In 1881, Andrew Carnegie paid for the construction of one of his first libraries in Dunfermline, Scotland, the town where he was born into poverty. As a boy with no money, Carnegie had borrowed books from a private library that a wealthy man opened to working children on weekends. Over the following decades, he and his foundation funded thousands more, over 1,600 in the United States alone. The name carved above the door was never the point. They were built around his belief that access to knowledge should not belong only to those born near privilege, money, or power.

On October 3, 1904, Mary McLeod Bethune opened a school for Black girls in Daytona with $1.50, five students, benches built from packing crates, and a conviction that they deserved an education the world was not prepared to offer them. The Jim Crow South had a clear message for “those girls” about what they were owed. Nothing. That small school was a response to it. What grew into Bethune-Cookman University began with one teacher’s refusal to accept that message – shared by a few students – and was rooted in a vision that someone had to insist was possible.

Around the same years, Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and Black communities across the South helped build a network of schools for Black children under segregation. By the 1930s, there were close to 5,000 of them. Local families contributed money, land, and labor alongside philanthropic dollars and often raised the schoolhouse with their own hands. Before any of this became a chapter in an American history book, it was a roof, a teacher, and a room where a child could learn.

Each one started as an answer to a specific human need. Open the library. Teach the girls. Build the school. They were built to open access, meet need, expand opportunity, or make a future visible before it was widely accepted as possible. The answers outlived their founders and settled into institutions, and those institutions picked up meaning along the way: a family name, civic pride, a diploma on the wall.

For a rising donor, that inherited meaning isn’t always enough. The institution has to show where it’s headed today and why that direction matters now. For them, the institution is not the reason. It’s the vehicle that takes them on the route to something they already care about. And if that vehicle is too hard to understand, too abstract, or too focused on itself, the donor will look elsewhere to get them where they want to go.

Rising donors haven’t stopped giving, nor have they stopped believing in philanthropy. The National Alumni Survey has run the numbers for four straight years, and its findings show that generosity holds. In 2024, 81% of alumni called giving important, and 77% gave. In 2025, 82% gave or volunteered. What hasn’t moved significantly is the share who give to their own alma mater: 31%, then 35%. Two in five say their alma mater is not a philanthropic priority at all, and among Millennials and Gen Z, it is more than half.

So where is the money going? The same survey answers that. Among Millennial and Gen Z donors, 13% gave to higher education last year. 37% gave to individuals through GoFundMe-style campaigns. 34% gave to civil rights and social justice work. Rising donors are funding needs they can see, and attached to people they can picture.

To understand the donor of tomorrow, perhaps we need to look beyond the loyal alumnus of recent yesteryear and go back further in our histories, to the founding philanthropists. They didn’t give to preserve anything. They gave to fix a need they could see. In the same way, rising donors aren’t looking to simply give back to preserve an organization, but rather to give forward to help solve a real human need. Rising donors are not abandoning the founders’ mindset. They are acting on it, just not through you.

So borrow from what works. The attraction of a crowdfunded or peer-to-peer fundraising campaign is that you see exactly who you are helping and exactly what your money does. It’s harder for a large organization to offer that. It offers the endowment and areas of greatest need, and meanwhile, the donor feels the distance. Let’s close it. Put a real person in front of them – the student, the patient, the family, and show what their gift changes this year. Then show the part that an institution can do that a single gift cannot: how the change continues and grows, year after year, for someone the donor will never meet. Carnegie’s libraries ran for a century. Bethune’s school is still teaching. That’s what scale buys, and it’s yours to offer.

The peer institution down the street was never what you should worry about. The real concern is quieter, more personal. Every need that feels close enough to touch is asking something of the donor. And what it’s asking for isn’t really money. It’s attention, and then trust, and then belief. So build around the moment that matters most: the one where someone sees a need, recognizes themselves in it, and decides you are how they do something about it.