Identifying the ‘new’ is not as straightforward as it may first appear…

According to Ecclesiastes (1:9), there is nothing new under the sun. Pliny the Elder, by contrast, believed that out of Africa, there is always something new. Without accepting either of these positions unreservedly, readers of this special feature can probably agree that ‘new’ is a relative term. What has a long history in one place may be a novelty in another. As one contributor to this feature remarks, the idea of endowments dates back to antiquity, though their use in Brazil is recent. There is another aspect of newness to consider: local variation. The adoption of an approach from one place does not mean that it will be used in the same way in its ‘new’ home and the interest of these approaches often lies in how they are adapted and the different uses they are put to.

The adoption of an approach from one place does not mean that it will be used in the same way in its ‘new’ home.

What is new is by no means always welcomed. Sometimes this can be a natural reluctance to accept change. Sometimes, this reluctance is well founded. Concerns expressed in the following articles include the absence of regulation of some new forms of giving. Others have worried that the new institutions presented here – DAFs and philanthropic LLCs – will take the place of foundations and that, together, these developments will make institutional philanthropy still more opaque than it currently is. The first of these anxieties is discussed in three articles in the feature. As for the second, statistics would suggest that the future of the ‘traditional’ foundation is safe for the present. Candid’s Foundation Directory Online gives a figure of 242,000 foundations for the US. Of the 2,500 foundations and 1,650 endowment funds registered in France in 2017 (the latest available figure), over a third of them were set up after 2010, while in China, the number of foundations is now 7,580, a rise of 7.76 per cent since 2018.