Blank, who is 80, is eminently likable — wise, ever-curious, and utterly lacking in pretentiousness, say colleagues, friends, and grantees. When Tené Traylor, a Black racial-equity advocate, had a job interview with Blank a few years ago at a restaurant, she arrived expecting the stereotype of a white, wealthy woman philanthropist — big hat, dark glasses, aura of grandness. Instead, she found Blank in khakis and a floral top as if she were about to go on a hike. The conversation, Traylor says, “was like talking to someone I had known my entire life.”
Although Blank’s $1 billion in giving makes her a person of influence in this city, no buildings bear her name. Local media seem oblivious to her wealth and largess. One of the few photos in wide circulation shows her clutching broad-leaf greens freshly plucked from her garden, blond hair slipping out from a broad-brimmed hat.
For much of her 30 years in philanthropy, Blank cloaked herself in anonymity, her charitable gifts funneled through a foundation called the Kendeda Fund, a mashup of the names of her now-grown children: Kenny, Dena, and Danielle. That began to change about a decade ago as Blank joined the growing line of donors and philanthropies choosing to spend down or sunset their charitable machinery. By the end of this year, Kendeda will shutter its small, unremarkable office space in Northeast Atlanta.
Blank still shies from the spotlight — she declined an interview request for this story. But Kendeda is opening up to talk about what it calls the “spend-out” as well as Blank’s giving approach, which once was unconventional but is now quite fashionable.
Long before MacKenzie Scott’s billion-dollar giving sprees made “trust-based philanthropy” a buzzword, Blank followed her instincts and put a lot of faith in her grantees along with big dollars. She bankrolled some for decades, eschewing grant cycles, elaborate theories of change, onerous grant applications, and data-insistent impact measures.
Indeed, Blank’s story may be as important for how she went about her philanthropy as for what it accomplished.
‘She Had to Own It’
Blank entered big-gift philanthropy three decades ago as she was settling into wealth that she found discomfiting. Born Diana Latow, she had grown up in a modest Polish-Catholic home on Long Island — her father was a clerk at a shipping company. One of her first jobs was in human relations at the Arthur Young (now Ernst & Young) accounting firm, where she met accountant Arthur Blank.
The two married in 1966, and their early years together were prosperous in a white-collar, middle-class way. In 1978, however, Blank and his friend Bernie Marcus started the Home Depot empire that would make the pair billionaires. (Arthur Blank, who now owns the Atlanta Falcons NFL franchise, is a notable philanthropist and Giving Pledge member.)
In the early 1990s, Arthur and Diana divorced amicably — Arthur credits her role in building the company — with Diana receiving a large settlement. She always had done volunteer work — at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, in an adult literacy program — but the challenge of parceling out great sums of cash weighed on her.
“When I first started, I did not know where to put my focus,” she recalled in a 2021 conversation with Georgia Tech president Ángel Cabrera. “I was exposed to so many needs across our country. What do I focus on? How could one thing be better than anything else?”
Courtesy of The Kendeda Fund
Blank shares much in common with Scott and Melinda French Gates. All three married men they met in the workplace who would build companies and extraordinary wealth. The three came into a personal fortune through divorce. That’s not uncommon for women donors, says Kathleen Loehr, a women’s philanthropy expert, and it can engender a strong obligation to learn how best to give away money. “She had to learn it for herself,” Loehr says of Blank. “She had to own it.”
For about a decade, Blank relied on her financial adviser, Barry Berlin, to scout philanthropic opportunities and protect her anonymity. When a newspaper article, book, or lecture sparked her curiosity, she dispatched Berlin with the instructions: “Why don’t you look into that and see what they need?”
This led to responsive, “shotgun” giving to organizations big and small, local and national, according to Berlin. When the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra was about to lay off nine musicians, Blank stepped in with a $4 million gift to help start an endowment. After visiting a historically Black children’s hospital sorely in need of renovation, she told Berlin: “Give them whatever they need.” Her $20 million gift helped in part to pay for a new facility.
Nonprofits as Experts
Over time, Blank focused on nature and the environment. As a child, she spent hours with her grandmother gardening and foraging for mushrooms and oysters. “The natural world has always fed my spirit,” she said in the Georgia Tech conversation.
