The Disappearing Line Between Philanthropy and Investing, and What It Means Across Generations

Cerulli's 2024 US High-Net-Worth and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Markets Report estimates that of the $124 trillion dollars moving across American generations over the next 25 years, $105 trillion dollars will flow directly to heirs and $18 trillion dollars will go to philanthropy. Nearly $100 trillion of the total transfer, about 81%, originates with Baby Boomers and older generations, and projections suggest close to half of it will first pass between spouses before reaching the next generation at all. That split matters because it means philanthropic intent is not a footnote to the wealth transfer. It is a distinct, sizeable destination for capital in its own right, roughly the scale of an entire national economy, moving on the same clock as everything else.

Boston Consulting Group's September 2026 report, "The Multiplier Effect of Impact Capital", surveyed 114 foundations, family offices, high-net-worth individuals, and their advisors, and offers a detailed baseline for where the generation currently holding this wealth stands today. Impact-first investing, instruments like grants, guarantees, and concessional debt built specifically to blend a philanthropic intent with a commercial return by drawing in additional third-party capital, was familiar to close to 75% of respondents. Only 21% reported allocating a high share of capital to it. The barrier they named most often was not doubt about the concept. It was a shortage of investable opportunities that could be sourced and evaluated individually, followed by the difficulty of actually measuring the impact once capital was deployed. The report's most granular finding breaks that gap down further, by asking each group how complex it found these instruments. Forty-two percent of advisors described impact-first structures as too complex or hard to understand. Among the clients those advisors actually serve, the figure was far lower across every category, 19% of foundations, 13% of family offices, and just 6% of high-net-worth individuals. In other words, the generation currently holding this wealth is not, by its own account, the one struggling to understand how giving and investing can be combined. The people advising them are. Family offices and high-net-worth individuals instead pointed to finding the right advisor and legal structuring as their actual obstacles, a logistics problem rather than a comprehension one. The report also points to where this kind of blended capital is already working at scale, which gives the abstract case some concrete weight. In Brazil's Cerrado region, the authors describe a projected $31 billion dollars in catalytic capital, including concessional debt, equity, and government-backed guarantees, combined with $6 billion dollars in mostly philanthropic grants, structured to unlock $24 billion dollars in commercial capital, enough to restore $9 million hectares of degraded cropland worth an estimated $55 billion dollars in increased production. That example illustrates what blending giving and investing can achieve when a market matures around it, and it is the kind of outcome the report's authors argue remains rare mainly for lack of comparably structured, comparably legible opportunities elsewhere. The report's authors reach a related conclusion from the generational angle directly. Citing Cerulli's own research on advisor retention, they note that only 20 to 27% of heirs keep their parents' wealth advisor after an inheritance, and argue that fluency in impact-first investing is becoming less of an optional specialization for advisors and more of a hedge against the wealth transfer already underway. Read alongside the philanthropy-specific research below, that reads less like a permanent feature of how funders think and more like a snapshot of a generation still operating inside a giving-versus-investing separation its own children are already abandoning, one instrument type and one advisor relationship at a time.

