In 2023, following passage of the Donor Intent Protection Act in Kansas, Philanthropy Roundtable launched a monthly series on donor intent developments and controversies nationwide to better inform you about this important topic. The Donor Intent Protection Act has now passed in Kentucky and Georgia as well, and efforts on behalf of this legislation continue in additional states.
This month’s Donor Intent Watch includes an update on donor lawsuits filed against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a discussion of a recent podcast featuring Beth Breeze, author of the 2021 book, “In Defence of Philanthropy.”
We encourage donors to contact us with any questions about our featured items and consult additional resources on donor intent at the Roundtable’s Donor Intent Hub. We also welcome any news about donor intent we may have missed.
Donor Intent and Religious Freedom
In May 2024, we reported on a donor intent lawsuit filed in 2021 by James Huntsman, brother of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Huntsman, who had left the church in 2020, sought the return of $5 million, claiming he had tithed that amount in response to misleading statements from church leadership. Instead of using his donation entirely for promised charitable purposes, he claimed the earnings from his tithe were used to help support commercial activities.
In July 2024, a group of LDS donors merged five cases filed against the church into one class action lawsuit, “alleging that senior church leaders and their money managers lied for decades about using member tithing donations solely for charitable causes while instead investing the cash in a multibillion-dollar ‘slush fund’ at Ensign Peak Advisors, the faith’s investment arm.” Like Huntsman, these donors are requesting return of the funds donated. As a class action, their lawsuit has the potential to affect millions of LDS donors.
The Huntsman case remains unresolved. The most recent hearing took place before an en banc panel (a panel which includes all judges of the presiding court) of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in late September 2024. The most recent hearing for the threatened class action lawsuit now involves 13 individual donors and its latest hearing took place in the U.S District Court in Salt Lake City on January 17, 2025.
These two lawsuits have repercussions well beyond the issue of donor intent. Because of the central role of tithing in the faith and practice of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (among others), LDS officials have maintained the First Amendment protects church autonomy in such cases. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty agrees and has submitted an amicus brief in the Huntsman lawsuit. Opponents argue this is essentially a civil suit about alleged fraud, and there should be no deference to religious authority.
Defending Philanthropy
Earlier this month I listened to a podcast featuring Beth Breeze, director and co-founder of the Center for Philanthropy and professor of Philanthropic Studies at the University of Kent in the UK.
My interest in Professor Breeze stems from her 2021 book, “In Defence of Philanthropy.”
Written at a time when philanthropy – and its donors – were under relentless attack, the book offered a thoughtful rebuttal to those focused on, in Breeze’s words, “all of the problems that philanthropists were bringing to the world and how their money was problematic, their giving was problematic, [and] their relationships were problematic.”
Those critics included Stanford University professor Rob Reich, whose 2018 book, “Just Giving: How Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better,” proclaimed, “In the United States and elsewhere, big philanthropy is often an unaccountable, nontransparent, donor-directed and perpetual exercise of power.” That same year, Anand Giridharadas questioned the legitimacy of philanthropy in “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” accusing philanthropists of hiding behind well-publicized gifts to mask their primary goal of maintaining the structures that preserve their wealth and economic privilege.
Also in 2018, Edgar Villanueva joined the philanthropy critics’ choir with his book, “Decolonizing Wealth,” in which he identified “the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy” which promote oppression The early advocates of trust-based philanthropy in 2020 and 2021 continued the attacks on philanthropy and donors with simplistic demands that donors come to a “power reckoning” and apply a “racial lens” to all their grantmaking.
Breeze’s 2021 book was a most welcome antidote to the negativity and over-the-top exaggeration and generalization of philanthropy’s detractors. She wrote it, she recalled in the podcast, because “Those of us who’ve actually worked in the philanthropy sector or who interview philanthropists or have any day to day interactions or relationships with donors and with the nonprofit sector knew that abstract description just didn’t match the reality.”
Breeze has always been clear that philanthropy is not without its flaws and donors do well to ask hard questions about their grantmaking choices and strategies. But philanthropy’s critics, she noted, “very quickly … jump to the far extreme and say all philanthropy is power, philanthropy is undermining democracy. … It’s terrible if we turned the word love of humankind, which is all that philanthropist means, into something so problematic when on a daily basis people are using philanthropy just to help each other out in some of their darkest moments.”
Asked if she had suggestions for new donors seeking to learn how to give effectively, Breeze advised they “find a community of fellow donors.” “It’s not the case,” she added “that people just sit there throwing money out and just demanding things be done. I think most donors give a lot of their time, a lot of their effort, a lot of their thought. They want to learn, they want to do well with it. And it’s just about finding that community of fellow donors so you can support each other.”
The podcast also explored tax policy, the roles of private philanthropy and government action and the problem of tainted money. If you have a chance to tune in, you won’t be disappointed.
Listen here.