At Berlin’s suggestion, Blank turned to the Tides Foundation in the early 2000s to guide her giving to conservation and sustainability causes. She volunteered for several months at the northern entrance to Yellowstone National Park in Montana helping to move a visitors’ center. “She spent the summer sleeping on someone’s couch,” says Dena Kimball, Blank’s oldest daughter and Kendeda’s executive director. Blank served eight years on the board of the National Parks Conservation Association and bought a townhouse in Bozeman, where she lives part time.
In 2007, Blank established the Kendeda Fund as her grant maker. Still, her giving structure remained minimalist. She never assembled a board and hired only a few advisers. The foundation didn’t have a website until 2015.
Such insularity and opaqueness are sometimes criticized as poor grant making and a sign of arrogance. Before expanding its board recently, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation faced criticism that its three trustees — the two namesakes and Warren Buffett, who has donated billions to the grant maker — lacked the range of skills and perspective needed to oversee a multi-billion-dollar global operation.
Blank’s approach, Kimball says, reflects her disinclination to put herself or her philanthropy at the center of anything. “‘Philanthropist’ is not a title that she wears comfortably.” Nonprofit leaders — not philanthropists — are the critical players.
Blank often describes her philanthropy as a journey of discovery. Notably, she went back to college for a degree in her mid-50s, living in the dorms at Mount Holyoke for two years. “Philanthropy for me is like being in college,” Blank once told Diane Ives, a Kendeda adviser. “I’m constantly learning.”
Grantees say Kendeda accepts failure as a chance to learn. The foundation has backed Wild Montana’s efforts to broaden the state’s conservation movement to include ranchers and farmers as well as environmentalists. A search for supporters through petition drives and community meetings stalled because staff — most of them from Bozeman and other cities— were seen as outsiders in rural areas, says deputy director Kayje Booker.
Kendeda didn’t balk when Wild Montana asked to shift grant money to new tactics. “We trusted them enough to admit that we failed — that’s hard to say to a funder,” Booker says. “They recognize that sometimes you have to mess up and fail so that you can learn and have more success later.”
Documentary filmmaker and producer Jeff Orlowski-Yang credits Kendeda with launching his career. Blank saw his first film, Chasing Ice, about climate change, at a film festival in 2012. It lacked the money for marketing or distribution until she backed his studio, Exposure Labs, with $275,000. The film went on to become one of the year’s top-grossing independent documentaries.
Exposure Labs
Kendeda has provided $4 million to the studio. “Their belief in us sustained us for many years,” Orlowski-Yang says. “I didn’t ever feel like I was constantly being tested or judged or questioned. That’s not always the case with funders.”
Dozens of Small Bets
Blank decided in 2013 to close Kendeda at the end of 2023. “From the minute Diana started giving away the money, she was giving it all away,” says Ives, who’s worked with Blank for about a decade.
Blank asked Kimball, who had joined the foundation as an adviser the year before, to lead the spend-out. Kimball had more than a decade’s experience as a top executive at nonprofits big and small, including Teach for America.
Kendeda staff describe mother and daughter as complementary opposites. Blank, who got her Mount Holyoke degree in anthropology, is deeply interested in people and the cultures they inhabit. Colleagues describe Kimball, meanwhile, as a strategic thinker who, like a chess master, always plans three moves ahead. In a charming episode of a podcast that Kendeda produced on the spend-out, mother and daughter tell a story about a bike trip where the always-focused Kimball lit out for the final destination, while her mother lingered over a batch of berries growing at the side of the road.
Kimball, Blank hoped, could introduce the structure and focus to give Kendeda’s last years the most impact. “She has the knack of being able to take my crooked line and straighten it out,” Blank said in the podcast.
Experts say the growing number of spend-out philanthropists reflects in part the “giving while living” ideal born in the 2000s. Other philanthropists — propelled by the crises and social-justice issues illustrated by the pandemic — are increasing payouts to the point of cutting into assets. “That prompts similar questions even if you’re not using the terminology” of spend-out, says Lyell Sakaue, a partner with the Bridgespan Group consultancy.
Bridgespan has studied approaches to giving away lots of money in a relatively short time. Some donors aim to expand proven programs; others look to build the field in an issue area or fund promising research or advocacy.
Charles Feeney — the business tycoon who famously declared that he wanted to die broke and gave away more than $8 billion — pushed for impact he could see in his lifetime. “What have we got to show for our investments?” he frequently asked his Atlantic Philanthropies team before the foundation closed in 2020. Some $2.5 billion of his giving went to construct more than 1,000 buildings on five continents.