UBS's research into the generation now receiving that wealth describes a consistent pattern across its recent work. In discussions with clients through UBS Collectives and Philanthropy Insights sessions, the bank found that younger family members increasingly blur the line between philanthropy and investing, evaluating risk, return, and impact together across whatever capital they hold, in contrast to parents who generally lacked today's breadth of sustainable investing options and so tended to keep giving and investing in separate accounts entirely. UBS's Next Generation Report 2026, based on surveys of more than 170 wealth inheritors, most between 26 and 40 years old, found that this generation is not only asking how wealth will be transferred but why, and what role they are expected to play in stewarding a family legacy while building something of their own. Nick Tedesco, president and chief executive of the National Center for Family Philanthropy, described these emerging leaders as asking existing foundation decision-makers to rethink their philanthropy's purpose and practices, and to think about their funding more holistically, drawing on every tool available rather than treating giving and investing as separate functions. That pattern shows up in adjacent research too. Julius Baer's Family Barometer 2025 found that 54% of US family offices are now active in impact investing, double the share in 2015, and that in Asia-Pacific, 86% of family offices are already engaged in philanthropy, often through structured giving built specifically to institutionalize family values across generations. Morgan Stanley's research on next-generation philanthropists finds more than 40% of millennials report engaging in impact investing directly, seeking financial return and social or environmental benefit (incl. rural development, youth education) from the same capital rather than budgeting for each separately. Set next to BCG's finding that the current generation of funders is held back mainly by a shortage of ready-made, investable opportunities and by an advisor gap rather than by conviction, this suggests the gap may close from the demand side as much as the supply side. A generation already disposed to treat return and impact as one evaluation, rather than two, is a different kind of customer for the same instruments BCG's respondents found underdeveloped, and arguably a less advisor-dependent one, given how comfortable that generation already reports being with blended, values-driven capital.

The interesting risk here is not that the next generation cares less about a family's philanthropic legacy. Most research points the other way. CCS Fundraising's work on donor engagement notes that philanthropic parents generally raise philanthropic children, and that family foundations still make up more than half of all private foundations, often staying within the same family across several generations. The risk is narrower and more procedural: whether the specific intent behind a family's giving, not just the general disposition to give, actually gets transmitted before the money does. Bank of America's research into high-net-worth philanthropy found that while a large majority of affluent households give, a much smaller share actually involve their children in the decisions behind that giving, a gap CCS and others describe as a missed opportunity to pass on not just resources but judgment. A next generation that inherits capital earmarked for philanthropy without having been part of deciding what that philanthropy was for inherits an instruction it has to reconstruct rather than one it helped write. Given that the same generation is already inclined to fold giving and investing together rather than keep them separate, that reconstruction is likely to look different from what the money was originally intended to do, not because the intent to give faded, but because the framework for interpreting it changed underneath it.

Family offices have begun responding to the scale of this transfer by writing down formally what their capital is for. A 2026 survey of 126 family office principals and executives by AlTi Tiedemann Global and Campden Wealth found that 48% now maintain a documented purpose-of-wealth framework, up from roughly a third the year before, and that framework typically names preserving wealth and deploying philanthropic capital as separate, weighted lines, at 9% and 46% of respondents respectively. That categorical separation is precisely what UBS's research suggests the incoming generation is inclined to dissolve. It is also consistent with what BCG's survey found among current funders. That generation is aware of blended instruments, but still operates around a divide between the philanthropic column and the investment column rather than inside a single merged one. It also still relies on advisors who are more likely than their own clients to find that divide hard to bridge. A framework built today around two clearly separated columns may describe an operating assumption the next generation does not share by the time it inherits the framework along with the money. That is not an argument for abandoning the exercise of writing the framework down. Documented intent, even imperfectly aligned with what comes after it, gives the next generation something concrete to react to, agree with, or deliberately revise, which is a better starting point than an undocumented assumption that simply lapses.

Not every next-generation heir wants to merge giving and investing, and those who do won't necessarily manage the shift smoothly. UBS surveyed wealth inheritors already engaged enough to join a bank's philanthropy programme, so this group likely skews further along than the population as a whole. This also doesn't mean a family's philanthropic intent is at real risk of disappearing. Most research points to continuity of the underlying wish to give. The open question is how that giving gets expressed, not whether it happens at all.

A position that produces a commercial return and a documented ecological or social co-benefit at the same time, without asking an allocator to choose between the two accounts in advance, sits closer to how the next generation already seems inclined to think about capital than to how a purpose-of-wealth framework built around separate columns describes it. That is worth noting as a point of fit, not as evidence that any specific asset was built to anticipate this generational shift. The co-benefit case for a position like this stands on its own agronomic and market evidence, tiered honestly, regardless of which generation happens to be reading the file.