Rosh Hashanah cards are arriving daily from every organization you have ever given to, Kol Nidre appeals are filling inboxes and families are sitting down to settle the year’s maaser, the tithe of their income. It’s the season for reckoning — for asking not only what you owe and to whom, but what you should give and to whom.

More of that giving now moves through donor-advised funds, which grew 27.9% in fiscal 2024 to $328 billion, according to the Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative. DAFs granted $64.6 billion to charities that year, and Jewish federations, foundations and family funds hold a growing share of that capital. It sits and earns returns, eventually to be granted out according to someone’s sense of what matters. But that someone isn’t always the person who created the fund.

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The infrastructure for holding that capital is more sophisticated than ever before. The infrastructure for explaining why it exists has not kept pace.

Whenever a DAF or family foundation is structured to outlast its founder, by choice or because it defaults to its named successors, one risk follows: longevity of structure is not durability of purpose. A fund can keep granting for years after the founder is gone, functioning exactly as intended but having lost any real connection to the convictions that led to its creation.

How this gap shows up depends on where you sit.

For institutional foundations and federations, it shows up in the boardroom: a founding generation’s priorities get translated into a strategic plan, the plan gets refreshed on a schedule and staff execute against it. New trustees inherit the current funding priorities, but not the deliberations that produced them. They often can’t say what problem the founders were responding to, or what would have to change for the mission to be fulfilled. One practical fix: build a founder’s letter of intent into trustee orientation as required reading, discussed in the room. Then set aside part of one board meeting a year to ask out loud whether the institution is still doing what it was built to do.

For family office and multigenerational foundation boards, the gap shows up at the handoff between generations. A founder’s children or grandchildren inherit both the seat at the table and the obligation to keep granting, without ever being told what the fund was for. They can easily learn the payout requirements. What they rarely get is any account of why — what needs their parents or grandparents set out to address, what beliefs drove their giving, what they’d want preserved if priorities had to shift. A letter of intent helps here as much as it does at an institution, but families have something a foundation board doesn’t: years together before the handoff. The remedy is to bring incoming trustees into real grantmaking conversations well before they hold authority, so that they learn not only why grants are approved but also why prospective ones are declined. The next generation then absorbs the judgment along with the responsibility, not just the mechanism.

For individuals and couples with their own DAFs, there is often no governance at all — no board, no staff, no co-trustee who might have heard what never got written down. If the account holder’s intentions are never said aloud to a spouse, an adult child or an advisor, the fund’s eventual disposition gets decided later by people guessing. The fix is to write a short personal letter of intent alongside the DAF’s paperwork, and talk it through with whoever might one day inherit advisory privileges over the account, rather than assuming the giving pattern will speak for itself.

Jewish practice does not treat the transmission of purpose as automatic. The Shema instructs that belief — and the reasons behind it — be taught diligently to your children, spoken when you sit in your house, when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise (Deuteronomy 6:7). Not modeled silently, but said. Put into words a child can hear, and repeated. 

The assumption embedded in the verse is blunt: Conviction that stays private tends to end with the person who held it.

Most philanthropic structures assume the opposite: that founders’ intentions are self-evident or will be absorbed by osmosis by whoever inherits the fund. The mechanics — the grant cycle, the payout schedule, the list of usual recipients — are preserved, but what doesn’t reliably transmit is the reasoning behind any of it. This is the same kind of gap the Shema guards against at the individual level.  

For donors at any of these levels, the payoff isn’t only risk mitigation. Donors who articulate the why behind their giving often find that the giving — and the organizations they give to — come to mean more to them. Conversations with the next generation deepen, and continuity holds across the handoff in a way that structure alone can’t guarantee.

None of this shows up in a DAF’s balance, a foundation’s payout rate or any of the numbers a board reviews each quarter. But it can be the difference between a fund that’s merely well-capitalized and one that’s still, in any meaningful sense, doing what it was built to do, long after the founder is gone.

Daphna Raskas is the founder of Treasured Letters, where she helps people articulate the values they hope to pass on alongside their financial and philanthropic planning. She holds a Ph.D. in management from Columbia Business School and has spent 25 years leading and advising nonprofit organizations.