Donor Advised Charitable Giving (DAFgiving360)

From the organization’s creation in 1999 through 2018, donors contributed to over 130,000 charities for a total of more than $10 billion. ³

Background

Donor Advised Charitable Giving is a provider of donor-advised funds, which are charitable accounts that allow donors to establish directed giving through a large pass-through entity that is also classified as a charitable organization. Donor-advised funds are popular among many individual donors for their ease of use and their ability to give to a large number and variety of charities while only needing to make one large contribution to the donor-advised fund for tax purposes. They are also popular for the fact that donors are given the option of making donations to controversial groups anonymously, without directly linking the donor or donor foundation to the final recipient. Many financial institutions and brokerages have established charitable arms to operate donor-advised funds, which are all organized as 501(c)(3) charitable organizations. These include the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, ⁴ Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, and Bank of America Charitable Gift Fund.  ⁵

Donor Advised Charitable Giving, which was formerly known as the Schwab Charitable Gift Fund, is not to be confused with the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, a private foundation that was formed by the founder of Charles Schwab and Co., or the Charles Schwab Corporate Foundation, the corporate giving arm of the Charles Schwab Corporation that focuses on grants to financial literacy and poverty programs. ⁶

In 2023, DAFgiving360 reported a revenue of $9,661,652,588, expenses of $6,747,958,156, and total assets of $41,110,879,271. ⁷

That year, DAFgiving360 paid Charles Schwab & Co. $7,893,693 for brokerage and administrative services, Natural Investments LLC $2,107,152 for asset management, Graystone Consulting LTD Morgan Stanley $2,037,743 for asset management, Basswood Capital Management LLC $1,629,119 for asset management, and Cerity Partners $886,123 for asset management. ⁸

Controversy

Donor Advised Charitable Giving and similar donor-advised funds have drawn criticism from left-of-center groups for “hoarding” wealth and not distributing all the money received to charities as quickly as possible. In 2018, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) issued a report titled “Warehousing Wealth: Donor-Advised Charity Funds Sequestering Billions in the Face of Growing Inequality.” The IPS report blasted DAFs including Donor Advised Charitable Giving, then known as Schwab Charitable, for not deploying funds as quickly as possible, regardless of a donor’s intent or desire to let a charitable “nest egg” grow. Critics have pointed to the fact that a donor does not ever have to instruct the funds to a charity, leaving out the fact that many donors prefer to use their fund as a sort or legacy tool not unlike a family foundation. ^{9 2}

In response to pressure from left-leaning groups, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, the largest fund of its kind, announced that it would begin to choose charities for donors if no funds are disbursed within three years. The group responded that 80 percent of its contributions had been fully distributed to charity within 10 years. Another criticism of the organization arises from the organizations’ collection of asset management fees as an incentive to keep donor money in the fund. It noted that the amount of financial resources Charles Schwab Corporation provides to its donor-advised fund is “far greater than any fees it receives for investment management.” ³

Additional criticism of large corporate financial management donor-advised funds is the questionable nature of their fitness for ideological giving. There have been reports of donor-advised funds vetoing certain conservative organizations for being “too political.” These concerns have been further compounded by the fact that donor-advised funds have the ultimate say on whether funds will ultimately be designated according to the donor’s wishes, even in some cases where fund providers make funding decisions for a donor in the event they have not been allocating funds or if they have died without naming an heir to their fund. ¹⁰

In May 2023, Inequality.org, a fiscally sponsored project of Institute for Policy Studies, published an essay on conservative activist Leonard Leo in which it criticized DAFgiving360, referring to it as “Schwab Charitable,” for making an enormous grant to the Leo-affiliated 85 Fund (formerly known as the Judicial Education Project). The report alleged that the donation was made to disguise the donor who made the transaction, as well as to “circumvent rules that prevent privately governed and funded organizations from masquerading as public charities.” The Inequality.org essay proposed more regulations around DAFs, stating that “Schwab Charitable” was a primary opponent of attempts to regulate them. ^{11 12}

