As we start the 2020s, we can quickly look back to the last decade to see what’s changed in the world of philanthropy to help us determine what some of the rising trends will be, as stated in an Inside Philanthropy article.
Big Philanthropy Will Get Bigger We all know that throughout the 2010s, we saw new faces emerge in the group of the Forbes 400, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates. In the past decade, the Forbes 400 has doubled their overall worth of 1.3 trillion to almost 3 trillion dollars. As the average age of people on the list is about 67 years old, the philanthropists on the list are most likely going to grow eager to dispose of their assets as they get older. We’re most likely going to see incredible sums of money become available for grants.
High-Impact Philanthropy Will Also Grow We can safely assume that millennials are going to become the forefront of the philanthropic movement. Think about GiveWell, which had only just started around the ‘10s, now has a total of $500 million in gifts to high-impact charities. We as a society are more focused on how best we can impact the world through the money we give to charities, not just giving for the sake of giving. As millennials and gen-z become the older generations, there’s going to be a shift in corporate philanthropy to more focused philanthropy.
There Will Be Big Scandals in the Philanthropic World It’s no surprise that we as a society are becoming more focused on what we spend our money on, and it’s more than likely the same for charities as well. As we become more comfortable with investigating who exactly gives money to charities, there are going to be a couple of scandals that go along with that. Not everyone who gives money to charities is doing it for the good of everyone, like Donald Trump, who donated to his own foundation for his own personal gain. There are also going to be scandals about bad behavior and abuse the wealthiest people in the world have done, like the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. There are going to be scandals because charities took money from people like him.