On Dec. 31, the Kendeda Fund went out of business. And that’s just what Diana Blank wanted.
Diana Blank, the first wife of the Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank, spent the last 30 years giving away more than $1 billion to a myriad of nonprofits — especially in Atlanta and Montana — with a focus on the environment, education, the arts, justice and equity.
The Kendeda Fund, which Diana named after her three children – Kenny, Dena and Danielle — pioneered the concept of “trust-based” philanthropy, where the recipient of grants is trusted to invest money in the most effective way possible with minimal oversight from the donor.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy last June wrote an in-depth article on the Kendeda Fund with the headline: “Before McKenzie Scott, there was Diana Blank.” The article referred to McKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, who has given away millions with grantees not having to go through an extensive application process often present at traditional foundations.
Kendeda’s approach to philanthropy was nimble, collaborative and intuitive. Local grantees have described the relationship as a partnership with Kendeda team members asking nonprofits what they needed and then working with them to meet that need.
Kendeda planted seeds of philanthropy as Diana Blank embarked on her journey of “giving while living.” Her eldest daughter, Dena Blank Kimball, joined the ride for the last decade as Kendeda’s executive director, helping map a plan a 10-year-plan to “spend out” all of the Fund’s assets.
“Her basic instincts were driven by curiosity, and then, by compassion,” Dena said of her mother. “I think her curiosity led her to be engaged in the world. She has been good at staying true to her authentic self. Hopefully, this last chapter will give her another chance to do that.”
Although the Kendeda Fund has gone away, an extensive effort has been made to capture the lessons of Kendeda and share them with the rest of the world through a website and podcasts. Capturing the message was the work of team member David Brotherton, who also ran the Fund’s portfolio on gun violence prevention.
The website provides valuable insights on how Diana Blank envisioned Kendeda as an entity that plants seeds:
“A successful garden requires care and attention in the here and now, and a leap of faith about the future. When you plant a young tree, your job is to nurture it so it can grow and thrive, even though you won’t be around to appreciate it fully grown. Closure isn’t the point. The knowledge that you have left something beautiful behind is the true gift.”
— Diana Blank
I asked Dena Kimball whether she felt sad about the end of Kendeda, a feeling I expressed during our extensive interview in mid-December, a couple of weeks before the Fund closed its doors.
“That’s so funny because it’s joyful to us,” Dena said of being able to fulfill her mother’s desire to give away her money during her lifetime and then move on. “We all want to hold on to things — that’s really a human quality. But Diana, more than anyone, is pretty skilled at letting go.”
Kendeda came to life after Diana Blank found herself with great wealth following her divorce from Arthur Blank, now the owner of the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United.
In 1993, she became connected with Barry Berlin, a wealth advisor who helped her manage her money and her philanthropy anonymously.
“Kendeda operated without a typical board. There was no governing body, and that was by design,” Berlin said. “When you’re working with a living donor, you have a lot of freedom. I would always encourage Diana to follow her interests.”
Because Diana Blank did not want to disclose her identity, Berlin became the face of the Kendeda Fund in Atlanta and beyond.
“Diana wanted to see it through in her lifetime when she was aware of her giving and could see the results,” Berlin said. “Kendeda was a name that could offer a thin patina of anonymity.”
In the mid-1990s, a $4 million anonymous gift prevented the Atlanta Symphony from having to lay off nine musicians. That was one of Kendeda’s earliest major gifts to the community. Many other pennies from heaven followed from the Kendeda name, and when asked about who was behind those gifts, Berlin always would answer that the donor does not want to be identified.
In 2006, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta was exploring a merger with Hughes Spalding, a historically Black children’s hospital next to Grady. An anonymous gift of nearly $20 million made that merger possible.
So many other gifts — large and small — followed.
But it was Kendeda’s style of giving that set it apart.
One great example was a program called “Grants to Green” — the result of a brainstorming session between Diana Blank and Berlin on a trip to Oregon.
