Philanthropy operates in a peculiar temporal position. Community needs are immediate and urgent; but the resources available through endowments can compound over generations. Grantmakers who think about their work in ten-year cycles are rare; grantmakers who think in generational timescales are rarer still. Yet some of the most significant community challenges — poverty, climate change, colonisation's ongoing effects — require sustained investment over decades or generations to address meaningfully.
Intergenerational grantmaking is the practice of designing grant programmes with explicit awareness of obligations to future generations alongside present needs. It's a framework for thinking about time horizons in philanthropy — and for making the governance and strategic decisions that longer time horizons require.
Every grantmaking organisation faces a fundamental tension:
Present needs are acute. People experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, mental illness, or family violence need support now. Deferring resources to address future needs while current needs go unmet seems cruel.
Systemic change takes time. But addressing the root causes of poverty, inequality, and social disadvantage requires sustained investment over years and decades. Short-term crisis response, without complementary investment in systemic change, perpetuates the cycle.
Future communities also have claims. A community foundation that distributes all its resources in the current generation leaves nothing for future generations — who may have equal or greater needs.
Compounding returns favour patience. Money invested today and allowed to compound for twenty years produces significantly more resources than money distributed today. The question is what trade-off between present and future serves communities best.
There is no right answer to this tension. But having an explicit framework for thinking about it — rather than implicitly defaulting to the immediate — is the beginning of intergenerational grantmaking.
Spending policy as intergenerational allocation. A foundation that spends 8% of its portfolio annually is prioritising present communities over future ones. A foundation that spends 3% annually is prioritising future generations over present need. A spending rate is, implicitly, an intergenerational allocation decision. Making it explicit — and debating it consciously — is better than letting it be determined by default or convenience.
Long-term investment alongside immediate grants. Many foundations that do both — address immediate needs through grants while investing in longer-term systemic change — are implicitly practising intergenerational thinking. The challenge is maintaining both when short-term pressures intensify.
Legacy planning and perpetuity. Perpetual endowments — designed to last indefinitely — are an expression of intergenerational thinking: the belief that resources held in trust for community benefit are more valuable if perpetuated than if consumed. The governance challenge is maintaining fidelity to the foundation's purpose across leadership changes.
Climate considerations. Climate change is perhaps the most significant intergenerational equity issue of our time. Grantmakers who are not thinking about climate are not thinking intergenerationally. This includes: investing the endowment in ways that don't contribute to climate harm, funding climate adaptation, and considering how climate change will affect the communities they serve over the coming decades.
Indigenous timescales. Māori and other indigenous cultures have intergenerational thinking built into their worldview. Whakataukī like "Hutia te rito o te harakeke, kei hea te kōmako e kō?" (pull out the flax bush's heart, where will the bellbird sing?) reflect awareness of how current actions affect future generations. Funders working with Māori communities are engaging with cultures that already have sophisticated intergenerational frameworks.
Addressing the root causes of social disadvantage — rather than just managing its symptoms — requires sustained investment over long time periods. Systemic change grantmaking includes:
Policy advocacy. Legal and policy change can create conditions that make services unnecessary — a successful living wage campaign reduces the need for food banks more effectively than funding more food banks. But policy change takes years or decades.
Narrative change. How communities understand and talk about social problems shapes what solutions are politically possible. Changing narratives about poverty, disability, or mental health is multi-generational work.
Movement building. Sustained social movements — civil rights, disability rights, environmental movements — produce systemic change over generations. Funders who support movements accept that they may not see the outcomes they're seeking within their lifetimes.
Institution building. Investing in community institutions — marae, iwi organisations, community foundations, sector peak bodies — builds the infrastructure through which community resources and agency are sustained over generations.
Capacity and capability development. Building the skills, knowledge, and leadership of communities — through scholarships, training, mentoring — produces durable effects that compound over time.
Managing resources in trust for future generations raises specific governance questions:
Purpose drift prevention. As communities change and leadership turns over, foundation purposes can drift from their founding intent. Mechanisms to prevent drift include: written founding documents, regular purpose reviews against founding intent, and trustee recruitment that prioritises understanding of and commitment to the founding purpose.
Trustee tenure and diversity. Balancing continuity (long-serving trustees who carry institutional memory) with renewal (new trustees who bring fresh perspectives and connections) requires deliberate governance. Too much continuity produces stagnation; too much turnover loses institutional knowledge.
Cross-generational representation. Who speaks for future beneficiaries in foundation governance? Some foundations include explicitly youth voices on boards or advisory committees — an attempt to represent interests that can't advocate for themselves.
Perpetuity clauses and variation. Some foundations have legal perpetuity clauses that prevent spending down. Others have variation mechanisms that allow purposes to change if the original need has been met or has become irrelevant. Understanding the legal framework governing perpetuity matters for governance.
Inflation protection. A perpetual foundation that doesn't protect the real value of its capital from inflation will eventually become insignificant. Investment policies that target real (inflation-adjusted) returns, spending policies that don't exceed real returns, and regular review of spending rates are all part of intergenerational stewardship.
Intergenerational grantmaking has critics as well as advocates:
The dead hand problem. Wealth accumulated in perpetual foundations may reflect historical economic structures (including exploitation and extraction) that are better corrected than preserved. Keeping wealth in perpetual foundations rather than deploying it for current community benefit can be a form of hoarding.
Founder's intent vs. community evolution. Honouring the intent of a founder who died fifty years ago may not serve the community's current needs. Rigid perpetuity clauses can lock resources into purposes that have become irrelevant.
Power concentration. Large perpetual endowments concentrate significant decision-making power in small groups of trustees. This concentration doesn't become more legitimate over time — it may become less so as the connection to the original purpose weakens.
Present urgency. In a world with urgent, solvable problems — child poverty, homelessness, climate change — arguments for deferring resources to unspecified future generations may be ethically weak. A life saved now is worth more than a life saved in fifty years.
These are legitimate tensions that foundation governance must engage with honestly, rather than resolving by default toward perpetuity or toward depletion.
Tahua supports foundations thinking intergenerationally — with the grant management infrastructure, portfolio analytics, and the long-term relationship management tools that multi-decade grantmaking requires.