In Parts 1 and 2, we focused on how next gen donors want to revolutionize philanthropy to prioritize impact and innovation, retool strategy, and go all in with their every asset—time, talent, treasure, and ties. We learned that they don't necessarily want to change what causes or issues major donors support so much as how they support those causes.

In Part 3, we turn to the questions of why emerging next gen donors give and especially who they are and what makes them tick. What we learned might surprise you.

Values, Not Valuables

If you follow pop culture, you might label wealthy Millennials and Gen Xers as “self‐centered” or “entitled.” We all see stories about the decadence of the “Rich Kids of Instagram.” But if you listen to next gen donors like John R. Seydel and Justin Rockefeller—who are highlighted in this chapter—you get a very different picture.

In fact, in our combined 40 years in this field, we have found that most next gen donors are driven primarily by values, not valuables. Regardless of their wealth and privilege, their philanthropy is motivated more by what they believe in and care about than by a desire for praise or other less noble impulses.

Our research for this book has confirmed our experience and assumptions. In surveying major donors ages 21 to 40 about the importance of various reasons for engaging in philanthropy, “supporting a mission or cause that I believe in, and that fits with my personal values” came in first out of 23 choices. Nearly every single next gen donor identified that reason for giving as “very important.” The second‐highest‐ranked reason—“fulfilling my duty as a person of privilege to give back to society”—similarly reflects their values orientation, as does “helping the less fortunate and the disadvantaged,” which also ranked highly. At the bottom of the list? “Receiving some sort of sincere recognition or thanks,” “having the chance to attend a social event,” and “receiving some sort of tangible benefit” (like event tickets).

In‐depth interviews added dimension to this data. Next gen donors talked a lot about the moral responsibilities that come with wealth and about actions informed by values. “You can be comfortable, but there is a lot of need in the world, and you have the ability to help people. It is a privilege, but there is the responsibility that goes with that.” This same next gen donor recalls being told, “Yes, our family has money and we are lucky, and you should never flaunt that.” A self‐made donor we interviewed emphasized values over valuables as well:

I don't feel like I'm shortchanging myself or I'm suffering due to my giving money away. I live an extremely comfortable life, and I give 50 percent of my income. And I know there are other people who could do the same. I'm uniquely positioned to get my peers in the tech sector more engaged in giving. There are a lot of people who have money and a lot of people who actually have pretty good values, so I think there's a lot of room for people to be giving more. It feels like an opportunity partly because it's not like I'm twisting people's arms. I think that if you give people the chance to figure out what it is they want to do and remove the barriers—maybe give them a little push to try it out—I think it grows from there.

The responsibility that most next gen donors feel regarding their wealth is not just a responsibility to avoid ostentation; it is a motivating desire to do good. “Philanthropy matters. It is a part of how you engage with the world. It is a part of being a responsible member of a community. It is part of being an adult.” The profound way in which these individuals are driven by values, and live out their values in all the choices they make, is one of the hallmarks of next gen donors.

Origins, Where the Values Come From

Giving to express values of some sort is a common motive conveyed by older major donors as well, as is the desire to give out of a sense of obligation as a person of privilege.¹ In fact, most next gen donors say they learned the value of giving from their parents and grandparents. We actually heard this from both those with inherited wealth and those with self‐made wealth, from young techies to entrepreneurial trailblazers.

One self‐made earner asserts, “Our parents have modeled for us, my wife and I, this significance of giving back—giving back to the community, thinking about others, thinking about the world around us, and being proactive forces for good.” Another alludes to her family's strong values: “It was ingrained in us that those who have a lot must give a lot; if you have, you must also give back.” And this donor has no doubts about where his philanthropic values come from, “I would say that, without question, my obligation and duty to do this came from my parents and the childhood I had. They were working on boards when I was young. They were giving money away before I could talk. That is what we do.”

Michele Pollack, a vice president at Goldman Sachs, describes in a recent media profile how her grandparents' experiences as Holocaust survivors inform her engagement as a funder and volunteer leader with the nonprofit Selfhelp, which provides a range of community‐based services to seniors and vulnerable New Yorkers in a way that Michele feels embodies the values of determination, grit, and dignity she learned from her grandmother, “Bubby.”²

Despite being children of the Information Age bombarded with social media all day, and despite their passion for fomenting an Impact Revolution in philanthropic practice, next gen donors typically follow their family's lead when it comes to the origins of their value system. They might disagree with older generations on the how of giving, but they don't disagree on the why, because they learned why from their parents and grandparents. In fact, 89.4 percent of the total population of next gen donors we surveyed said their giving was influenced by their parents, and 62.6 percent said their grandparents. This transmission of philanthropic values within families is often closely connected to the most significant family stories. Take the next gen donor below who shares a classic American success story with philanthropy at its core:

We actually have a letter that accompanied my great‐uncle when he came to the United States by himself at age 15. The letter says, “If you should be so lucky as to make a great fortune in your new country, always remember that comes with responsibility and is connected with turning it back around and being a part of a community.” It puts it in this sort of moral context. It is not your money but money you are a steward of, and it is your obligation, your spiritual and moral obligation, to turn that back around.