In 2024, Inequality.org released a report claiming DAFgiving360 (or Schwab Charitable) was one of the three top fund providers contributing funds to “climate disinformation organizations” from 2020 to 2022, along with National Philanthropic Trust and DonorsTrust. ¹³

In 2025, Inequality.org released an essay criticizing DAFgiving360 and similar DAFs for providing “enormous publicly-subsidized tax benefits” to donors. It advocated for changing tax laws regarding DAFs to force them to move their money to charitable organizations rather than store the funds indefinitely to prevent additional “abuses.”  ¹⁴

In April 2026, DAFgiving360 announced it would suspend all services towards processing donations to the SPLC after a Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama indicted the group on 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. In addition, the U.S Department of Justice (DOJ) accused the group of using donations to fund extremist groups it was reporting on including the Ku Klux Clan and the National Socialist Party of America. ^{15 16}

Financials

In 2017, the group, then called Schwab Charitable, was among the largest grantmakers in the United States, collecting over $3.3 billion in contributions from account holders and giving over $1.8 billion to charity. Schwab Charitable charges an administrative fee to its donors not unlike a traditional brokerage account and pays a small fraction of its revenue to Charles Schwab & Co. and other financial advising companies for annual asset management and administrative costs. ¹⁷

According to its 2023 990 form, Donor Advised Charitable Giving reported a revenue of $9,661,652,588, expenses of $6,747,958,156, and total assets of $41,110,879,271. ⁷

That year, DAFgiving360 paid Charles Schwab & Co. $7,893,693 for brokerage and administrative services, Natural Investments LLC $2,107,152 for asset management, Graystone Consulting LTD Morgan Stanley $2,037,743 for asset management, Basswood Capital Management LLC $1,629,119 for asset management, and Cerity Partners $886,123 for asset management. ⁸

Grantmaking

History

According to the 2017 annual report for Donor Advised Charitable Giving, at that time called Schwab Charitable, grants from the organization had tripled from $504 million in fiscal year 2011 to $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2017. While the organization (on behalf of advised-fund holders) gave sizable amounts to right-leaning organizations, the growth in the organization’s grantmaking coincided with increased giving to left-leaning groups. Gifts to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU increased rapidly enough to move into the organization’s top five recipients list as of 2020. Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, respectively, were the second and third most popular donation recipients among Millennials that year. Additionally, Planned Parenthood became the most-donated-to nonprofit among Generation X (born between 1965-1984) donors to the group. ¹⁸

According to a 2020 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council were listed, at the time, as “among the charities that saw big increases,” with other major left-of-center recipients being the NAACP, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Energy Foundation, the Anti-Defamation League and its state affiliates, and the New America Foundation. ¹⁸

Between 2018 and 2020, Donor Advised Charitable Giving gave $3,350,350 to the Voter Registration Project, a voter mobilization group which targets African-American, Latino, Native American, low-income, and other voter groups statistically likely to lean left-of-center. The organization claims to be non-partisan, but is run by individuals with long-standing connections to left-of-center nonprofits, including the AFL-CIO labor union federation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and the State Voices network of liberal state-level advocacy groups. ^{19 20  21 22}

2023 to Present

In 2023, DAFgiving360 disbursed $115,000 in grants and $2,004,158,073 in “investments” to entities in Central America and the Caribbean; disbursed $13,319,624 in grants to entities in East Asia and the Pacific; disbursed $34,295,191 in grants and $246,558,342 in “investments” to entitles in Europe; disbursed $1,077,000 in grants to entities in the Middle East and North Africa; disbursed $780,350 in grants and $242,804 in “investments” to entities in North America; disbursed $230,000 in grants to entities in Russia and neighboring states; disbursed $370,693 in grants to entities in South America; disbursed $4,573,639 to entities in South Asia; and $4,629,489 in grants to entities in sub-Saharan Africa. ²³

