Every weekday, dozens of parents walk past the brightly colored plastic gears while dropping their children off at Kids Can Community Center.
Each gear, magnetically attached to the front wall, lists in bold white letters a prominent donor that made the new South Omaha child care hub a reality.
The biggest gears are reserved for the biggest donors: the Peter Kiewit Foundation, Susie Buffett’s Sherwood Foundation and the William and Ruth Scott Foundation among others.
It’s a satisfying sight for CEO Robert Patterson — a constant reminder that Omaha’s generosity has created spaces for kids to grow.
But he also knows that if Kids Can is to survive long term, the names on the gears will have to change.
“We know how lucky we have it here, but I also try not to rest on those laurels because no foundation is permanent … no nonprofit is permanent,” Patterson said.
Omaha’s long-stable philanthropic scene is shifting amid the dwindling of a generation of successful businessmen-turned-charitable giants. Some of Omaha’s highest-profile foundations are asking — and answering — an existential question about their futures: Should we live on after our benefactor dies?
At least five of the city’s 10 biggest spending family foundations, including two tied to the Buffett family, intend to eventually spend down their assets and cease operation. A few have already begun a yearslong ride into the sunset.
The Holland Foundation plans to give its final grants in 2026, a decade after the death of its namesake Dick Holland. Four years after that, the deep-rooted Peter Kiewit Foundation will end its half-century run of supporting local causes.
These two legacy foundations have given a combined sum of more than $400 million over the last decade to local nonprofits, building projects, universities and scholarship funds. Their contributions are especially evident at downtown venues bearing their benefactors’ names, the Holland Performing Arts Center and the Kiewit Luminarium.
Sunsetting isn’t just an Omaha phenomenon — foundations are increasingly contemplating closure across the country as they look to honor their benefactors’ wishes and avoid drifting from their missions long after the person who made the fortune dies, experts say.
“They’re thinking about wanting to do the good I can do now and solve today’s problems with today’s money,” said Wendy Boyer, executive director of the Peter Kiewit Foundation.
Several of Omaha’s top foundations are keeping their blueprints close to the vest, but at least one is resolved to stick around indefinitely — in part, to counterbalance the sunsetting of their peers.
Nonprofit leaders like Patterson say they will have to diversify their funding sources as several big donors on their balance sheets fade away. Some believe the next generation of Omaha philanthropists will take up the baton, but others worry painful contractions could hinder nonprofits that aid the city’s most vulnerable residents.
“Sometimes we have to do less with less, and that could be our new reality,” Patterson said.
On the horizon
A few weeks before Dick Holland died, his longtime assistant Deb Love approached the 95-year-old with a burning question only he could answer: What should happen to the foundation when you’re gone?
Holland, a former advertising executive who made vast sums as an early Berkshire Hathaway investor, had thought long and hard about that question. The plan was always for the foundation to sunset after his death, but cementing the decision weighed heavily on him, Love said.
“He said, ‘Well, Deb, I just want to tell you that I don’t want to die and have people forget about me right away,’” Love recalled. She assured him they wouldn’t.
Holland and the foundation’s board came up with a blueprint for giving away his riches: support the arts, lift up kids in poverty and sunset after 10 years. Foundation leaders have stuck to the plan since Holland’s death in 2016, but channeling a deceased philanthropist is no simple feat, Love said.
“There are some days where I wish I could talk to him and ask him questions, but then I just have to go with my gut,” she said.
Holland’s death came as Omaha began to lose a class of elite businessmen who made their fortunes over the previous half-century — through Berkshire and other means — and became top patrons of local education institutions, social service providers and the arts.
Philanthropists Walter Scott, Allan Lozier, Bill Scott and Howard Hawks have all died since 2021, leaving behind family foundations with a combined $2.1 billion in assets, according to their most recent IRS filings.
Historically, many American foundations have kept operating long after a benefactor’s death under the leadership of younger relatives or unaffiliated professionals, including early philanthropies established by famed industrialists Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and John Rockefeller.
Sunsetting has always been the less traveled path, but now seems to be growing in popularity, said Ben McDearmon, director of legal resources at the Council on Foundations.
The goal of sunsetting is to honor the intent of the original donor by using their money to support causes and solve problems that would have been familiar to them, said Donna Kush, president of the Omaha Community Foundation.
That’s what spurred the Peter Kiewit Foundation to announce last month that it will spend down its nine-figure assets by 2030, said Boyer, the organization’s director. Kiewit, who helped turn his family business into one of the world’s largest construction firms, set aside $150 million to establish a foundation upon his death in 1979.
In recent years, the foundation has seated its third generation of trustees, becoming further removed from people who knew Kiewit and the world he understood.