John R. Seydel also feels he inherited his values from his family, including a profound commitment to environmental sustainability. John R. is the grandson of Ted Turner, founder of CNN—the world's first live 24‐hour global news network—and the United Nations Foundation, established with a billion‐dollar grant to promote a more peaceful, more prosperous, and more just world. Below, John R. describes how he is driven by the values he learned from his parents and grandparents and how they demonstrated those lessons both in what they said and how they live.

John R. deeply respects his predecessors and the values they passed down to him—values like hard work, risk‐taking, sustainability, and care for people and the earth. His grandparents and parents exposed him to people and places that helped him internalize the family's values while also encouraging him to begin to make them his own.

A Delicate Balance

In the next three chapters, we will hear about many ways that these next gen donors are trying to find a delicate balance between the past and the future—in this case, between receiving respected values from the past and beginning to develop their own expressions of values and ways of living them. Like this donor, they seek a balance between respecting and revolutionizing, honoring and becoming, being grateful and forging their own paths: “I think you can hold onto tradition and the core of why the tradition is there and still evolve it. Christmas provides a nice metaphor for this. The traditions of Christmas are the tree, the lights, the presents, the stockings, etc. But how each generation interprets that is open. I think we are living along the family tradition, but our window dressing is maybe a little bit different.”

Each generation's unique experiences inform who they are and how they see the world. Therefore, each generation expresses its values—including inherited values—in ways unique to its generational personality.⁵ “I think my values stayed the same [as my predecessors'], but my approach has actually completely changed,” points out one next gen donor. “My siblings and I learned the sense of charity and the importance of giving back at home yet are applying it around the world in our own ways.”

Crafting and expressing this balance between the past and the future is still a work in progress for most. Each emerging adult needs to individuate, to decide which family values to internalize and which to implement differently or leave behind to make room for his or her own. Regardless of our socioeconomic status, we all feel this tension to some degree. We all struggle with how to respect and honor the past that gave us our start while yearning to reenvision a brighter future. But for next gen donors this struggle takes on added weight as they live under the scrutiny of a spotlight. Plus, they know that how they end up resolving this tension will have a great impact on society.

Justin Rockefeller, whom we first heard from in Chapter 4, invested time in learning about his own famous family history by becoming engaged with family institutions, from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Japan Society to their many charitable foundations. But as we see next, Justin also talks about respecting the family while helping the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to divest of fossil fuels, migrating its endowment to impact investing and creating The ImPact, a pledge and a platform he cofounded to have families commit to impact investing and to share data about investments in this realm. He, too, pays respect to his roots, honoring the family's value of giving through his service on boards, yet he is working to evolve their investments to better reflect a current expression of next gen values.

Justin's story echoes so much of what we have talked about in this chapter. To start, he is driven by values. While he hails from an American dynasty and presumably could have done anything as a Rockefeller, we see instead that he is working hard, aligning his values with his giving and investing to make an impact in the world.

Living Seamlessly and Managing Up

Justin is absolutely walking his talk. He is illustrating something we have seen in significant numbers among next gen donors: the aim to live seamlessly, to express, as Justin describes, their “personal, professional, and philanthropic values” consistently, and to make sure their behaviors reflect those values.

Mary Galeti, who we met in Chapter 3, describes these personal, professional, and philanthropic values as now being integrated: “It feels more important than maybe it did for previous generations, who saw social life as very social, professional life as professional, and then family life as all about family. We, I think, see those as more integrated into the self. It is all aligned on this trajectory of whatever it is that we are heading to fund and to be as people. If we lived aligned with our values, we will find meaning as well as impact.”

Another next gen donor we interviewed concurred with Mary's point that next gen donors want to bring all of themselves, aggregating what they have from all parts of their lives, when they step up as a donor. He actually presented this notion as his personal mission:

The single, impelling purpose in my life is to maximize the value that I create for the world with the resources that I have. I think about the financial resources that I have, which are all inherited. I think about the relational, intellectual, spiritual, political, and other resources that I have, and I want to align all of those toward a common purpose. I have a very clear sense of what value my wealth has created for me. It has given me an opportunity to achieve my full potential as a person. This is kind of a cliché line, but I think money is often the most and least important thing you can give.

