from the desk of
Sandra K. Kidd
Senior Partner
 

Keep on Giving, America

It is prodigious the quantity of good that may be done by one man, if he will make a business of it.  — Benjamin Franklin, American philanthropist
 

As a history buff, I am honored to wish our country a happy 250th birthday at the start of 2026. To kick off the year of celebrating our 250th, I am taking a highly curated look back at the early days of American philanthropy. A few examples:

• Long before Europeans ever set foot on our continent, Native Americans practiced giving, sharing resources among young and old to keep their communities strong.
• In 1618, just a decade after the 1607 founding of the first colony in Virginia, the London Company set aside 10,000 acres for the purpose of a school “to be erected and endowed in Henrico, Virginia, for the training of English and Indian youth in knowledge and religion.” Private donations, estimated at 1,500 English pounds, came in, and the Rector of Virginia’s Henrico Parish, the Rev. Thomas Bargrave, donated his personal library. The Henricus College project never came to be. It was abandoned 5 years later, following the destruction of the settlement at Henrico through Native American raids in 1622, which ultimately allowed Massachusetts to get ahead of Virginia 20 years later.
• The first recorded fundraising campaign is widely acknowledged to be that of Harvard College in 1643, when founders solicited the “college corne,” gifts of wheat and money to fund its religious and educational mission. The “silent phase” donor to this effort was John Harvard, who donated half his estate and his personal library in 1638. This led to a time-honored practice of donor recognition when the new college was named in his honor.
• Boston’s Scots Charitable Society, established in 1657, was set up to provide support for Scots families in need and for the education of their children and is still in operation. It is believed to be the longest continuously operated such charity in the Western Hemisphere.
• Benjamin Franklin, American inventor, statesman, diplomat, philosopher, and philanthropist, founded the first subscription library in 1731 to advance the acquisition of “self-knowledge” among his peers. As the oldest cultural institution in the country, The Library Company of Philadelphia endures today. In December 2025, it announced its merger with Temple University to continue its nearly 300-year mission.
• The first modern American philanthropic foundation was believed to be the Peabody Education Fund, established in 1867 by George Peabody to advance education in the post-Civil War South. By 1898, The Peabody Education Fund had distributed an estimated $4 million across the Southern states and thereafter ended its work, in accordance with the mandate of its founder.

I have a personal connection to Peabody’s legacy, in that the Peabody Normal School in Nashville, established through the foundation’s giving, is now part of my alma mater, Vanderbilt University.

Vanderbilt was founded by a New England philanthropist, Cornelius Vanderbilt, in the post-Civil War years, when an earnest solicitor from the Southern Methodist Church named Bishop Holland McTyeire convinced him to give $1 million to start a new university to help bring the nation back together by educating the youth of both the South and North. One hundred years later, this then-young Southern girl was one of the many students receiving scholarships to attend VU, an opportunity that led me to my own 40-year-plus career in philanthropy.

In soliciting Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had never been known to give anything away, Bishop McTyeire followed principles that have stood the test of time:

• He used his personal association—his wife Amelia was a cousin of the Commodore’s Alabama-born wife Frank Armstrong Vanderbilt–in order to get a meeting with her wealthy husband. Frank was deeply devoted to the Methodist Church and is credited with being essential to making the gift happen.
• He set up a series of face-to-face meetings with Vanderbilt to look the old gentleman in the eye and personally lay out the vision for a new institution.
• He kept following up until he secured the gift, a feat in itself because the Commodore was not noted for his philanthropic spirit.

And the Bishop kept his word: Vanderbilt celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2025. Its current “Dare to Grow” campaign surpassed the initial goal of $3.2 billion in fall 2024—and, like America’s history of philanthropy, has continued to thrive.

United States charitable giving in 2024, based on the latest data from Giving USA, reached nearly $600 billion. As we turn to celebrating our 250th, may this proud and very American tradition–of asking, giving, and receiving—keep on for another 250 years!