What Makes Philanthropic Impact Endure?

(Photo by iStock/imagedepotpro)

It was the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, a massive global summit to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit and envision “the future we want,” as the tagline went. Thousands of people from all over the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro. In a ballroom, philanthropists, UN leaders, rock stars, and the entire staff of Virgin Unite were listening to Richard Branson speak. But off to the side, Henry Timms, then executive director of the 92Y, and Aaron Sherinian, Chief Communications and Marketing Officer for the UN Foundation, were conspiring to create a day in which people could celebrate giving. They beckoned Susan McPherson, then vice president at the communications agency Fenton, over to help. While in the background, people were applauding and clinking drinks, the three were drawing on a napkin, envisioning a counterbalance to the consumerism of Black Friday. Five months later, Giving Tuesday was born, with one key goal: as McPherson described it to us, “to celebrate all those who give, volunteer, and care, especially at a time of the year when so much focus is on purchasing.” Since 2012, it has grown into a movement in nearly 100 countries that each year catalyzes billions of dollars to worthy causes, most of it in places its founders will never visit. “None of us could imagine how much it would grow all these years later,” McPherson reminisced.

They had no idea that scribbled on that napkin was a blueprint for change that would endure. But they could have bet on it.

How do you know whether what you fund will outlast you?

That question has been hanging over the field. In SSIR, Sarah Cone recently argued that too much of today’s philanthropy moves money around without building anything that lasts—that what is missing is not longevity so much as institutional form equal to the time horizon of the problem. She is right about the diagnosis. Roman aqueducts still carry water, medieval universities still produce scholarship, and Carnegie’s libraries still lend books—because they were built with endurance in mind. These examples are powerful. But they can also narrow our imagination about what durable impact looks like.

The larger picture is more hopeful than it first appears. Field-shaping philanthropy today often looks different than the brick and marble archetypes sculpted for us more than a century ago. Many of today’s field-building donors came of age in a world shaped by markets, networks, and technology. Their giving reflects that, and manifests in different forms, as a standard, a market, a movement, a public institution, or a shared backbone organization for a field. Those choices can make it (literally) harder to see the impact of their giving. Still, when these efforts are designed well, they endure for the same basic reason Carnegie’s libraries did: The gift creates something others are ready and able to sustain.

Through our social-impact advisory firm, the Starfish Institute, we worked with a large philanthropy to design an intentional approach to sunsetting that would shift them from strategic philanthropy to legacy-level investments with enduring impact. To ground that work, we studied dozens of examples of enduring philanthropic impact and distilled five dimensions—and five corresponding questions to ask about any prospective gift, investment, or strategy—that surfaced across the most enduring ones.

Durability: Will It Last?

We began where Cone also starts, with Andrew Carnegie’s libraries. Between 1883 and 1929, Carnegie funded the construction of more than 2,500 public libraries, reaching nearly every state and more than a dozen countries beyond. Many still stand, and more than a century later most still lend books, host community rooms, and anchor the civic life of the towns around them. (Talia’s local library in Brooklyn, N.Y., is a Carnegie library, and its shelves have served up inspiration in the form of books for her three daughters since they could chew on the pages of an illustrated board book.)

Their durability wasn’t luck, and it wasn’t sturdy masonry. It was written into the terms of the gift. Carnegie paid only for the building, and only if the town first supplied the site and committed, in writing, to fund the library’s operations, staff, and upkeep in perpetuity—with annual public support of at least one tenth of his original grant and free access for all. In California alone, 122 localities took that bargain. The effect was to turn a one-time private gift into permanent public infrastructure: From the day it opened, a Carnegie library was owned and sustained by the public that used it, not by Carnegie. He built a system, not a set of programs, and designed it, from the start, to outlast him. Because the libraries were to be sustained entirely by public funding and local governance, they were also a model of the second quality of enduring philanthropy: They were designed for independence.

Independence: Can It Stand Without You?

In 2000, an early commitment from the Gates Foundation seeded Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which was created to take on the challenge of getting the world’s poorest countries reliable access to life-saving vaccines. From the outset, Gavi was built not as a program a foundation would run but as a shared system that governments, vaccine manufacturers, multilateral agencies, and civil society would co-own. Rather than buy and deliver vaccines itself, it built the machinery beneath them, such as pooled procurement that drove prices down, shared data and technical infrastructure, and co-financing agreements that required recipient countries to pay a rising share of vaccine costs over time, eventually graduating off Gavi support entirely as their economies grew.

That co-financing rule was the mechanism that gave Gavi the independence necessary to endure. It was designed to phase the original funder out and transfer funding to permanent owners over time, and it has. Since the policy began in 2008, recipient countries have put in more than $1.9 billion of their own funds; 55 vaccine programs first introduced with Gavi money are now financed entirely by the countries themselves. Along the way, Gavi has helped immunize more than 1.2 billion children.

While this engineered independence makes Gavi stand out as an example, its initial gift was also catalytic, helping spark additional follow-on funding and actions—which is another quality that emerges clearly across other examples of philanthropy with enduring impact.

Catalytic: Does It Spark More Than It Spends?

When the $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition launched in 2021, funded by the Musk Foundation, carbon dioxide removal was still treated by many people as speculative or dismissed as “greenwashing.”

