Philanthropy Roundtable today released a report finding that charities can disregard the purpose of a restricted gift while leaving donors with no legal recourse. In many states, only the attorney general may bring such a case, leaving donors or their representatives without standing in court.

“Donors give when they trust their wishes will be honored, but often the law fails to safeguard that trust. In many cases, the court never even asked whether the charity kept its word, because the donor had no right to be in the room. A small legislative fix could have a big impact, and ultimately benefit the charities and the communities that depend on generous giving.” – Philanthropy Roundtable Senior Vice President of Public Affairs Claudia Cummings

The report, written by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly and titled the “Safeguarding Endowment Gifts Act: The Tao of Enforcing Donor Intent,” surveys a decade of litigation and legislation and concludes that existing common law, trust law and uniform state acts have produced an ad hoc patchwork that protects donor intent on paper but often not in practice. It identifies the Safeguarding Endowment Gifts Act (SEGA), a model state law, as a targeted solution that gives donors the right to enforce written endowment agreements without disturbing existing state law. So far, Kansas (2023), Georgia (2024), Kentucky (2024) and Montana (2025) have adopted SEGA.

The confusion runs deep enough that courts applying the same state’s law have reached opposite conclusions about whether a donor may be heard at all. In California, a man who donated his car to Kars 4 Kids was told only the attorney general could enforce the charity’s obligations, while a federal court allowed Elon Musk’s suit against OpenAI to proceed on the theory that a donor who creates a charitable trust has a “special interest” in enforcing it. The report calls that variability, on so fundamental a question, “indicative of an underlying incoherence in the law.”

Read the full article about enforcing donor intent at Philanthropy Roundtable.