What Else Can We Do? The Thirteen Intentions of Philanthropy

(Illustration by Vicki Turner) 

A few months ago, I met someone who had just experienced an unimaginable loss: An extraordinary, beloved family member had been killed in a mass shooting that made global headlines. In the aftermath of the tragedy, he wrote a statement of purpose and values to honor her memory. His question was how to translate the statement into action, into something enduring.

His credo was incomparably more human and compelling than any viral LinkedIn post or stylized foundation report. Perhaps that’s unsurprising. Yet I was struck by how little its communitarian and humanitarian vision and ambitions had to do with scale, leverage, power, collective impact, or any other philanthropic trend or buzzword of the moment. It opened my eyes and softened my heart.

Among the many distinctive qualities of his loved one was a beautiful discipline of care. Every night she would ask, “What else can I do for someone?”—and then do it before bed. Inspired by her practice, I committed to sending him a detailed email before the next day was out. I had promised that it would contain a list of philanthropic intentions to reflect on, outlining the varied reasons why people give and how different visions for success result in different playbooks for giving. It was harder to draft than anticipated. I had just assumed there would be any number of such typologies in print and online. But a late night of digging and a panicked gut check with colleagues in practice and academia confirmed that to keep my promise, I would have to create one from scratch.

My new friend’s credo highlighted a more complete and compelling way to think about success, whether pursued by everyday donors or by legacy foundations: one grounded in the intentions that motivate giving. Those intentions reflect enduring human impulses (the virtues and follies); our relationships, communities, and senses of self; and rich and diverse cultural teachings and religious traditions. Seeing giving through the lens of intentions better reflects how the world works and offers a more coherent, ambitious, and pluralistic vision for American philanthropy at a moment when its ideologies, theories of impact, and, yes, tax deductions have all been called into question.

As I pressed “send” before going to bed, it occurred to me that our field desperately needs to pose the same question that prompted the whole exercise. After a year of profound disruptions across the nonprofit sector, now is the time to ask, “What else can we do?”

Our Many Reasons to Give

“Der mentsh trakht, un G-t lakht,” goes the Yiddish adage. “Man plans and G-d laughs.” That expression of irony and resilience seems apt these days for foundations, nonprofits, and NGOs. So many of our best-laid plans and theories of change have unraveled, as the federal government has become a fickle partner, regularly withdrawing support. Nonprofits are in financial duress, layoffs are rippling through the sector, and communities are exposed.

Those hard realities complicate an approach to social change that has dominated the thinking of many funders for a generation: the government hand-off model of achieving scale. The essence of that approach is simple: Philanthropy seeds innovation; government scales it. When it works, it’s elegant. Vaccines reach millions, hunger is alleviated, pre-K education becomes widely available, and initiatives once sustained by donations turn into public line items. But if the government opts out, the model ends up in disarray, and nonprofits and communities are left picking up the pieces.

The best way to deal with multiple compelling visions of moral action in a democracy is to accept that yours may not be the right one and act accordingly. That is not always easy for those who go into the social-impact sector.

Critics may be tempted to blame hubris: foundations presuming to know what works and having the chutzpah to use millions of dollars to try to reorient (“leverage”) public funds on the order of billions. But a fine line distinguishes hubris from impatient optimism. In areas like global health, scaling through the public or private sector remains a vital goal. (Science has made clear that the more kids who get the polio vaccine, the better.) The issue is not that the model is inherently misguided, but rather that it has bred a moral monoculture that equates “doing good” with “getting to scale” and “maximizing impact.” Entire schools of thought, including quite a few vocal proponents of effective altruism, argue that it is not just a worthy goal of philanthropy but the only truly defensible one. The problem is that, as with any monoculture, it’s brittle when conditions change and susceptible to shocks like the one we’re living through.