Organizations that received more than $20 million in grants (excluding investments) from DAFGiving360 in 2023 included Johns Hopkins University ($517,434,329), National Philanthropic Trust ($249,117,686), Lucas Museum of Narrative Art ($165,000,000), 85 Fund ($160,000,000), Renaissance Charitable Foundation ($144,682,101), Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund ($127,700,997), Stanford University Board of Trustees ($90,410,606), UCSF Foundation ($68,713,740), Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ($57,173,550), Global Support and Development ($41,750,000), Vital Strategies Inc. ($34,969,000), Broad Institute ($32,285,000), California Institute of Technology ($31,532,760), UC Berkeley Foundation ($30,879,662), ImpactAssets Inc. ($30,234,867), Doctors Without Borders ($28,779,499), Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Inc. ($25,937,050), Trustees of Princeton University ($25,464,226), Mayo Clinic ($25,117,951), Harvard University ($24,339,910), and Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust ($22,012,665). ²⁴

Other notable recipients of DAFGiving360 grants in 2023 included New Venture Fund ($12,836,950 for environmental and animal welfare), American Endowment Foundation ($11,590,765), Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund ($9,812,305), Nature Conservancy ($8,927,872 for environmental and animal welfare initiatives), International Rescue Committee ($7,207,991), Donors Fund ($6,130,332), Planned Parenthood Federation of America ($6,041,077), Friends of the Israel Defense Forces ($5,832,838), Open Philanthropy Advisors ($5,000,000 for “human services”), OpenAI ($5,000,000), Environmental Defense Fund ($4,865,437), Tides Foundation ($4,744,757), Human Rights Watch ($4,472,518), Natural Resources Defense Council ($4,183,601), Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program ($4,051,608), C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group ($4,000,0000), American Jewish Committee ($3,750,720), Palestine Children’s Relief Fund ($3,687,881), World Wildlife Fund ($3,643,090), Turning Point USA ($3,628,173), Cato Institute ($3,398,266), American Near East Refugee Aid ($3,319,816), EarthJustice ($3,295,757), New Israel Fund ($3,000,974), Hopewell Fund ($2,589,856), ClimateWorks Foundation ($2,529,000), Voter Participation Center ($2,436,763), Anti-Defamation League ($2,159,934), Unite America Institute ($2,118,500), Southern Poverty Law Center ($2,037,606), and Barack Obama Foundation ($1,957,058). ²⁴

Leadership

In 2023, then-president of DAFgiving360 Samuel W. Kang received a total of $914,841 in total compensation. ²⁵

As of 2025, Julie Sunwoo was the president of DAFgiving360. She had worked at Charles Schwab investment bank for 30 years, holding various leadership positions including in corporate risk management. ²⁶

As of 2025, DAFgiving360’s board of directors was comprised of chair Adele Taylor, Greg Avis, Bill Brownell, Anne Casscells, Loretta Doon, Dan Kingsley, Linda B. Segre, and Una Osili. ²⁷

Board chair Adele Taylor was chief administrative officer at Charles Schwab as of 2025, a position she had held since joining Schwab in 2024. Prior to Schwab, Taylor worked at global investment firm Franklin Templeton as SVP and lead for corporate strategy and corporate development. ^{28 29}

At that time, board member Greg Avis was a managing partner of Bangtail Partners; he also co-founded major private equity firm Summit Partners. He has sat on the boards of various nonprofit organizations including the left-of-center James Irvine Foundation, ITHAKA, New Profit, Opportunity Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the Sobrato Family Foundation. ²⁷

As of 2025, board member Una Osili was employed by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy serving as both the Efroymson chair in philanthropy and economics and the associate dean for research and international programs and was serving as the chair of the Philanthropy Panel Study. At that time, she was also the dean’s fellow for the Mays Family Institute on Diverse Philanthropy. Osili was also the lead researcher and publisher of Global Philanthropy Tracker, the Global Philanthropy Environment Index, and Giving USA. She is the founder of the Generosity for Life platform. ²⁷