The Generosity Crisis Just Got Personal

Why the closure of a school in East Palo Alto reveals deeper challenges in American philanthropy

I didn’t plan to wake up sick to my stomach. But that’s exactly how I felt when I read the headline alongside my first 5am cup of coffee with the The Washington Post : “The Chan-Zuckerbergs stopped funding social causes. 400 kids lost their school.” The school in question was The Primary School, a bold, holistic initiative in East Palo Alto founded in 2016 by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. It was built on a powerful premise: that educational inequity could be addressed through wraparound support - free tuition, healthcare, mental health services, and parent coaching. Chan, a pediatrician by training, called it her “long haul” project. Less than a decade later, that long haul has been halted all together.

The Primary School will close after the 2025-2026 academic year, not because it failed to fill a need, but because its sole funder chose to walk away. No scandal. No public failure. Just a pivot in philanthropic priorities. That pivot, while framed politely by communications directors and exit grants, leaves families - many of whom live at or below the poverty line - scrambling to reorient their children’s futures.

This is more than one school’s story. It’s a flashing red warning light for the entire philanthropic sector. We are witnessing, in real time, the consequences of what my co-authors and I forewarned in The Generosity Crisis - a systemic unraveling of trust, sustainability, and community resilience within American charitable giving. The closure of The Primary School is not an isolated misstep. It’s an important case study in what happens when generosity becomes overly concentrated, brittle, and dependent on the good will of too few, often well intentioned individuals.

A philanthropic system held up by a handful of individuals is generous by design - but fragile by nature.

To grasp the full weight of this moment, we need to look beyond the headline numbers of philanthropy. In 2024, Americans gave $592.5 billion to charity - a record-breaking figure that seems to signal strength. But where that money came from, and where it’s going, tells a more complicated story. Nearly 19% of the year’s largest gifts flowed into donor-advised funds (DAFs)—up sharply from just 6% in 2023. While DAFs may be a valuable tool for strategic giving, they often operate with limited transparency or timeline for disbursing funds to working nonprofits. Meanwhile, the share of giving from small and mid-level donors continues to shrink. By every meaningful measure, 2024’s giving landscape reflects not just generosity, but deepening wealth concentration. Mega-donors like the Chan-Zuckerbergs represent an outsized portion of total giving - while the everyday donors who once formed the bedrock of civil society are steadily fading from the picture.

This isn’t just a statistical anomaly. It’s a structural transformation with cascading consequences. When giving becomes concentrated in the hands of the few, the nonprofit sector becomes vulnerable to their decisions - however well-intentioned, however strategic, however sudden. As we wrote in The Generosity Crisis : A Compendium, “Many dollars from few donors is a far less resilient model than many donors giving a few dollars each.” The Primary School’s demise confirms the stakes of that insight. A philanthropic system dominated by mega-gifts is one where progress can vanish overnight - subject not to the needs of the community, but to the evolving ambitions of the benefactor.

The future of generosity shouldn’t be billionaire-directed. It must be community-built.

I don’t say this to diminish the generosity of large donors. I’ve spent enough time inside and outside of nonprofits to know that big checks can fund bold ideas and transform lives. But I also know that unchecked concentration of power in any system - whether in politics, media, or philanthropy - introduces fragility. One change of heart. One new political administration. One pivot to AI or biology or a more publicly palatable mission. That’s all it takes.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative strategic retreat from social causes is not occurring in a vacuum. It comes amid a broader political shift in the United States, as the current administration ramps up scrutiny of DEI programs and slashes federal funding for social services. In that environment, many philanthropists are shifting toward safer, more “neutral” domains like science and health research. That may be understandable, but it is not apolitical. When a community school collapses while a billionaire's lab thrives, the message is clear: impact is optional, optics are everything.

I’ve been on both sides of this story. I made it through college because people in my community believed in me - and backed that belief with action.

As someone who grew up in poverty, who made it to college only because of the generosity of people who believed in me, this doesn’t just hit intellectually. It hits viscerally. I’ve spent the past two decades working in and around nonprofits - including seven years at a Boys & Girls Club serving kids in a violent gang territory - because I believe that communities should never be forced to rely on the whims of the powerful for stability. Philanthropy at its best is a tool for collective liberation. At its worst, it becomes another fragile dependency, another power imbalance dressed in benevolence.