What if Kendeda could help nonprofits make their facilities more energy and water-efficient? They enlisted the help of Dennis Creech, the founder of Southface, as well as the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, to launch the program that helped nonprofits save 20 percent on energy and utility bills — becoming an annual endowment thanks to the money being saved while improving the environment.
“Nobody else was doing it,” said Creech, who joined Kendeda in 2017 after he retired from Southface. That was renamed “GoodUse” when it went national. “It’s in 25 states now. Well over 500 nonprofits have participated in these programs.”
Fortunately, the concept continues to thrive and expand. The Biden administration’s Department of Energy has adopted the program, and it hired Gretchen Gigley, who used to run GoodUse at Southface, to implement the program.
It’s one of the many Kendeda seeds that continues to grow.
When Dena Kimball joined Kendeda in 2011 and became executive director in 2012, the organization became more proactive rather than reactive.
Originally, Dena joined Kendeda to run a girl’s rights portfolio. After a year, Diana Blank asked Dena, who had experience with nonprofits large and small, if she would step up and run the entire Fund.
“I thought about it for a while,” Dena said. “I came back to her, and I said, ‘Mom, I will do this regardless, but I just need to know, do you want me just to keep doing it the way it’s been done? Or do you want me to do it the way I would do it, of course with a deep reverence, nod, respect and continuation of a lot of the approaches and choices you made. Do you want me to bring myself into it?’ I saw that as a really important question because I just needed to know what her expectations were.”
Diana didn’t hesitate. “No, I want you to bring yourself into it,” she told her daughter.
The Kendeda story is a tale of love and respect between a mother and daughter. The two are both Virgos, with Diana’s birthday on Sept. 13 and Dena’s a day later (29 years apart). But their styles are totally different.
One of the podcasts features a conversation with the two of them talking about a bicycle ride they took in Ireland. Diana would stop to pick blackberries – enjoying the journey. Dena, a quicker cyclist, was more focused on the destination.
“We are so different,” said Dena, who added the family joke is that she’s more like her dad. “One of the things we have is the same sense of humor. That’s a good connection point for both of us in our work and in our life.”
Dena said she wished she were more like her mother, and in the podcast, Diana says she wishes she could be more like her daughter.
From Berlin’s perspective, Dena’s discipline was needed to wind down the Kendeda Fund. The spend-down timeline had been set for 2017, but the Fund’s portfolio kept growing while the giving wasn’t at a scale to meet the earlier deadline.
“As time went on, Diana relied more and more on Dena. You could see the progression,” Berlin said. “Dena came on in 2012, and it became a 10-year project in 2013.”
Creech was able to witness the transition – both as a grantee and later as a team member.
“The relationship between Dena and her mom is special,” Creech said. “It was a tough gig for Dena. She wanted to be respectful of her mother. They were both incredibly respectful of each other.”
Creech remembered his first visit to the Kendeda office on Krog Street, seeing a mission statement on the wall: “We invest in transformative leaders and ideas.”
As part of Kendeda’s efforts to be more proactive, it launched the Atlanta Equity portfolio in 2016, putting Tené Traylor at the helm to “reimagine philanthropy” in Atlanta.
The Atlanta Equity portfolio invested in a host of local nonprofits to spur transformative change in Atlanta’s Black and brown communities. Those nonprofits included the Georgia Justice Project, the Atlanta Land Trust, the Village Micro Fund, the Grove Park Foundation, the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative, Enterprise Community Partners, the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, the Partnership for Southern Equity and the Center for Civic Innovation among others.
The accelerated giving was based on Kendeda’s sense of urgency to address the community’s disparities in wealth and health. All the while, grantees knew Kendeda’s days were numbered, and the Fund’s investment was aimed at giving the nonprofits the ability to sustain themselves over the long term.
“I think it’s courageous for philanthropists like Diana Blank to say I’m going to speed up my giving,” Creech said. “She was not born into great wealth, and she did not live a lifestyle of great wealth. She said these problems are serious. She has been a risk-taker when it comes to social change. Doing a spend-down also was risky.”