“Getting to scale” appeals to large funders for a good reason: With great wealth comes great responsibility. If your resources offer a plausible path to “solve” poverty, malaria, or hunger but you just plaster your name on museum wings (with a tax deduction to boot), you could arguably do better with your giving and are leaving moral value on the table. Similar arguments have been made about giving to local soup kitchens, rather than malaria bed-net initiatives, or to religious charities over grassroots movements.

But let’s reflect on how many assumptions are baked into that line of thinking: about “solving” global issues, giving versus hoarding wealth, the value of cultural and religious institutions, the nature of moral action. There’s a profound meshuggaas in the view that there is only one right way to make a difference. The great Rabbi Moses Maimonides spoke of multiple types of ascending tzedakah (charity), the highest being anonymous giving and support that enables self-sufficiency. Neither would likely make the cut in much of today’s social-change discourse, but the Jewish tradition sees them as vital. With apologies to many friends and colleagues, I believe that our moral wisdom is not greater than that of Immanuel Kant, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Confucius, Jesus, the Buddha, or Maimonides, and those moral traditions are not here for your power rankings.

The mid-20th-century American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr suggested that the best way to deal with multiple compelling visions of moral action in a democracy is to accept that yours may not be the right one and adjust accordingly. That prescription is not always easy for those who go into the social-impact sector with strong convictions about what is right and good. In the absence of a pluralistic buffer—of awareness and acceptance of other people’s diverse moral intentions—we can (and often do) turn into a bunch of haters and moral scolds. It’s not a good look, and, as recent headlines demonstrate, it hasn’t exactly been subtle or effective. We can do better.

A Typology of Intentions

An influential philanthropic movement of recent years has elevated power sharing and power building, advancing frames like “decolonizing wealth” and practices like participatory grantmaking and trust-based philanthropy. The intention (to oversimplify) is to shift power and resources from funders to groups and communities that historically or currently lack or have been stripped of that power, so that they can define their own priorities and futures. Success, then, is not primarily about achieving some quantitative scale of impact; it depends on how the work is done and who decides what.

(Illustration by Vicki Turner) 

That approach has transformed fields like community development, where residents are uniquely positioned to define their own priorities and needs when it comes to neighborhood assets or public safety. But the same logic suggests a different approach if the goal is to develop a vaccine to stop a pandemic—a situation where scientific expertise and speed matter most. The point isn’t that one approach is right and the other wrong, in the abstract. It’s that the right tactic, and the definition of success, depends on the intentions that guide giving.

American philanthropy is animated by at least 13 intentions, each with its own view of success and moral logic of what good looks like. After I vetted multiple versions of that typology with practitioners and academics, every intention within it stood out as genuinely distinct and common enough to matter. I wish the list were shorter, but I found that combining intentions always overlooked something important.

I have outlined the 13 intentions, including their definitions, examples, and common tactics, and visions of success, in a table. (See a modified version below. Download the full table here.) They are clustered into four families—communitarian, transformative, declarative, and humanitarian—that illustrate their connections. That struck me, on reflection, as a better grouping than “instrumental” (trying to do something) versus “expressive” (trying to say something), since every act of giving has both instrumental and expressive dimensions, just in different proportions. The point isn’t to force every act of giving into a box, but to recognize the full range of intentions that drive giving, only some of which tie success to scale.

People can also, of course, be driven by self-serving intentions: personal enrichment, hedonic satisfaction, pay for play, PR, reputation laundering, even enlightened self-interest. A cynic might even say these are the most common intentions for giving. Maybe so. But very few people give joylessly, and what success looks like in those cases is relatively straightforward and reasonably transparent, so I’ve chosen not to belabor that here.

What It Means To Be ‘Effective’

The table’s typology of intentions does more than clarify and decode different approaches to philanthropy; it also offers a broader and better approach to understanding and assessing “effectiveness.” It suggests that the term “effective” is inherently contextual and helps avoid the category error of foisting one intention’s vision of success onto another’s. It highlights that the best way to judge the effectiveness of an act of service or philanthropy is to ask why it was undertaken in the first place and what it sought to achieve.

