Bank of America survey finds 47% of wealthy Gen Z and millennial donors use charitable trusts

Forty-seven percent of wealthy Gen Z and millennial donors use charitable trusts, against 5% of Boomer and Silent Generation donors, while family foundations run 24% to 2% and fundraising 30% to 11%. Those three lines come from new Bank of America Private Bank research, and they describe a giving toolkit that splits by age far more sharply than giving itself does: the average younger donor with $3 million or more in investable assets supports twelve charitable causes, against eight for wealthy donors overall.

Escalent fielded the study for the bank, surveying 1,431 wealthy individuals between January 8 and February 5, 2026. Giving remains close to universal in that population: 89% of wealthy Americans contributed to a cause in 2025, led by basic needs at 86%, health care at 72% and disaster relief at 68%. The useful distinction is less how much younger donors give than what they give through, because instruments are the part of a giving plan that someone gets paid to build.

A charitable trust has to be drafted, funded and administered; a family foundation has to be governed and its grants decided, which makes each a recurring professional engagement rather than one-off check-writing. That is why the 42-point spread on trusts is the widest vehicle gap the study reports between its two cohorts, ahead of foundations and fundraising, and why a firm that runs the family's tax and investment work but none of its charitable vehicles is, on that number, watching an account open somewhere else. The coverage also lists donor-advised funds and mentorship in the vehicle comparison while publishing no percentage for either, which leaves two of the five lines unquantified.

The cause-level data show where families will disagree: environmental preservation draws 84% of younger donors and 47% of Boomer and Silent donors, human rights and social justice draw 85% and 43%, and health care or medical research draws 90% from the younger cohort, 83% from Gen X and 67% from the older cohort. On those three categories the middle generation holds the median, breaking toward the young only on basic necessities, where it matches their 90% against 83% among Boomers and the Silent Generation. A generation sitting at the midpoint of every contested cause is also the one most likely to be refereeing the family's grant meeting, which makes its absence from the vehicle data more than an omission.

The study breaks vehicle use into two groups, younger and older, and Gen X disappears; InvestmentNews reports no vehicle percentage for the cohort at all. That is a strange hole. The Federal Reserve data the coverage cites, from the second quarter of 2026, puts a middle cohort at roughly 26% of US wealth, more than double the millennial share and about half the Boomer share, so the generation holding roughly a quarter of the country's wealth is the one the vehicle table skips. An advisor trying to read whether a family's giving machinery will move into a trust, a foundation or neither gets nothing on the generation standing in the middle of the handoff.

Measurement is the last gap, and the one with the clearest service answer: one in four philanthropists say they do not measure the impact of their giving, even though 87% say they give because they believe they can make a difference and 83% cite personal values or beliefs. A donor with an explicit theory of change and no instrument for testing it is a client for impact reporting and grant governance. It is the same measurement problem that shows up on the private-markets side of the business.

Chandler, who heads philanthropic solutions at Bank of America Private Bank, frames the difference as a family project rather than a rupture: philanthropy is "becoming increasingly multigenerational," she said, with younger donors wanting to honor the traditions that shaped them while defining their own impact, and families facing the job of building shared priorities early enough to leave room for new ones. Her framing is careful, and the data justify the caution. A survey taken between January and February can show that 24% of younger donors use family foundations, but it cannot show whether they chartered those foundations or took seats on ones their parents chartered, and the same ambiguity hangs on the 47% trust figure, which may measure a younger donor's own planning or a structure that was already in place when the donor arrived.

Chandler's title is its own piece of evidence, since a bank of Bank of America's size staffs a head of philanthropic solutions, which indicates the work is treated as a specialty with standing client demand rather than absorbed into a generalist advisor's week.

For an RIA or a family office, the consequence is that charitable planning stops being a soft conversation appended to the estate plan. Philanthropy travels through family networks, and this publication has argued that growth at advisory firms travels the same way, with 43% of consumers arriving through friends and family against 4% through search or AI. The second-generation trustee is where growth actually arrives, and a firm that meets her only after the family foundation has hired its own advisors is likely meeting her as a prospect rather than a client.

Two additions would make the next version of this survey operational: vehicle percentages for Gen X, and a donor-advised fund figure. With those lines, an advisor could see whether the younger cohort is building philanthropic institutions or inheriting them. Without them, the 47% trust and 24% foundation figures may describe structures the donor joined rather than built, which is exactly what an advisor needs to know before proposing a new one.