With the impossibility of predicting the long term future, how can a donor prepare a statement of intent designed to be effective over centuries?
Successfully deploying the long-term funding infrastructure offered by Ben’s Way Funds Generators[i] will depend on several factors, including effective donor intent documentation. What is the best way with today’s view of the world for donors to express their desires for the gifts they will give to future generations? How do you define success exactly? What should donors understand before committing?
This article reflects on best practices today to express donor intent, and then imagines how these practices might be best expressed when considering enormous distances in time and growing long-term future funding. Stay tuned.
[i] A Ben’s Way Funds Generator is a proposed organization that invests donated seed funds to grow and repeatedly give portions per the donor’s wishes from the portfolio to charity at various set payout periods or targets. Since we hope that a great deal of time for humanity continues after we die, we advocate that society use some of that time to securely fund future societies, by investing funds to grow more new charitable donations, in effect creating a repeating Funds Generator for the benefit of charities.
The term Ben’s Way attributes the inspiration for Funds Generator plans to Benjamin Franklin. He set up a social impact loan business to last 200 years after his passing via his Last Will and Testament. The business was a socially impactful money lender to young, apprenticed artisans from 1790 to 1990. Ultimately, Franklin's donation and legacy of social impact investments compounded his seed funds into major gifts to Boston and Philadelphia at the 100- and 200-year mark. In 2022 dollars, his roughly $283 thousand invested in 1790 grew to become gifts in 1890 of $11.2 million and $13.9 million in 1990. Learn more here.
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash