TRIIBE and the Missing Philanthropic Layer

The Top Layer

From the private sector, all sources of giving increased.²

Corporations (7.1% total giving). This includes direct and in-kind giving from companies and corporate foundations, including matching gift programs, disaster response, and product donations. As a surprise to many, it is the smallest segment, and tied directly to business conditions, subject to change with adjusting profits.

Bequests (10.1% total giving). This includes assets directed to charity through a will or trust, which means funds are pledged years before they move. This segment also covers estate and more complicated vehicles, including charitable trusts and estates that take years to settle.

Foundations (19.0% total giving). This is primarily grantmaking by large foundations such as those of Gates, Ford, and MacArthur, along with community foundations. Private foundations held about $1.64 trillion in assets in 2024 and are legally required to distribute at least 5 percent annually, although they have typically averaged 7 percent.⁴

Individuals (63.9% total giving). This includes everything individuals give directly to nonprofits, and contributions to donor-advised funds, which as of the latest report for 2024 totaled $90.57 billion.⁵

A donor-advised fund (DAF) is a charitable bank account. The donor puts money in, takes the full deduction, and decides later where it goes, similar to a foundation but without the 5 percent minimum. The balance can sit invested in the market, and larger accounts can even hold private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, and real estate stakes, growing tax-free until the money is granted out.

The Middle Layer

In this way, foundations and donor-advised funds are not destinations, but intermediaries. Money enters them, sits, and leaves on the schedule a donor or board controls.

For the above table, Giving USA reported $117.15 billion foundations granted out to nonprofits, not the $79.05 billion that they received. That distinction matters, because contributions to foundations fell 16.2 percent in 2025, with foundations granting out $38.1 billion more than they took in.²

Donor-advised funds are counted the other way. The deduction happens the year the money enters the account, not the year it eventually reaches a nonprofit. Once deposited, nothing requires the money to move: There is no minimum, no deadline, and no account-level reporting. For example, in 2024, $90.57 billion entered DAF accounts while $64.60 billion was granted out of them, a difference of roughly $26 billion counted as given but not yet delivered.⁵ Measured the way foundations are, by what left rather than what arrived, total philanthropic donations would be roughly 4 percent smaller.

Now, although nothing compels this money to move, it moves anyway. DAF accounts held $327.87 billion across 3.59 million accounts by the end of 2024, and granted out 25.2 percent of what they started with, compared to foundations operating under a legal floor, which granted roughly 7 percent.^4,5

A possible explanation for this difference is not discipline but lifespan: A foundation is built to exist in perpetuity, and the 5 percent is calibrated to preserve the principal, which makes it a spending limit as much as a spending requirement. A DAF has no institution to sustain and no obligation to exist in 50 years, so it prioritizes the present.

Government Funding

While Giving USA measures private funding, demonstrating a strong increase in 2025, government funding moved the other way, first and most sharply abroad.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a body of 38 mostly wealthy member countries, tracks official development assistance, or ODA. Every donor government reports to the same definition, which makes it the only series for international aid comparable across countries and years.

In 2025, ODA fell 23.1 percent to $174.3 billion, the largest annual contraction ever recorded, with U.S. ODA falling 56.9 percent to $29.0 billion.⁶

An executive order paused U.S. foreign development assistance in January 2025.⁷ In March, the State Department announced that 83 percent of USAID-managed programs would be terminated, and by July 1, USAID had stopped implementing foreign assistance entirely.^8,9 It had managed more than $35 billion in FY2024. The largest single funder of global development exited in under 6 months.

The Shrinking Pool

The retreat was not only foreign. In the first 4 to 6 months of 2025, a third of American nonprofits reported at least one government funding disruption. 21 percent lost at least some government funding, 27 percent had funding delayed, paused, or frozen, and 6 percent received a full stop work order.¹⁰

The exposure is larger than it looks. Nonprofits draw about 28 percent of revenue from government on average, but for the organizations disrupted, government funding supported 42 percent. Hiring plans fell from 52 to 38 percent by mid-2025, and the share of nonprofits planning layoffs more than doubled.¹⁰

Private philanthropy did not make up for this loss. Bridge funding came in at roughly $125 million against a contraction measured in tens of billions.¹¹ Even as foundations granted out more than they received, in CEP's 2026 survey, 57 percent of nonprofit leaders said foundation grants had become harder to secure since January 2025, 44 percent reported reduced foundation funding, 39 percent ran a deficit in 2025, up from 22 percent in 2022, and 67 percent reported concerns about their financial stability.³

