Atlantic Philanthropies - History of the Giving While Living Ethic

The History of the
Giving While Living Ethic
BY 	B E N J A M I N S O S K I S
M AY 2 0 1 7

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“The History of the Giving While Living Ethic” is excerpted from a forthcoming
volume on the history of Giving While Living and limited-life philanthropy,
made possible by support from The Atlantic Philanthropies, and reprinted with
permission of the author.
BENJAMIN SOSKIS is a Research Associate at the Urban Institute’s Center
on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, and the co-editor of HistPhil, a web
publication dedicated to the history of the nonprofit and philanthropic
sectors. He is a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Philanthropy; his
writing on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector has also appeared in
the Washington Post, The Atlantic online, the New Yorker.com, the Guardian,
the American Prospect, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. He is the
co-author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song that
Marches On (Oxford, 2013), and of “Looking Back at 50 Years of U.S.
Philanthropy,” commission for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s
50th Anniversary Symposium. He is also a consultant for the history of
philanthropy program of the Open Philanthropy Project, jointly funded by
Good Ventures and GiveWell. He received his Ph.D. in American history
from Columbia University and lives in Washington, DC.

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1 Tony Proscio, Winding Down the Atlantic Philanthro-
pies 2001-2009: The First Eight Years (Duke Sanford
School of Public Policy, 2010), 4, 58.
Preface
Chuck Feeney’s philanthropy, and that of the foundation he established,
The Atlantic Philanthropies, has been defined by two exceptional decisions.
On November 23, 1984, Feeney transferred to what was then called the
Atlantic Foundation nearly all his personal fortune — mostly shares in Duty
Free Shoppers (DFS), which he had co-founded two decades before — a
gift valued at between $500 million and $1 billion. Then in January 2002,
Atlantic’s board, following Feeney’s wishes, made a formal commitment to
spend all the foundation’s assets, by then some $4 billion, in ten to fifteen
years time. In December 2016, the foundation made its final grant, bringing
the total awarded over 35 years to more than $8 billion. Atlantic will close
its doors for good in 2020.
These decisions have come to represent two closely related commitments:
the Giving While Living ethic and the embrace of limited-life philanthropy.
The two are routinely chronicled as milestones on the same journey and
are often conflated in journalistic accounts of Feeney’s philanthropy, such
that the spend-down process is described as the ultimate fulfillment of
“Giving While Living.” Yet there is a value in maintaining their distinctness.
Each constitutes a certain approach to giving in time; each asserts particular
beliefs about the timeframes and timespans that should govern philanthropy;
each, in turn, can claim its own genealogy and moral foundations. This
monograph will outline those genealo

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