Scaling, for instance, is a crucial imperative for those hoping to eradicate tuberculosis or increase access to safe drinking water (Intention 6: Tackle a Major Problem). But it’s not really on the minds of donors seeking to memorialize victims of a tragedy and ensure its lessons are never forgotten (Intention 2: Give Back or Memorialize), funders of block clubs and neighborhood groups aiming to build community cohesion and resiliency (Intention 1: Strengthen Community), grant makers of theoretical research hoping to unravel mysteries of the universe (Intention 5: Accelerate Breakthroughs), or people witnessing hunger in their neighborhood and giving time and money to local pantries as an expression of solidarity and shared humanity (Intention 12: Offer a Helping Hand). Casting such generosity as “suboptimized” misses the intention—the motivation to give in the first place—entirely.

Some of the most storied, important philanthropic contributions of the past century track that lesson. Consider the following three examples, none of which was driven by a quantifiable calculus of “getting to scale” or “maximizing impact,” yet all of which were transformational.

1. The Ford Foundation’s support of the Civil Rights Movement | Between 1960 and 1968, Ford increased funding for civil rights groups from 2.5 percent of its annual giving to 36.5 percent, supporting the historic work of groups like the NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund, and the National Urban League. It’s impossible to understand those investments without accounting for the foundation’s desire to take a stand on civil rights (Intention 10: Take a Stand) and build the power of minority groups in the United States (Intention 9: Build Power). Attempting to quantify Ford’s relative contribution to the transformative success of those organizations is folly and very much beside the point.

Other, better indicators of its success exist. Several years ago, while wandering through the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, I came across a flyer from the Citizens Council of Greater New Orleans calling on “all white citizens” to stop buying Ford products to “dry up at least one source of money that is being used to destroy our Southern way of life.” I thought it a remarkable artifact of philanthropic impact and sent a photo to a friend at Ford. Minutes later, I got a call from an unknown number. It was Ford Foundation president Darren Walker, running to the book fair, wanting to know where he could find the flyer. It hangs in the foundation’s headquarters to this day.

2. Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington’s schools in the American South | Businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald teamed up with the famed educator and civil rights leader Booker T. Washington to build more than 5,000 Rosenwald Schools in the early 20th century, aiming to support Black students in the segregated South. That partnership became a cornerstone of modern American philanthropy. Rosenwald’s foundation required community matching funds, reflecting a desire to build durable civic assets through community ownership (Intention 3: Build and Sustain the Commons) and to promote the potential of thousands of children and young adults otherwise cut out of public education (Intention 13: Promote Potential). Success for Rosenwald and Washington wasn’t just about the number of schools built or students served (though those figures mattered greatly); it was also about dignity, agency, potential, community investment, and ultimately changing an unjust reality in public education. Their efforts represented American philanthropy at its best, even if it lacked an impact-optimization calculus.

3. The Detroit “Grand Bargain” | Detroit’s recovery from decades of depopulation and disinvestment hung in the balance after its state-appointed emergency manager filed for bankruptcy in 2013. Creditors came to town to assess the value of every city asset, up to and including Homer, a sloth at the zoo; retirees faced catastrophic pension cuts; priceless, historic pieces at the Detroit Institute of Art were on the block; and the city risked a decade of litigation that would have undercut any economic turnaround.

In a story told many times over, a coalition of funders and nonprofits banded together to contribute more than $800 million to help the city exit bankruptcy protection in exchange for protected pensions and irreplaceable holdings. That partnership was deeply communitarian. It was driven by the desire to support a Detroit community with which every funder had a special connection (Intentions 1: Strengthen Community and 2: Give Back), as well as protect vital civic assets and social contracts (Intention 3: Build and Sustain the Commons) amid an unprecedented crisis in a great American city (Intention 11: Respond to a Crisis).

