What Is Philanthropy For When Intelligence Is Abundant?

Summary: Philanthropy has the resources. It has the frameworks. What it is running short on is the willingness to be in genuine relationship with the people and the living world it exists to serve. As AI makes analytical expertise widely available, that scarcity becomes the defining question: if intelligence is abundant, what remains irreplaceable? This essay proposes relational wisdom. Written in two voices for two rooms, the boardroom and the field, because the gap between them is part of the argument.

For foundation trustees, philanthropic advisors, institutional donors, and anyone asking what comes next.

For most of human history, our greatest challenge was scarcity.

We lacked food, medicine, knowledge, the means to coordinate across cultures and continents. The institutions we built, markets, governments, and foundations alike, were built to solve those problems. Philanthropy was no exception. The foundations we know today were born in an age when wealth, expertise, and decision-making were concentrated in relatively few hands. Their purpose was clear: direct private capital toward public good where governments and markets could not or would not reach.

That model has done extraordinary work. It has helped eradicate disease, expand education, protect ecosystems, and improve the lives of millions of people across the globe. The track record of serious, evidence-driven philanthropy over the past two decades is genuinely remarkable, and the willingness of certain institutions to ask hard questions about effectiveness, to update their thinking publicly, and to bet on neglected causes before they were fashionable, deserves recognition before anything else is said.

And yet I find myself returning to a question I cannot set down.

What is philanthropy for when intelligence is no longer scarce?

Artificial intelligence is not simply another technological innovation. Whether its long-term effects are ultimately beneficial or dangerous remains genuinely uncertain, and serious people disagree sharply about the answer. But one thing seems increasingly difficult to deny: AI is changing the relationship between people, knowledge, capital, and power at a speed unlike anything most practitioners in this field have navigated before.

If analytical capability becomes widely accessible, if grant analysis that once required months can be completed in hours, if sophisticated forecasting is available to organizations of every size and budget, then something important shifts for philanthropy. The comparative advantage of well-resourced institutions was never only their capital. It was also their access to expertise and research. If that expertise becomes a commodity, what remains uniquely valuable?

My answer is not what most frameworks in the field are currently optimizing for.

What remains scarce, and what becomes more precious as intelligence becomes abundant, is wisdom.

Not information. Discernment. Not optimization. Trust. Not capital allocation. The capacity to be in right relationship with the people, communities, and living systems that philanthropy is meant to serve.

The Question the Most Serious Institutions Are Already Asking

The most intellectually honest philanthropic organizations are already wrestling with this tension, even when they do not name it in exactly these terms.

The best of them have noticed something important: that there is a significant difference between having clear analytical frameworks for allocating resources and having genuine openness to the knowledge held by people closest to the problems being addressed. They have noticed that the institution with the capital is not automatically the institution with the clearest understanding of what the solution should look like. Some have named this the "strategic funder trap," the assumption that the organization directing resources should also be directing vision, and they are actively trying to avoid it.

This is a meaningful and underappreciated shift. It represents the sector's leading edge asking whether evidence and rigor, indispensable as they are, are sufficient on their own. They are not. They are necessary conditions for serious philanthropy, but they are not the whole of what serious philanthropy requires.

The most serious philanthropic institutions are already asking whether the strategic funder trap is itself a limiting frame, and who, beyond the institution, should be part of answering the foundational question of what the wealth is for.

What Analysis Cannot Provide

The most sophisticated allocation models in philanthropy today begin with a similar premise. An institution has capital. Research evaluates opportunities. Resources are directed. Outcomes are measured. Even when the research is genuinely rigorous and the outcomes genuinely matter, this structure carries an embedded assumption: that the person or institution with the capital is the one best positioned to determine where it should go.

That assumption is worth examining, not because it is wrong, but because it may be increasingly incomplete.

The challenges that will define the next chapter of philanthropy are not primarily analytical. Ecological fragmentation, the erosion of belonging, the breakdown of the social trust that makes collective action possible, the widening gap between those who benefit from extraordinary wealth creation and those who do not, these are not problems that more sophisticated analysis will solve alone, though analysis remains genuinely necessary. They are problems that require something the field has underinvested in for decades.

Relational wisdom. The capacity to be genuinely present with suffering rather than at a professional distance from it. The willingness to be changed by the people and communities a funder is trying to serve, not only to change them. The ability to hold complexity without immediately converting it into a strategy.

Trust levels in institutions across every sector, including philanthropy, are at historic lows. This is not a communications problem. It is a relational one. And no amount of rigorous evaluation, however honest and well-intentioned, restores trust that was never fully built in the first place.

