As wealth transfers are set to benefit women more than men in coming decades, women are playing increasingly decisive roles in philanthropy, such as leading spend-down foundations.

This trend is particularly prevalent in an emerging and growing area of philanthropy – spend-down philanthropy, where philanthropists and foundations set a time limit to channel their giving. Proponents of spend-down philanthropy cite that this model enables foundations to achieve their mission with greater urgency, given the daunting scale of social and environmental challenges. Women are leading this new wave in philanthropy – but why and how?

Official data do not exist on whether women are statistically more likely to lead spend-down foundations, but out of a handful of philanthropic leaders and advisors I interviewed, there seems to be a trend around women increasingly leading spend-down foundations. ‘I’ve observed a distinct trend: women are increasingly leading the charge in establishing and guiding limited-life foundations’, says Sofia Michelakis, Managing Director at Phīla Engaged Giving , a Black-owned and women-led philanthropic advisory firm. A Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors report from 2020 found that mearly half of the organisations established in the 2010s were founded as time-limited vehicles, compared to 20% in the 1980s.

Is it a mere coincidence that women are leading many of the spend-down foundations? Interviews with women leading such foundations suggest that it is not. ‘I don’t want to essentialise women leaders as embodying a certain set of traits’, says Nwamaka Agbo, CEO of Kataly Foundation, a family foundation set up in 2018 with an endowment of $445 million, intending to spend down within ten years. Nwamaka reflects on her own lived experience as a queer Black woman, ‘I intimately understand how people and communities have experienced harm from people in power. Because of that understanding, I do my best to lead from a place of empathy’. Experiences of oppression and injustices may indeed be more commonly shared by women in society.

Read the full article about women in spend-down philanthropy by Bonnie Chiu at Alliance Magazine.