At the time, I asked the president of one of the partnering foundations, whose contributions amounted to the largest gift in its long history, the obvious questions of precedent and opportunity cost. How would he answer a similar call from, say, Stockton, California? Or critics who pointed out how far $800 million would go toward addressing global hunger?

“I’m not worried about precedent,” he replied. “We have a special obligation to this place. It’s where we’re from and a big part of why [this foundation] even exists.” He similarly cast the hunger question as needlessly zero-sum and a non sequitur to boot: It assumed that the participating funders would have otherwise focused on that other issue or come together around it in a way they did for a once-in-a-lifetime crisis in their hometown.

All three of these contributions were as exceptional in effect as they were common in intent. Similar intentions have animated many of American philanthropy’s most iconic moments, from Clara Barton’s pioneering work with the Red Cross to the crucial role of mutual-aid societies in the Underground Railroad. They also drive most acts of everyday giving. Those intentions are not therefore better or more effective in the abstract than other motivations for giving, nor are the examples beyond critique. Every intention can be (and often is) pursued clumsily and with ideological blinkers, and, sadly, more than a few movements in our field are convinced that theirs is the only right way to do philanthropy. But only a mono-cultural echo chamber would suggest that the intentions that inspired such transformative historic acts are somehow inevitably less “effective” than its own ways of doing things.

Using the Typology

The typology also offers a toolbox of sorts, since a similar pattern flows from the why to the how: the targets and tactics employed by donors. The table illustrates how different intentions tend to inspire different approaches to giving. For instance, funders hoping to advance critical values or norms, or a vision of excellence in work, life, or art, often gravitate to exemplar prizes like the Nobels, Bookers, and Academy Awards (Intention 8: Elevate Values). When well designed and delivered, such prizes are extraordinary tools for attracting attention and advancing narratives, by demonstrating what great looks like. But they are generally less useful for sustaining shared civic assets like parks and libraries (Intention 3: Build and Sustain the Commons).

The basic insight isn’t novel: Choosing the right tool for the job requires you to be clear about what you’re trying to get done and why. Donors hoping to share joy and celebration (Intention 4) and promote human flourishing (Intention 7) often turn to commissions, fellowships, and forms of universal basic income in arts and culture. The arts are arguably the most powerful driver of change, meaning, and purpose in our lives and in the histories of entire communities and civilizations. Yet it’s unlikely that a randomized controlled trial will ever fully capture the totality of that impact or quantify it in a way that guarantees a certain bang per buck. But it’s upside down to conclude that such support is somehow wasted, because attributable impact isn’t the point—meaning, beauty, and flourishing are.

Philanthropic monocultures can invert that logic, offering up hammers in search of nails. Some funders seek to maximize disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and others run participatory grantmaking processes with a certain agnosticism to the issues at play. That’s often entirely defensible, in some cases even very compelling. But it’s a hard sell to people who care deeply about specific places or problems, or are motivated to give for different reasons. That is why so many foundations, in recent years, have hit their heads against a wall trying to convince other funders to coinvest on their priority issues using their preferred vehicles and tactics. They seem to believe that where and how people give is somehow delinked from why they give. As in so many parts of life, if you don’t understand people’s whys (or care to learn) and meet them on those terms, you’re unlikely to influence their hows. You end up talking past one another.

In practice, intentions can blur and overlap. Donors are often moved by several intentions at once and can back the same causes and organizations for different reasons. After all, most nonprofits cite multiple motivations in their work. The same holds for coalitions: Most would fall apart, or fail to form in the first place, without overlapping intentions rising above other disagreements and goals. This overlap is a feature, not a bug, of the typology. It reflects how giving actually works.

Youth development programs illustrate this well. A funder might support a scholarship to address disparities in education (Intention 6: Tackle a Major Problem), sustain a program that changed their own life (Intention 2: Give Back or Memorialize), or expand the horizons of a group of students (Intention 13: Promote potential)—or all three! All three offer a powerful motivation to give and may be evident in a single gift; yet they each tie to a different, if complementary, vision of success.

