Exits Lead to Sharing Wisdom and resources from two spend down foundations

The French American Charitable Trust and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies  have both thoughtfully considered how their exits from funding relationships and, eventually, the funder landscape can be useful to other funders. One strategy is to share commissioned reports publicly, so that others can leverage their learnings and wisdom.

"At FACT, our key approach was: Giving More. To us, Giving More meant giving more strategically, giving more money, and giving more leadership. This approach helped FACT make a difference even with a relatively small endowment. We offer our final report in the hope that our experience as a limited life foundation can provide some help and inspiration to others. We urge new donors, colleagues, and others reading this report to think about the principles that became central to our grantmaking. Principles that enabled our small foundation to have a big impact in a short time.”

Diane Feeney

Read Giving More. Making Change. A Journey in Progressive Grant Making.

“Uniquely, ACBP as an operating foundation conceptualized (often with others) and incubated many organizations and programs; nine of which operate at various stages of independence today. As we came closer to the time of spending out, we tried to provide for greater and greater support to the Philanthropies’ core mission, gradually paring away at less integral concerns, and to pave the way to independence for the incubated entities.This report was a joint effort by a coalition of funders that sheds considerable light on young Jews and their relationship with Israel and to the organized Jewish community in general.”

Charles Bronfman 

Read Israel in the Age of Eminem.

What can you share after exiting a grantee relationship or the field? Share it in the comments below or as a submission.

Takeaways are critical, bite-sized resources either excerpted from our guides or written by Candid Learning for Funders using the guide's research data or themes post-publication. Attribution is given if the takeaway is a quotation.

This takeaway was derived from The Effective Exit.