Some details of the Primary School’s operation border on the surreal. At one point, students were required to wear “speech pedometers” - devices that tracked their spoken interactions to assess brain and language development. In theory, this was an innovation rooted in research. In practice, it reads like a metaphor for a deeper problem: a kind of technocratic solutionism applied to communities who asked, above all, to be seen, trusted, and supported. When those same communities were told via Zoom that their school would be closing, they weren’t offered an apology. They were offered “transition specialists” and one-time education stipends ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. As if generosity could be reduced to a check.

Sadly, history is repeating itself. As we explore in The Generosity Crisis , the Gates Foundation ’s high-profile investment in the Common Core curriculum followed a strikingly similar arc: bold ambition, limited community engagement, and eventual controversy. In both cases, the philanthropic impulse was rooted in optimism - but lacked the deep, relational groundwork needed to last.

To their credit, the Gates Foundation acknowledged the fallout and made meaningful shifts in how they approach systems-level change, incorporating more community voice, greater transparency, and adaptive learning into future efforts. Those hard-earned lessons, however, seem to have gone unheeded in the case of CZI. Despite clear signs of instability and stakeholder disconnection, the initiative closed quietly - without public reflection, shared learning, or co-created solutions for what comes next.

The result? Disruption without durability. Innovation without integration. These aren’t just missteps. They’re warnings. Because when major philanthropic experiments launch without listening, or exit without accountability, the cost is measured not just in dollars - but in broken trust, abandoned communities, and reform fatigue that makes future change even harder. Money can spark innovation - but only trust can sustain it.

“Trust isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the operating system of modern generosity.” – The Generosity Crisis: A Compendium

One of the central reasons I joined Virtuous two months ago was a singular focus: using AI to support our goal of increasing net new generosity by $10 billion. Not because I believe technology is a silver bullet - but because I believe it can be a force multiplier for trust when built ethically, strategically, and in partnership with the communities it’s meant to serve. We have a responsibility to ensure that artificial intelligence doesn’t widen the gap between large institutions and everyday donors - but instead helps close it.

At Virtuous, we’re not building AI for the sake of innovation. We’re embedding predictive and generative capabilities directly into our fundraising platform - tools designed not to automate relationships, but to enhance them. Predictive models help nonprofits measure relational connection and anticipate likelihood to give. Generative systems activate those insights with tailored, timely, human-centered outreach. It’s not just smarter fundraising - it’s trust-building at scale.

Our focus is on unlocking the power of AI to put the donor at the center of every decision.

These tools aren’t designed to replace relationships. They’re designed to enhance them. Our predictive models help nonprofits measure connection and anticipate a donor’s likelihood to give - not based solely on wealth, but on alignment, engagement, and shared values. And our generative systems go a step further, activating those insights with personalized communications, tailored engagement pathways, and relevant calls to action. In short: not more noise, but more meaning.

This kind of infrastructure is vital because most nonprofits will never receive a $50 million gift. They shouldn’t have to. What they need is a sustainable pipeline - an engaged community of donors, advocates, and partners who give not out of obligation or convenience, but out of a durable sense of connection. We need to move from dependency to distribution, from scarcity to sufficiency, from extraction to partnership.

We can no longer afford to build social systems on the backs of benevolent giants.

We need to invest in fundraising systems that democratize philanthropy, decentralize engagement, and double down on trust. That requires new mindsets, new tools, and above all, a renewed commitment to the people who show up day after day, paycheck after paycheck, to support the causes they believe in.

So yes - I woke up with a knot in my stomach. But I’m channeling that discomfort into something purposeful. Because the real story of this moment isn’t just about a school that closed. It’s about a country that must decide whether its generosity will remain fragile - or finally grow up.

“When trust erodes and dependency grows, generosity becomes a gamble which is a risk society can't afford to take."

The Primary School’s closure isn’t just a footnote in a billionaire’s portfolio - it’s a test of our collective values. It asks us what kind of generosity we want to stand for: one directed from the top down, or one rooted in shared responsibility. Can we build a system where trust is the standard, not the exception? Where generosity is resilient because it’s distributed - not brittle because it’s concentrated? And most of all, what would it take to ensure that no child, no nonprofit, and no community ever again has their future rewritten by a funding pivot they didn’t see coming? The answers to those questions won’t come from the powerful. They’ll come from us.

Let’s build a future where generosity isn’t dictated. It’s distributed. Where impact doesn’t hinge on a billionaire’s inbox, but on the strength of collective resolve. The Primary School’s story doesn’t have to be a tragedy. It can be a turning point - if we choose to learn from it.