For individual donors, the share of American households giving to charity fell from 66.2 percent in 2000 to 49.6 percent in 2018 and 46.9 percent in 2020.^12,13 No figure has been published since.¹³ The Fundraising Effectiveness Project tracks donor records at more than 15,000 participating nonprofits. Its counts have fallen every year since 2021, with new donor counts further falling in the first quarter of 2026.^14,15

Even as 2025 donor counts fell 3.6 percent, dollars raised grew about 5.0 percent, the strongest growth in 5 years.¹⁴ Simply put, fewer people gave more money. In fact, roughly $19.2 billion came from gifts larger than $600 million, or about 5 percent of all individual giving.²

That is how both facts (the best year of American philanthropy and the spike in financial troubles) hold at once. The total grew through instruments that concentrate funds while the pool anyone can reach shrank, pointing to a problem with distribution rather than a capital shortage.

The Burden of Proof

The burden of proof required to reach philanthropic dollars keeps rising. Effective altruism pushed cost-per-outcome reasoning into mainstream giving. To standardize metrics, the Global Impact Investing Network built a global catalog, giving funders a common vocabulary for comparing performance across organizations.¹⁶ A whole industry was born to help nonprofits demonstrate return on impact, because funders increasingly expect it before committing.

But that proof depends on public data, and that public data is contracting. All 13 principal federal statistical agencies lost staff beginning in early 2025. 6 of them lost at least a third of their workforce and 2 more than two thirds, which the American Statistical Association ties directly to halted reports, falling response rates, and reduced data production.¹⁷ For example, the Department of Agriculture defunded the annual household food security survey entirely.¹⁸

The Missing Layer

Every funding source in this paper moves on trust. A foundation or company funds organizations its staff already know (71 percent of private foundations tell the IRS they fund only preselected organizations), and the ones with open applications ask for years of financial proof a new organization can't have.¹⁹ A donor-advised fund grants to causes its donor has already chosen. A bequest is written years before it arrives. Trust takes time, and startups have none.

The incentives that push the for-profit sector to find new startups (commissions, returns, and equity) also don't exist for nonprofits. The youngest founders are the ones where the gap is easiest to see, but nobody is paid to look.

We looked, because we are that generation, and found the ones who started anyway. In 2014, the IRS introduced Form 1023-EZ, replacing its 26-page application with a short form, approving new nonprofits in weeks, not months.²⁰ Social media put the world's problems in front of teenagers, and free tools let them register an organization, build an audience, and run programs online before anyone cuts them a check.

From the outside, it looks like the money followed. Young founders win awards, land press, and share impact reports that read like success. Yet less than 0.002 percent of philanthropic dollars reach early-stage, under-35-led initiatives (applied to Giving USA's 2025 total, that is $12.3 million against $617.2 billion).^2,21

The TRIIBE 100, our global index of the 100 leading nonprofit founders under 30, measures what each organization discloses publicly. The 75 confirmed so far carry 512 years of nonprofit leadership and have raised $8.6 million. On average, they have run their organizations for 7 years and raised $115,000. Measured differently than RIVET's broader estimate, the conclusion is the same: Even the best of the nonprofit startup sector are underfunded.

The common belief is that teenagers start nonprofits to get into college. The reality is these founders turn 18, look for a way to fund the work with a salary, and find out there isn't one. Many keep the organization running through 4 years of college anyway, waiting for a door that, until now, nobody had built.

What Comes Next

The nonprofit sector has never stopped inventing. England wrote the first legal definition of charity in 1601,²² and every innovation since has been built on it: The first foundation in 1867,²³ the U.S. charitable deduction in 1917,²⁴ the first donor-advised fund in 1931,²⁵ impact investing in 1969,²⁶ and crowdfunding in 2010.²⁷ Every one of them made it easier to give. None of them rewarded anyone for looking.

The next innovation has to work the other way. In 2025 the money was there. The connection to founders was not. The for-profit world solves this with portfolios: Back many, expect most to fail, measure the return on investment on the whole.

The nonprofit sector should do the same: Back many, expect some to fail, measure the social return on investment on the whole. Not because established organizations can't innovate, but because they can't afford to. An organization with staff, programs, and donors to protect cannot bet on an idea that might not work. A founder with nothing yet to protect can, which is why every sector that innovates has a startup engine, and why the nonprofit sector needs its own.

So we built TRIIBE, maximizing return on impact and income for philentrepreneurs. We back the TRIIBE 100 with funding, mentorship, and measurement of their social return on investment. TRIIBE Talks give visibility: Intergenerational conversations featuring next-gen voices. TRIIBE Grants gives the rest of the sector the largest grant database in the world, free for anyone to search.

Whether these philentrepreneurs succeed with innovations the sector hasn't imagined yet, become the bench of future executive directors, or fail, the sector will finally have a way to try.