs longer than it sits anywhere else in the giving chain. A real share of what gets called "philanthropic giving" is actually capital moving from one DAF to another — a reasonable answer to a timing problem that became a layer of its own, with its own infrastructure, its own advocates, and its own payout numbers that measure movement inside the layer rather than capital leaving it. DAFs aren't the problem. DAFs are what buildup looks like when you follow one thread. The same story could be told about regranting, evaluation, or capacity building. Each started as an answer. Each became a layer. None got closed.
The Chain Itself Is the Problem
You can see the result today: philanthropy is well-intentioned, highly capitalized, and hard to see through. Capital moves through several entities before it touches the work. Each layer takes a cut, asks for a report, and slows things down. Everyone in the chain is doing their job. The chain itself is the problem.
And now the pressure is real. For decades, the federal government effectively outsourced the care of civilians to this sector — food, housing, health, education, crisis response. The arrangement was quiet but load-bearing. That partnership is now unwinding. The same government that depends on nonprofits to reach low- and middle-income Americans has started treating the sector as a political opponent, cutting funding and pulling back. At the same time, funders are cautious about politics, giving is more conservative, and proof expectations are higher — while demand rises faster than any of it. A system built for a different moment is being asked to perform under conditions it wasn't designed for, and low- and middle-income Americans are the ones left in the wind.
The Honest Part
Here is the honest part. A lot of what's being tested right now was built over the last thirty years, by the same people who still hold the seats. The same generation that started as optimists and grew into the dominant economic force of the era is also the generation responsible for what philanthropy has become. That's not a charge. It's just the math of who has been in the room.
Buildup doesn't unwind on its own. Every structure has a constituency, every body has a staff, every convening has a history. The instinct that built them is still the dominant instinct in the sector: when in doubt, add. The work now is the opposite instinct — subtraction — a skill this generation, by its own formative experience, was never trained for. The movements rewarded building. Capitalism rewarded building. Nothing in the last sixty years rewarded the discipline of closing things. A Boomer friend said to me recently, "I'm sorry. I hope your generation fixes it." I appreciated the honesty. But the sentence contains the mistake.
The Handoff That Isn't Yet
The next generation can't fix it. Not yet. The capital hasn't transitioned. The boards haven't transitioned. The decision-making hasn't transitioned. And it's not just the sector — the broader economy has been tuned over decades to protect the generation that built it: housing, tax treatment, retirement policy, wealth concentration. The same pattern that produced structural buildup in philanthropy produced structural protection everywhere else.
The seats are still held. The system still works for the people who built it. So the handoff isn't a handoff yet — it's a shared moment, and the people holding the seats are the only ones who can decide what to close. This is the call: not to step back, not to hand off, but to stay in the room and do the harder version of the work that made you. You built. Now help close what no longer serves the mission you built it for.