(Illustration by Vicki Turner) 

Just as individuals regularly blend intentions, the social-impact sector relies on donors pursuing different intentions in concert—often without realizing it. Put another way, your success (no matter the intention) almost always depends on work done by people with other motivations and employing very different tactics.

Anyone who has spent five minutes in effective altruist circles has gotten the hard sell on the bang per buck value of purchasing malarial bed nets over, say, training seeing eye dogs. But what happens when the child who receives a bed net in that faraway place wakes up and is bitten by a mosquito on her walk to school? Where does she get medication? What clinic can she go to? Who will treat her? And ultimately, do you care about that particular child or not? Because other people do. Her family and community, of course, but also place-based funders with roots in her region (Intention 2); global NGOs working to improve her country’s health system (Intention 6); breakthrough-focused donors who supported the development of the dual insecticide nets that you’re hoping to distribute, as well as translational research for new treatments (Intention 5). Your DALY breakthrough owes quite a bit to donors with entirely different intentions and tactics, who measure success in entirely different ways.

Ultimately, we can and should accept that other intentions are powerful and valid and project different visions of success, even while caring passionately about our own. Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher of pluralism, beautifully captured that balance in The Ethics of Authenticity: “Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God, or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.”

One of the most important questions funders need to be able to answer is, “Why do you care?” But their credibility also depends on how they go about their work, and of course, the results of their actions. So it is entirely appropriate to disagree about the “what” and the “how”—about the best ways to pursue an intention on its own terms. Every intention contains multiple potential theories of change, implicit (or explicit) timelines, and available tactics. Our field is only enriched by debates about whether the best way to achieve a science breakthrough is by launching a prize or by supporting early-career scientists; or whether one policy approach or another is more likely to improve K-12 outcomes; or whether the best way to broaden scale and access to glasses is through market mechanisms or government hand-off.

Pluralistic, Not Passionless

Applying the typology is a prescription not for a passionless sector but rather for a more explicitly pluralistic one. While I have focused on the principles underlying that prescription, we also have pragmatic reasons to be more open to different flavors of philanthropy.

There are as many ways to give well as there are to waste money. But the right test of both is best defined by the intentions that drive giving, not by a singular theory of how philanthropy should work.

Eggs in more baskets | A weakness of the government hand-off model is its susceptibility to politics. That is not because foundations are overly political or ideological (though, if we’re being honest, at times that hasn’t helped) but because one administration’s priorities have increasingly become another’s targets: Choice Neighborhoods, Medicaid expansion, student-debt relief, and so on.

We’ve concentrated risk in the government hand-off model at precisely the moment when political volatility has become the norm. This isn’t just about hedging bets; it’s about recognizing that durability requires a diversity of approaches. A monoculture leaves us vulnerable, and nonprofits and the communities they serve reap the consequences.

A stronger line of defense | Recent justifications of our sector have notably relied on communitarian and humanitarian intentions close to home. “Nonprofits serve the most vulnerable Americans,” wrote Diane Yentel of the National Council of Nonprofits, in response to reports that the Trump administration would initiate criminal investigations into the Open Society Foundations. “[They] are core to the success of our communities, connecting neighbors to safe shelter, nutritious meals, vital health care, and more.” The Council on Foundations, Independent Sector, the National Council of Nonprofits, and United Philanthropy Forum issued a joint statement that argued for “ideas and information [to] flourish free from government interference”—a pluralistic principle if ever one existed.

The sector defends itself using communitarian and pluralistic language, while foundation leaders pursue technical theories of system change at the national and global scales. And that’s okay. We ourselves may be motivated to build power, accelerate a breakthrough, optimize DALYs per dollar, or pursue justice, rather than charity. But we would do well to remember that the latter is the bulwark of public support for our sector. It is how most Americans practice, experience, and understand philanthropy. I have it on good authority (and personal experience) that even foundation executives tend to be driven by those “charitable” intentions when they make their own personal donations. This is not hypocrisy. It’s evidence that we already know multiple intentions are vital and legitimate—we’ve just created professional norms and echo chambers that pretend otherwise.