“The further you are from 1979 when he passed away, it simply is more complex to sit here and say, ‘What would Mr. Kiewit think about the opportunities staring us in the face in 2024?’” said Paul Ternes, the foundation’s community investment officer.
“It is a life cycle. There is a time to pass the torch to the next generation, and for the next generation to identify what the priorities are,” Boyer said.
The nationally focused Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and the locally focused Sherwood Foundation — both based in Omaha and funded by billionaire investor Warren Buffett — will eventually sunset on unspecified timelines, family members previously told the Flatwater Free Press.
But before they go away, the two foundations are likely to see an influx of billions of dollars following Warren Buffett’s death. Susie Buffett previously stated the Sherwood Foundation’s focus will remain local, potentially providing a boon to Omaha’s nonprofits.
Another major grantmaker with Berkshire ties, the William and Ruth Scott Foundation, will cease operations sometime after its initial benefactors are gone, said foundation president John Levy. (Bill Scott, who died in February, is survived by his wife Ruth.)
At least one leading local philanthropy that recently lost a benefactor has no planned end date: The Lozier Foundation.
The family behind the Omaha-based manufacturing company has long felt that keeping the foundation around in perpetuity would provide the most value to the community, said Dianne Lozier, a foundation trustee and Allan Lozier’s widow. Though they continually review that decision, seeing other foundations sunset reinforces her desire to stick around, she said.
The foundation, which held more than $450 million in assets in 2022, aims to address societal problems that “are not likely to go away soon” like homelessness and mental health struggles, Dianne Lozier said.
The prospect of gradually losing control over grantmaking can be daunting, but Lozier said she trusts the “caring hearts” of her family’s next generations to guide the foundation’s decisions.
Representatives from the Walter Scott Foundation, the Mammel Foundation, the Robert B. Daugherty Foundation, James Cabela’s Eagle Foundation and the Hawks Foundation declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.
Love said she’s been working for several years with Holland-supported nonprofits, ranging from kids’ charities to Opera Omaha, to prepare them for the foundation’s dissolution. She’s helped some find new donors.
The Kiewit Foundation is now taking on a similar role — part donor, part consultant — to help about 45 nonprofits that rely on it for operating funds.
“Our goal is really that we do no harm to those nonprofit partners we work with and to see if we can help build their capacity to be successful past our exit,” Boyer said.
Leaders of several children-focused nonprofits that receive funding from Holland and Kiewit say they’re working to ensure the loss of those grants doesn’t disrupt the important services they provide.
Unexpected shifts in funding are hard to manage, but the advance notice given by the sunsetting foundations affords grantees plenty of time to adjust their spending, said Gene Klein, CEO of Project Harmony, a child abuse treatment organization.
Rabble Mill, a youth engagement and workforce education organization, must keep “trying to tell the story” to more prospective donors to diversify its revenue, said executive director Andrew Norman.
Patterson plans to advocate for increased government funding to help sustain Kids Can’s child care and after-school programming.
“We can’t depend on philanthropy to always be the savior,” he said.
Nonprofits may also need to tailor their pitches to younger philanthropists, who seem more interested in making one-time impact donations than giving annual operating money, Patterson said.
Philanthropy professionals are split on the question of whether a new generation of Omaha donors can fill the large shoes of those exiting.
Love believes Holland and his contemporaries had an uncommon commitment to giving their money away, and she worries the city’s nonprofit sector will struggle to find adequate replacements as more of them fade away.
Omaha’s philanthropic old guard has historically worked together to pool millions of dollars for projects like the riverfront revitalization, the downtown baseball stadium and a new central library. Some fundraisers and philanthropy executives wonder if that level of collaboration will continue with younger donors.
“I would be concerned if I was someone trying to raise money,” Love said.
Matt Darling, a consultant with Oakdale Strategies, said successful local companies are still producing millionaires and billionaires who will become the next class of high-level philanthropists.
“Omaha is going to be just fine with the sunsetting of philanthropic dollars,” Darling said.
One promising sign: A deep-pocketed foundation bearing the name of early Berkshire investors is only just breaking onto the scene.
The Edward and Sally Malashock Family Foundation got a $68 million infusion in 2022 following the deaths of its founders, instantly vaulting it into the upper echelon of Omaha philanthropy.
This year, the foundation made grants to about 75 local organizations that promote social justice, women’s and mental health, youth services and the arts, said Matt Egermayer, the foundation’s executive director and a grandson of its founders.
Outgoing foundations like Holland and Kiewit have long “done a lot of heavy lifting” in philanthropy, and up-and-comers will follow their example, Egermayer said.
“There’s this great pride that people have for the city, and those future leaders and success stories are going to want to continue to give back,” Egermayer said.
“I completely understand the concern from the nonprofit community, but I personally am optimistic. I believe in Omaha.”