These next gen donors all speak to a desire to have their values align with their actions, whether as donors, investors, social entrepreneurs, consumers, or parents. A self‐made next gen donor we interviewed explained it this way: “I have a desire to do good in the world and to do things to improve the quality of life for other people. It's an intentional theme informing where I want to spend my time, how I take my kids to volunteer, and the impact I want to have on people. Philanthropy is another part of that intention.” Another put it more simply, saying, “Philanthropy is not just something that you do; it is very much a part of who you are.”

Some of the donors we spoke with not only want to live seamlessly but also take the initiative to manage up, encouraging more careful values alignment within their families and advisors. “As much as we may have heard from our parents or investment advisors while we were growing up, that ‘you make money with this hand, you give away with the other hand,’ I think that is being challenged by my generation.” How older generations respond to next gen donors managing up will play out over the next decades, but a shared sense of values seems to be the best place to ease the tension of change across generations, even if how those values get implemented starts to look different.

What Does This Mean?

Many older generations of Americans may view values‐aligned decision‐making as a privilege or a luxury. They often come from a place where just being able to choose a profession counts as a luxury. Many of them took jobs or learned trades because it was the best or only way to provide for their families. The idea of grappling with how to give away one's wealth might seem decadent. But members of the next generation—across all economic levels—don't see wants and needs as mutually exclusive. In a study of college‐educated, full‐time‐employed Millennials from 29 countries, 60 percent choose jobs that had a “sense of purpose”; and among businesses where Millennials say there is a strong sense of purpose, there is significantly higher reporting of financial success and employee satisfaction.⁸ Generation Impact wants to live in what Aaron Hurst calls a “purpose economy,” one “where value lies in establishing purpose for employees and customers—through serving needs greater than their own, enabling personal growth and building community.”⁹

Next gen major donors share this desire for values‐driven choices in all parts of their lives. Victoria Rogers in Chapter 5 is a good example of a Millennial who aligns her deeply held belief in accessible art with her many gifts of time, talent, treasure, and ties. Justin Rockefeller similarly notes how Millennials, whether donors or not, “already align their money and their values through their consumer choices and their employment choices,” and assumes they want to align their giving and investing as well.

Of course, the consequences of how these high‐capacity members of the next gen choose to act on this desire for purpose are far‐reaching and great. The choices they make will likely have outsized impacts for all of us and all we care about. As such, we need to pay close attention to the values next gen donors want to enact through their giving and how they want to express these values.

In short, if you want to engage effectively with the next generation, you need to start by engaging them around values, as values drive the seamless way in which they want to live. Ask questions about their values rather than selling your nonprofit's mission or your advisory firm's services. Begin conversations around values, not around contributions or sales.

At 21/64, Sharna's team sees firsthand how next gen donors' values drive their decision‐making. To help donors articulate their driving values, 21/64 created a simple but powerful deck of Motivational Values Cards, assembled by listening to the words next gen donors use to describe their motivation values. By sorting the deck, donors can quickly reflect on what's most important to them at any time. Sharna and her team urge nonprofit fundraisers, advisors, parents, and others who work with next gen donors to start by asking them to clarify what they value most. Nonprofits can determine whether a prospect's values align with their mission before investing too much time in cultivating someone who won't be a fit. Advisors can offer values exercises as a helpful tool when clients are writing statements of intent to accompany the philanthropic vehicles they are forming. And for families and giving circles, having a common language around values, even agreeing upon a few core values, enables individuals in a group to more easily and effectively make decisions together.

Taking a few minutes out of busy schedules to articulate values can seem a waste of time to some high‐powered donors. Similarly, as fundraisers feel pressure to make an ask in the few minutes they have with donors, or as advisors push to review quarterly investment returns with clients, the groundwork around values often gets brushed aside. This can hinder relationships with next gen donors, especially as they want to clarify who they are and what they value in order to make decisions in alignment with their values. If we don't “go slow to go fast,” we risk undermining the very outcomes that next gen donors want to achieve.

For those working not only with next gen donors but also with multigenerational families who give, beginning with values becomes even more critical to the success of any work the family will do together. Without helping families to articulate and prioritize their collective underlying values, families and those who interact with them are often left navigating conflicts between one generation that wants to fund, say, scholarships in the local community versus the next gen donors who want to fund microcredit loans globally. But if next gen donors and their elders realize that the next gen first learned its values from parents and grandparents, these underlying values can serve as a bridge across the generations that helps them find a way through these sorts of differences in philanthropic interests. Remember, the fact that next gen donors want their values to drive how and why they give presents the greatest potential to benefit us all in this Golden Age of Giving.