Accounting for the everyday | Finally, we should want our sector’s norms to bear at least a passing resemblance to actual everyday practice. Consider: Why do foundation executives personally give in different ways than the organizations they lead do? It may be for the same reason that so many foundations shift course after their living donors pass, or when their boards professionalize: because it’s not their money, and because of assumptions that narrow the range of intentions on the table as a result. Defaulting to the head and losing sight of the heart is all too easy.

I don’t want to overstate the implications here. Many large funders have very good reasons to focus on big global problems (Intention 6) and accelerating breakthroughs (Intention 5) and have made world-changing contributions along those lines. That motivation is a huge part of why I went into philanthropy. But there are so many other ways to make a meaningful difference. For instance, the past decade has seen many large institutional funders (even ones quite set in their ways) create “opportunity” and “discretionary” funds to give back to their home community, or bear witness on an issue outside their normal focus areas. Those are not lapses, but rather examples of these funders embracing other ways of making a difference. Foundations often think about their giving in terms of issue portfolios; they might consider constructing those portfolios in terms of intentions as well.

For the rest of us, small-scale donors and living funders alike, there are as many ways to give well as there are to waste money. But the right test of both is best defined by the intentions that drive giving, not by a singular theory of how philanthropy should work. All of us giving in the same way is part of what got the sector into its current mess. Embracing a diversity of philanthropic intentions and approaches only adds strength and resiliency to the sector, as well as a pluralistic orientation at a time when our community is in greater need of solidarity than sanctimony.

Asking the Question

In 2025, even nonprofit organizations and leaders who did everything right and judiciously followed the model of government-driven scale ended up struggling. The natural response of funders who encouraged them down that road is to point fingers at the current administration and hope and pray that this is a bridge period on the road back to normalcy.

But what if it isn’t? What if we’re facing some volatile new normal? We have a mission-driven obligation to reassess our theories of social change accordingly. Thinking about intentions is a good place to start, even if that ends up pointing to approaches outside philanthropy’s comfort zone—like focusing on market-driven rather than government-driven scale, stepping up our spending rates to support more scaling ourselves (versus constantly trying to “leverage” others), or diversifying our goals to be not just about scale. Despite our best-laid plans, we’re learning painfully what happens when a singular theory of impact collapses.

Asking “What else can we do?” points toward a more pluralistic and resilient future, because even if we can somehow wait it out, the past year has revealed the brittleness of philanthropic monoculture. The remedy isn’t to abandon ambition but rather to recognize that “doing good” and “getting to scale” are not synonymous, and that a sector of diverse intentions and moral horizons is itself a form of social insurance that leaves us better equipped to weather whatever comes next. Pluralism is a strength, a hedge against hubris, shocks, and paralysis. The health of the field and of our civic life depends on many kinds of giving.

That question will suggest different things for different funders. Large foundations might construct portfolios balanced across intentions, not just issue areas. Individual donors might start with their own intentions, including visceral, human-centered ones, rather than rigid boxes of how to give “well.” And all of us can practice fictional coach Ted Lasso’s wisdom of being “curious, not judgmental” when encountering giving that looks different from our own.

I’ve come to think that the operative question for philanthropy isn’t always how to make the biggest difference, but how to make a meaningful one. My friend understood that intuitively. In the wake of tragedy, he didn’t ask, “How can I maximize impact and scale?” He asked how to honor his loved one’s memory and values, including her discipline of asking, “What else can I do?” That question—rooted in love, not leverage—offers wisdom for our entire field. “What else can we do?” is not just about public-private partnerships or DALYs. It is also about keeping faith with memory, community, and shared humanity. The more our sector honors that question and its implications, the more philanthropy’s future will be worthy of its name: love of humanity.

Read more stories by Ariel Simon.