The Next Question

If the last era of serious philanthropy asked where money could go to create the greatest measurable benefit, the next era may need to ask something harder and more foundational.

What conditions allow human beings and the more than human world to genuinely flourish? And what would it mean for philanthropy to cultivate those conditions rather than simply allocate resources toward outcomes it has defined in advance? And who, beyond the institution, should be part of answering those questions?

This is not a rejection of evidence or accountability. We need both more than ever. But evidence alone cannot tell us what is worth valuing. Data cannot determine moral responsibility. Optimization cannot replace the moral imagination required to ask whether we are solving the right problems.

The challenge before serious philanthropic institutions is not choosing between analytical rigor and relational depth. It is learning to hold both, simultaneously, without collapsing one into the other.

Philanthropy is at a genuine inflection point. Extraordinary wealth is being created through AI and technology at a pace and scale that will test every framework the field has developed. The CEO of Coefficient Giving, one of the most analytically serious philanthropic organizations in the world, wrote in his 2025 annual letter that continued AI progress "increasingly looks to me like the default path rather than an aberration." If that is true, and I believe it is, then the question of what philanthropy does with that reality, and whose voices shape the answer, will define the sector for the next fifty years.

The institutions that navigate this well will not be the ones with the most sophisticated models alone. They will be the ones that combine evidence with genuine humility, systems thinking with community wisdom, analytical rigor with the moral imagination to ask what it means for every person to live with dignity. And they will be the ones willing to ask not only where the money should go, but what kind of relationships, what kind of trust, and what kind of wisdom should be doing the work of directing the world's care toward the places and people who need it most.

That work is not primarily technical. It is human. And it begins with a different first question.

Not where should this money go.

But what is this wealth for, and who should be part of answering that together.

Between the first part of this essay and the second part is a gap. The same argument lives in that gap, dressed differently for different rooms. The boardroom version uses the language of the room. The human version uses the language of the thing being described. Neither is the whole truth. Together, they might be closer.

For program officers, community organizers, grantees, practitioners, and everyone who has watched the gap between philanthropic intention and lived reality for longer than they care to count.

Something has gone sideways.

I do not say this with anger, though anger would be understandable. I say it with the particular kind of clarity that comes from spending twenty years in every seat at this table, grantmaker, grantee, board member, fundraiser, consultant, and now advisor, and watching the same patterns repeat with different names on the letterhead.

Let me start where I do some of my best thinking, which is outside.

A few years ago I watched someone cut down three large trees at the edge of their property. Old trees. The kind that take a century to grow. When I asked why, the answer was: I was worried about my house. Not their family, not the people living inside it, not the community of birds and insects and fungi that had organized itself around those roots over decades. The house. The asset. The thing that could be insured and appraised and protected against loss.

I have thought about that moment many times since, because I think it describes something much larger than a landscaping decision. It describes a relationship to the living world in which the asset becomes more real than the life it was supposed to protect, and fear becomes the organizing principle of every choice.

That is not a personal failure. It is a cultural condition. And philanthropy, for all its good intentions, has not been immune to it.

The Money Is Sitting Still

Hundreds of billions of dollars are sitting in donor-advised funds right now. The assets have grown substantially over the past decade. The payout rate has improved but remains well below what the assets could sustain. Meanwhile, people are being detained at borders, priced out of their homes, unable to afford medication, watching their communities fragment in ways that are not abstract to them but are often very abstract to the people deciding where the money goes.

I am not saying every person holding a donor-advised fund is acting in bad faith. Most of them are genuinely trying. But the system makes it very easy to defer, to study, to wait for more evidence, to hold the money in a structure designed primarily for the convenience and tax advantage of the giver while the urgency of the need keeps rising.

Would people do this if they were more genuinely in relationship with what is happening? I am not entirely certain. But I think the distance, the insulation of wealth from consequence, is doing something to our moral imagination that we are not adequately naming in this field.

The New Experts

Something else is happening that I want to name plainly because I have watched it accelerate and I think it matters.

Financial advisors are entering the philanthropic space in large numbers, positioning themselves as philanthropic experts because they have managed a donor-advised fund or served on a board or two. Some of them genuinely care. Some are genuinely learning. But many are operating from a framework that was built to accumulate and protect wealth, not to understand human suffering, nonprofit ecosystems, or what it takes to change a community's conditions from the inside.

The frameworks of finance and the frameworks of justice are not the same frameworks. They produce different questions, different relationships, and different outcomes. When financial thinking colonizes philanthropic practice, the result is not more effective giving. It is philanthropy that looks more like portfolio management, that treats communities as investment opportunities, that measures success in terms that make sense on a spreadsheet and very little sense to the people whose lives are being discussed at a remove.