Over four years, the competition convened a global ecosystem of innovators, researchers, students, and investors, helping shape the next generation of carbon removal technologies and catalyzing rapid industry growth at a critical moment for climate action. Of the 1,300+ teams of innovators from 88 countries that came into being as a result of the prize, more than half were formed after the prize was announced and might never have worked on carbon removal without the public challenge the prize created. The prize helped legitimize the industry and brought disparate organizations working on disparate facets of the problem together, helping them see themselves as part of a broader field.

The prize also provided a framework for evaluation across a diverse range of solutions. To win, a team had to remove at least 1,000 metric tons of CO2 in a year and prove it to independent verifiers.

That is the catalytic power of a well-designed prize. A fixed pool of philanthropic money can summon far more talent, capital, and institutional attention than it could fund directly. By XPRIZE's post-prize accounting, the $100 million purse helped unlock more than $3.3 billion for carbon removal and removed hundreds of thousands of metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. The 2025 grand-prize winner, Mati Carbon, is now scaling enhanced rock weathering across farms in India and Africa.

The prize money was only a fraction of the activity it set in motion, yet it effectively catalyzed a whole ecosystem into accelerated action, simultaneously pointing the way to another key characteristic of change that endures: systemic impact.

Systemic Impact: Does It Change the Game?

Starting in 1991, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation began a long campaign against tobacco, investing more than $700 million of its own funds and drawing other funders into the work. Over time, that funding helped build the infrastructure needed to challenge one of the most powerful industries in the world.

The strategy worked on several levels at once. RWJF funded research that documented tobacco’s harms, coalitions of “SmokeLess States” that organized for tobacco policy across the country, and a national advocacy hub, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The aim was to change the environment around tobacco: evidence to reshape public understanding and spur pressure, public pressure to change policy, and policy to make smoking less visible, less accessible, and less socially acceptable.

By the late 1990s, the case against the industry had become much harder to ignore. State attorneys general sued tobacco companies to recover the public costs of treating smoking-related illness, and the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement became one of the largest civil settlements in American history. It required the companies to pay states more than $200 billion over time, restricted major forms of youth marketing, opened industry documents to public view, and created funding for a national campaign to prevent youth smoking.

The settlement created and funded the American Legacy Foundation, now Truth Initiative, to carry the work forward. Its “truth” campaign gave young people a different way to understand smoking by exposing the industry strategy behind teenage addiction. Decades later, the institution is still using that basic approach, now adapted to youth vaping and nicotine addiction more broadly. Teen cigarette smoking has fallen from nearly 23 percent in 2000 to under 2 percent today, even in the face of e-cigarettes and vaping.

This is what a systemic bet can produce, a long, many-sided investment that changes law, public opinion, advocacy capacity, and institutional ownership at the same time.

Transferability: Can Others Own and Evolve It?

Returning to where we began, GivingTuesday may have started in 2012 as an idea on a napkin, but it has grown far beyond that moment. Part of its success stems from the fact that it was built to be given away. Its founders made the brand, the logo, and the campaign playbook free for anyone to use and adapt. That openness is what enabled the idea to transfer so seamlessly, letting it take whatever shape a place needed, whether for a local synagogue’s day of service, GivingTuesday Brazil’s Dia de Doar, or a flood-relief drive run by volunteers in Pakistan.

Within a few years, what began as a $500,000 investment evolved from a marketing idea into a global movement embraced by millions. It catalyzed community-based generosity campaigns, launched efforts in every country and territory on the planet, and normalized a new annual ritual alongside major spending holidays. In the United States alone, donors gave an estimated $3.1 billion on a single GivingTuesday in 2022, and 37 million people took part.

By 2019, the movement had outgrown its parent and spun off as an independent nonprofit. The founders’ design principle—own as little as possible so everyone else can own the rest—is exactly why it kept growing after they let go. It turns out that sometimes napkins can be as durable as marble.

Why They Last

The five dimensions are easiest to describe one at a time, but, in practice, they work best together. For philanthropic investments to endure, they must hit multiple of these qualities at the same time. Durability without independence is an Ozymandias, crumbling the moment a donor’s attention moves on. A catalytic spark without transferability smolders out with its initial gift. Endurance results from the compound effect of these elements.

Fortunately, none of this requires a Carnegie-sized fortune. Smaller donations can have outsized impact and endure well beyond their initial funding with the right set-up. Thinking along these five dimensions is a great place to start.

As with any analysis that learns from successes, there are undoubtedly efforts that met these criteria but, having floundered or fizzled out, are now lost to the dustbin of philanthropy archives. Meeting these five criteria significantly enhances the likelihood of success but is no sure-fire guarantee of it.

At the same time, there are urgent challenges that demand immediate response that are no less vital to our overall personal and societal wellbeing, not just for disaster or emergency relief but to attend to the everyday unmet needs of the hungry, the ill, the dispossessed, the abused. We often use the metaphor of a double helix to describe what makes any effort strong: Across any giving strategy, two strands—one the incremental and daily and the other systemic and enduring—can be braided together to reinforce and strengthen not just each other but the resulting impact.

Which returns us to the question we opened with, the one worth asking of anything you invest in whose enduring impact you care about: Will what you fund outlast you? Whether you have $100 million dollars or $100, if you want to leave a legacy, ask these five questions before you begin.

Read more stories by Talia Milgrom-Elcott & Justin D’Angona.