Giving on their own terms
Family philanthropy occupies a distinctive place within the broader philanthropic ecosystem. A new Bridgespan Group landscape study, covering 186 of the world's wealthiest families across 20 economies, offers one of the clearest pictures yet of where its strengths, and limitations, lie.
Families can move first, and stay long after institutions would give up, because so few checks sit between their decision and its deployment, a pattern the study finds distinctive about family philanthropy, and about Asian family philanthropy most of all. The cause is structural. Roughly 94 percent of Asia's wealthiest families are first- or second-generation wealth holders, and the businesses that built their fortunes remain, in 95 percent of cases, under direct family control. Wealth this recent and this concentrated rarely needs anyone else's approval to act.
Bridgespan's companion report documents the pattern in practice. In China, Zhang Yiming and his family committed approximately US$150 million to improve education in Longyan, backing teacher training, technology upgrades, and broader system-wide improvements over many years. In India, Azim Premji's foundation was able to mobilise longstanding relationships, institutional capacity, and corporate infrastructure to coordinate a large-scale response during the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching more than 150 million people. In Colombia, Marcel and Cynda Collins Arsenault entered post-conflict reintegration work in the fragile early period following the 2016 peace accord, before many institutional funders were prepared to engage. The examples differ in geography and purpose, but the report links them to the same underlying feature of family philanthropy: concentrated decision-making authority that allows families to commit early, stay engaged over long periods, and deploy resources with unusual flexibility.
However, there remains much more potential to grow. Currently, barely one family in 10 offers the flexible, general-operating grants that nonprofits value most, and while more than 80 percent of Asian families publicly report outputs, only 25-33 percent report what actually changed as a result. Bridgespan's own conclusion is blunt. The autonomy that lets families take risks others cannot can just as easily let them act on conviction without testing what a problem requires.
The useful question for policymakers and institutional funders, then, is not how to make family-giving bigger or more like everyone else's, but how to work with the terms it already operates on: a government wanting a partner for a decade-long, unproven idea is asking for exactly what this sector supplies; a 10-year, no-strings grant is asking for something the data says is rare almost anywhere. Family philanthropy’s value lies less in matching how everyone else gives than in going where more accountable capital cannot yet follow.
Families can move first, and stay long after institutions would give up, because so few checks sit between their decision and its deployment, a pattern the study finds distinctive about family philanthropy, and about Asian family philanthropy most of all. The cause is structural. Roughly 94 percent of Asia's wealthiest families are first- or second-generation wealth holders, and the businesses that built their fortunes remain, in 95 percent of cases, under direct family control. Wealth this recent and this concentrated rarely needs anyone else's approval to act.
Bridgespan's companion report documents the pattern in practice. In China, Zhang Yiming and his family committed approximately US$150 million to improve education in Longyan, backing teacher training, technology upgrades, and broader system-wide improvements over many years. In India, Azim Premji's foundation was able to mobilise longstanding relationships, institutional capacity, and corporate infrastructure to coordinate a large-scale response during the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching more than 150 million people. In Colombia, Marcel and Cynda Collins Arsenault entered post-conflict reintegration work in the fragile early period following the 2016 peace accord, before many institutional funders were prepared to engage. The examples differ in geography and purpose, but the report links them to the same underlying feature of family philanthropy: concentrated decision-making authority that allows families to commit early, stay engaged over long periods, and deploy resources with unusual flexibility.However, there remains much more potential to grow. Currently, barely one family in 10 offers the flexible, general-operating grants that nonprofits value most, and while more than 80 percent of Asian families publicly report outputs, only 25-33 percent report what actually changed as a result. Bridgespan's own conclusion is blunt. The autonomy that lets families take risks others cannot can just as easily let them act on conviction without testing what a problem requires.
The useful question for policymakers and institutional funders, then, is not how to make family-giving bigger or more like everyone else's, but how to work with the terms it already operates on: a government wanting a partner for a decade-long, unproven idea is asking for exactly what this sector supplies; a 10-year, no-strings grant is asking for something the data says is rare almost anywhere. Family philanthropy’s value lies less in matching how everyone else gives than in going where more accountable capital cannot yet follow.