Philanthropy, once broadly regarded as a force for civic good, is increasingly now viewed as elitist, opaque and disconnected from the communities it purports to serve. In 2025, that distrust has reached a critical inflection point. On one front, high-profile foundations—especially those funded by controversial mega-donors—have come under intense political scrutiny. Among these, the Open Society Foundations (OSF), funded by George Soros, faced a flurry of allegations and a reported investigation by the U.S. Justice Department; the accountability and transparency of funding by the World Health Organization (WHO) Foundation were questioned; and ClimateWorks Foundation was pressed about alleged top-down funding that sidelines frontline groups. For many members of the public, such headlines confirm suspicions that philanthropy actively wields political and cultural power without mandate.
Simultaneously, broader structural pressures have accelerated. In many parts of the world, shrinking public aid and volatile donor funding—often shaped by donor priorities, not local need—have reinforced the perception that philanthropy deepens inequality and concentrates power rather than distributing help equitably. The withdrawal of government aid in 2024 and 2025, especially affecting vulnerable communities globally, has exposed how reliant many civil society organizations are on private giving, and how precarious that dependence can be. Regardless of their politics, people don’t trust philanthropy. Progressives often view it as private power shaping public priorities; conservatives see it as wealthy activism without accountability. Both sides reach the same conclusion: philanthropy holds power that nobody voted for.
The problem isn’t that philanthropy lacks design. The issue is how design is used to protect institutions, optimized for preservation, opacity and gatekeeping. To rebuild legitimacy and trust, design must be reimagined as civic necessity—a way for these institutions to confront assumptions, redistribute voice and make power visible.
Redesigning how power is surfaced
The trust gap won’t close easily. While 57 percent of Americans express high trust in nonprofits overall, only 29 percent say they have high trust in wealthy individuals engaged in philanthropy. This figure, which has decreased from 2020, reflects a stark truth: many people distinguish between the nonprofit missions they value—food banks, community centers, climate shelters—and the wealthy funders behind them. They trust the work, but not the gatekeepers.
The disconnect stems from a visibility issue: philanthropic power has been structured to remain unseen, unchallenged and unshared. The mechanics of philanthropy have become harder to see, harder to understand and easier to doubt. When decisions happen behind closed doors and priorities shift without context, communities feel invisible to the institutions supposedly supporting them. Addressing this doesn’t call for better PR. It requires redesigning how power is surfaced and interpreted, making decisions legible, processes intelligible and relationships accountable.
Transparency tools like reports, dashboards and compliance frameworks might show receipts, but design makes the receipts matter. It turns accountability into agency and shapes legitimacy by helping people see, understand and locate themselves within systems that have historically excluded them. When MacKenzie Scott announced $7 billion in giving through a quietly updated blog post, her announcement style mattered as much as the money. Scott was not simply funding change; she’s was redesigning the interface between donor and public, signaling a shift toward shared authorship.
Design in action
For philanthropy to endure, the real work lies not in ‘design thinking’ or related buzzwords, but in fundamentally redesigning how power is seen and shared. Design must move from being a tactical layer to functioning as civic infrastructure—shifting meaning, visibility and voice into public hands.
Boards, for example, often operate at a level of abstraction that obscures lived impact. But when grant portfolios, stakeholder ecosystems or community narratives are visualized, the conversation changes. Blind spots become visible. Gaps stop being theoretical. Design becomes a form of civic diagnostics, exposing patterns of power that institutions have been structurally conditioned not to notice.
Philanthropy is quick to fund programs and pilots, but far slower to invest in imagination. Yet communities cannot build futures they cannot imagine. Design invites participation by turning abstract strategies into shared understanding and by returning narrative power to the people most affected by philanthropic decisions.
Too often, communities are consulted only at the end of the process, asked to react rather than author. Good design flips that top-down model by bringing lived experience into decision-making early and often, not as feedback but as co-creation. This redistribution of narrative power is both symbolic and structural.
This isn’t hypothetical. Thought Matter’s project, For the People, a redesign of the U.S. Constitution, sought to make a foundational civic document accessible and resonant for a new generation. The work demonstrated what happens when people see themselves inside systems that have historically excluded them: engagement deepens, ownership grows and trust begins to form.
The new era: Culture as infrastructure
Philanthropy’s legitimacy problem is no longer a secret. While some foundations have begun updating their governance practices, the 2025 Independent Sector report makes clear that good governance is now table stakes. The deeper challenge lies in confronting philanthropy’s imagination deficit.
To do so, philanthropy must take culture as seriously as capital. Culture isn’t a side project addressed through campaigns; it’s the infrastructure that shapes how institutions see themselves and how communities experience them.
This is visible in organizations such as the Obama Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies, which leverage founder identity, collective memory and cultural symbolism to make their global operations feel personal, accessible and intelligible. MacKenzie Scott offers perhaps the most radical example of high-trust, low-bureaucracy philanthropy. By stripping away the traditional gatekeeping mechanisms, she signals a redistribution of narrative and decision-making power. Through subtle but consequential cultural and structural choices, legitimacy flows outward, from communities themselves, rather than inward from donor identity.
Restoring legitimacy
American philanthropy has long shaped public life, from libraries to education systems, yet it has rarely built the cultural conditions for the public to shape it in return. To earn back its social license, philanthropy must shift from secrecy to visibility, from perfection to honesty and from patronage to partnership.
Design is how those commitments move from aspiration to practice. It is the civic medium through which institutions learn to see their own power, share authorship and expand imagination. If philanthropy hopes to shape the next century, it has to invest in the imagination of the people who will live in it. The real work—the redesign of legitimacy itself—starts now.