Interestingly enough, one of the Fund’s most visible projects is Georgia Tech’s Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, the first building in Georgia to earn the Living Building Challenge certification. The net-positive building actually generates more energy and water than it consumes.
Kendeda’s made a $30 million grant – $25 million to build the building and another $5 million to help spread the concept of living buildings and restorative development.
Given the visibility of that project, Diana Blank decided to publicly reveal her identity at the time she announced the Kendeda Building gift.
Although her mother shunned the limelight, Dena said she now is quite proud of the Kendeda name.
“It has come to mean something to her,” said Dena, who continues to serve on the board of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. “Her philanthropic journey, which started out very reluctantly, has now become a point of great pride for her. She now is very proud when she sees the name anywhere.”
For Creech, the end of Kendeda is bittersweet.
‘Who is going to take Kendeda’s place in Atlanta?” he asked. “Who is going to fund the kind of things Kendeda did – democracy, race, economic justice? Kendeda is going to be missed. There’s a whole new generation of wealth coming in, and I’m hopeful they will learn from Kendeda. Kendeda enriched the philanthropic ecosystem in Atlanta and beyond. The bitter part is if others don’t move into this trust-based philanthropy. Kendeda showed you can do this kind of philanthropy.”
Dena was careful to say Kendeda is not telling other foundations to adopt its approach. It just wants to share information on how Kendeda evolved and dissolved — in case others are interested in following suit.
“I hope what Kendeda represents is the donor’s choice — myriad of her choices — to embrace her nimble giving, her intuitive giving,” Dena said. “Hopefully her focus is on the dignity of people and the sustainability of communities. That’s what Kendeda represents.”
As for saying goodbye to Kendeda, Dena said her mother has always been comfortable with change.
“Change is coming. It’s going to happen — good change, bad change,” Dena said about her mother’s attitude. “To try to hold on, freeze time and try to legislate everything and codify and harden and institutionalize, it was never her orientation. At 81, she’s still thinking very much about community. She’s just doing it from a different vantage point.”
Note to readers:
Dating as far back as the mid-1990s, I became curious about the new anonymous donor in town. When the Hughes Spalding gift was announced in 2006, I was determined to find out who was behind the Kendeda Fund. My network of contacts told me it was Diana Blank.
I called Barry Berlin, saying I wanted to write a story about her. At the time, I was the lead business columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Berlin said Diana Blank was a private person, and she didn’t want her identity to go public. He added she was willing to meet with me at her residence, then a modest townhome near the Chattahoochee River.
We spent two hours talking about life, women philanthropists, the community and her desire to remain anonymous. Counter to my normal instincts, we agreed that I wouldn’t disclose her identity. But that when she was ready to go public, I would get the exclusive.
Time passed. I moved on to the Atlanta Business Chronicle. In 2015, I got a call from Berlin saying Kendeda was going to make a $30 million gift for a living building on the Georgia Tech campus — and that Diana was ready to reveal her identity.
As promised, I got the exclusive. Of course, when I made the agreement, I never envisioned I would be sitting on the story for nine years. But I have no regrets. During that 2015 interview, Diana told me that by allowing her to remain anonymous, she was able to live her life without the public fanfare of wealth.
Getting to know Diana and the entire Kendeda team has been a special gift.
one of your most poignant and beautiful pieces, Maria. We need to be reminded of the great service that Kendeda and its “anonymous” donor performed for Atlanta, as we ask ourselves, as Dennis did, who will replace this fountain of living water?
If we taxed and allocated appropriately, heroically giving people like Diana Blank would not have to single handedly carry the repatriation of hoarded capital back into the community from which it was siphoned away. What she did by grace and decision, others should not get a pass on being obligated to do. Her example should be the standard and since the better angels can’t be trusted to inspire everyone, there’s always option b.
Thanks, Maria! I hope Kendeda will inspire others to give now, not leave it for future giving! We especially need to prepare for climate warming — later is too late!