Blank’s spend-out has funded a few capital projects, including a $30 million “living building,” which is one of only a few dozen structures in the world that generates more energy and water than it uses. But much of her money aims to bolster organizations and leaders. One example: $8 million in matching funds awarded to 37 core grantees to start or beef up operating reserves — an atypical form of support.
In 2015, Blank stepped forward as the donor behind Kendeda. She was motivated in part by grantees who believed a more public Kendeda could lift their standing. Maria Saporta, a veteran journalist then with the Atlanta Business Chronicle, had uncovered her identity nearly a decade earlier. But she had agreed to break the news only when Blank was ready in exchange for an exclusive interview. “I genuinely became quite fond of Diana,” says Saporta, who now runs the SaportaReport, a civic news outlet. “I’m not one of those journalists who like to screw the good guys.”
The spend-out in Kendeda’s girls’ rights program illustrates its roots in Blank’s earlier giving. Kimball, who oversees the portfolio, put more than $100 million over nearly 10 years toward ending child marriage in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. In India, American Jewish World Service regranted money to some 85 partners on the ground. The grantee-designed work represented a fundamental shift from a narrow focus on protection and rescue of girls to efforts to help them gain agency and see new roles for women in India’s patriarchal society.
Three women’s rights advocates in India hired by the American Jewish World Service to lead the effort describe an unusual relationship with Kendeda — “a case study of trust-based philanthropy,” says Praneeta Kapur, a veteran grant maker. There was ample money for research, and the work developed iteratively, with pauses to incorporate what they had learned. Kimball, they say, was a helpful co-strategist who also actively recruited fellow big donors.
Jonathan Torgovnik, AJWS
“Philanthropy is an act of power,” says activist and academic Manjima Bhattacharjya, who’s part of the effort. “The way this has played out over these 10 years has really been a sharing of that power — with us, with grantees.”
There are echoes of this in Kendeda’s equity work in Atlanta, which started after Kimball’s return to Atlanta after more than a decade away. A new vitality had swept over many of Atlanta’s predominantly white neighborhoods but skipped a lot of areas where Black families lived. Kendeda wasn’t directly addressing that disparity, she says. “As proud as I was of our Atlanta work, we were missing the key point of my mom’s values and orientation.”
Traylor, after impressing Blank in that restaurant job interview, took the reins of Kendeda’s Atlanta equity program in 2016. An Atlanta native and former official with the United Way and the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, she spent months meeting with community groups and leaders. “I did not have the answers; they did,” she says.
Kendeda awarded large multiyear operating grants to small often-fledgling organizations, many of them with Black leaders. Traylor referred to the core group as the Justice League. The goal: deploy Kendeda funds and its name to help groups build sustainable operations, connect with other donors, and dispel the notion that they were risky investments.
“We knew we were going to be here for the next six or seven years,” says Traylor, who left Kendeda last year to lead the Center for Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute. “So the question for us was: How do we support them so that they can be the voices at the table when we’re gone?”
Traylor focused in particular on developing young leaders. She worked with young Black professionals who, as college students, had begun helping Black-owned businesses in their Westside neighborhood get small loans. Their nonprofit, the Village Micro Fund, now has eight staff members and offers extensive coaching and consulting to Black entrepreneurs. “We are part of the community,” says co-founder Harriett Williams. “We live in the community, and we support the community that we care about.”
‘Master Class’ in Grant Making
Kendeda could be criticized for shunning formal evaluations of its spend-out impact. In a self-critique, Kimball says she could have done more to pressure Atlanta donors to get behind equity efforts. “I don’t know that I personally issued the challenge” to them, she says. “I don’t know that I got as uncomfortable as I could have been. Maybe there’s still the chance.”
Benchmarked against other foundations, Kendeda received extremely high marks in a recent survey of its grantees by the Center for Effective Philanthropy. One wrote that Kendeda put on “a master class in utilizing a more open, less formulaic giving strategy to truly empower the people on the ground doing the work.”
If realized, the legacy of Blank’s spend-out — a host of stronger nonprofits that advance change — won’t be evident for years. And she likely won’t get credit. Which, of course, has never been the point.
Says Kimball: “We have a donor who’s very content to be part of the process, understanding that there’s been great work before her and there will be great work after her.”
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