Nonprofits Sit On $124 Trillion Question as Boomer Wealth Moves to Their Kids

Nonprofits built their fundraising playbook on a simple idea: find the wealthiest people in town, get to know them personally, and ask them for money year after year. That playbook is running into a demographic wall.

Steve Isom, chief operating and financial officer of nonprofit software company Bloomerang, told Fortune that the so-called Great Wealth Transfer is already underway, with baby boomer money flowing to their children and grandchildren. The scale is staggering: an estimated $124 trillion is expected to change hands as boomers age out and pass on what they've built, according to Fortune's reporting.

The problem, according to Isom, is that the people receiving that money aren't the same people writing checks to the local symphony or United Way chapter. "The older generations are disproportionately providing the majority of the philanthropic dollars," Isom said, even though their kids and grandkids are the ones inheriting the fortunes.

Isom pointed to his own community of Omaha, Nebraska, as an example. In the 1960s and 1970s, involvement with a local nonprofit was a "who's who" marker in town, and those same families are still the major donors decades later. Their children, he said, are less involved. Their grandchildren, often, aren't involved at all.

That's a trust and relationship problem more than a money problem. Isom argues nonprofits that spent 60 years building deep personal ties with a handful of wealthy boomers never built equivalent ties with the next generation, and now they're scrambling.

What the data actually shows about younger donors

Bloomerang's 2026 Giving Signals Report, conducted with The Harris Poll surveying more than 1,000 U.S. donors and 400 fundraising leaders in March, found something reassuring for nonprofits: millennials are currently the most active generation of donors, not the least.

Three-quarters of millennials surveyed said they plan to give more this year than last. Compare that to 49% of Gen X and just 36% of baby boomers who said the same. By that measure, younger donors aren't disengaged from giving. They're motivated by something different than their parents were.

The report found millennials and Gen Z donors are driven primarily by a sense of belonging, wanting to feel like they're "part of something," rather than the social-status motivations that drove boomer-era giving tied to community standing and personal relationships with organizational leadership.

A donor who wants their name on a gala invitation and a donor who wants to see, in real time, how their $50 gift helped a specific family are looking for fundamentally different things from the same nonprofit. If an organization's entire donor-engagement model was built around galas, plaques, and boardroom relationships, that model does not translate to a 32-year-old giving through a Venmo link because a friend posted about it.

Where the real money will land

Giving activity and giving dollars are not the same thing. Millennials may be the most active generation by participation rate, but wealth management firm Cerulli Associates' research shows more than half of the total wealth transfer will come from roughly 2% of households, those already classified as high-net-worth or ultra-high-net-worth.

Most of the $124 trillion isn't going to be spread evenly across millions of millennial donors giving small recurring gifts. It's concentrated in a small number of families, and capturing that money requires the same kind of deep, personal, decades-long relationship-building that worked on their boomer parents and grandparents. Isom said nonprofits are seeing that concentration up close and don't yet have a strategy to reach those inheritors early, before the money has already been allocated to donor-advised funds, family foundations, or entirely different causes.

Fortune's piece, drawing on Bloomerang and Cerulli, lays out the scale of the problem clearly but stops short of naming which nonprofits or sectors are actually adapting successfully versus which are simply anxious. No specific case studies of organizations that cracked the code on younger major donors are cited in the reporting. Whether any nonprofit is actually solving this, or the entire sector is staring at the same $124 trillion cliff with no plan, remains unclear.

The stakes are concrete and near-term. Cerulli's research indicates the transfer is not a distant, future event. It's happening now, through the 2020s and beyond, as boomers age into their 80s. Nonprofits that don't build relationships with the next generation of high-net-worth heirs in the next few years risk losing donor pipelines that took 60 years to build, with no clear replacement in sight.