This is not a personal critique of anyone individually. It is an observation about what happens when a powerful system extends itself into territory it does not fully understand, and the people who have spent their careers in that territory do not have the platform or the resources to push back effectively.

What Has Gotten Disconnected

There is something happening in public life right now that the philanthropic sector is not adequately tracking because it does not fit neatly into any existing framework.

People are disconnected. Not just politically, though the political disconnection is real and severe. They are disconnected from one another, from the natural world, from any sense of shared fate. The social infrastructure that makes communities resilient, the informal relationships, the sense of mutual obligation, the experience of being known by your neighbors, is eroding faster than most institutions are equipped to address.

Some of this is economic. Some of it is the architecture of digital life. Some of it is the result of decades of policies that have systematically defunded the things that build collective life: public spaces, public libraries, neighborhood institutions of every kind. And some of it is deeper and harder to name. It is the forgetting of how to be in relationship with other living things. The tree that gets cut down because someone is afraid for their house. The money that stays in a fund because releasing it feels like losing control. The community that never gets asked what it needs because the people with the resources have already decided what the problem is.

Many people are living in fear and cannot move forward ethically, personally, or collectively because we have lost the practice of being genuinely in relationship with one another, and with the living world. That sounds large. It is large. And philanthropy, if it understands its own potential, is one of the few sectors positioned to do something about it, not by fixing it from above but by modeling a different way of being in it.

What the Contemplative Traditions Already Know

I am a lay Buddhist practitioner. I am also a community psychologist and a philanthropic advisor. These are not separate identities maintained in different rooms. They are the same knowing applied to different contexts.

And what the contemplative traditions have understood for millennia, what community psychology has been documenting for decades, what every practitioner who has spent real time inside communities already knows, is this: you cannot help people you are not in relationship with. Not really. You can deliver services to them. You can fund organizations that serve them. You can measure outcomes that describe their lives from a careful analytical distance. But you cannot contribute to their genuine flourishing without being willing to be changed by the encounter.

That willingness is what the current system is not organized to produce. And it is what the next chapter of philanthropy, if it is going to be genuinely useful at the scale the moment requires, will have to learn.

The most important resources for that learning are not analytical. They are relational. They are the practices of showing up without an agenda, listening without already knowing the answer, staying in relationship when it becomes inconvenient, and trusting that the people closest to a problem hold knowledge that no amount of research conducted at a distance can replicate.

That is not a soft idea. It is the most practical thing I know.

The Question That Has Stayed With Me

I have been in this field long enough to know that asking whether philanthropy is asking the wrong questions is itself a risky move. The sector does not have a strong history of rewarding the person who names what everyone can feel but nobody is comfortable saying out loud.

But I think the moment we are in, with AI reshaping the landscape of expertise, with extraordinary new wealth about to enter the philanthropic ecosystem at a scale that would have seemed impossible ten years ago, with trust in institutions at historic lows and the urgency of collective challenge at historic highs, is exactly the moment to ask the question.

What if the greatest challenge facing philanthropy is not a lack of resources, but that we have been asking the wrong questions?

What if the problem is not insufficient data, but insufficient relationship?

What if the solution to the crisis of trust is not better communications, but being genuinely trustworthy, which requires being present, which requires being willing to be changed, which requires a kind of humility that is genuinely difficult to sustain inside systems organized around certainty and control?

I do not offer this as a conclusion. I offer it as an opening.

An opening to the people inside the most serious philanthropic institutions, who I believe are genuinely trying to figure out what the next chapter looks like and who are ready for harder questions than the field has been willing to ask.

An opening to the donors, new and old, who sense that directing a check is not the same as being in relationship with the change they want to see in the world.

An opening to the practitioners and community members who have been doing this work without adequate resources or recognition for years and who know things about what helps that the field has not yet adequately learned.

And an opening to anyone who has watched a tree come down and felt, in that moment, that something important was being lost that no policy framework has yet figured out how to name.

The question is not only what philanthropy is for.

The question is what kind of people, and what kind of relationships, and what kind of wisdom we want doing the work of directing the world's care and resources toward the places and people who need them most.

That is a human question.

It always was.

Shanon Solava is a community psychologist, lay Buddhist practitioner, and Certified Impact Philanthropy Advisor. Her practice focuses on the human dimensions of wealth stewardship, philanthropic strategy, and values-centered governance for families, foundations, and philanthropic institutions. She writes Giving Without Grasping from her home in Pennsylvania, where she tends five acres of native meadow and forest. Reach her at [email protected].