Gearing Up to Spend Down: A Foundation in the Midst of Paradigm Shifts

In 2004, The AVI CHAI Foundation set itself on a course to expend its full endowment and complete its philanthropic work by the end of its 36th year, in early 2020. That work is devoted to strengthening Judaism, Jewish literacy, and Jewish tradition in North America, Israel, and the former Soviet Union, and to encouraging mutual understanding among Jews of different backgrounds and commitments. (Additional information about AVI CHAI can be found at vichai.org.)When it started the spend-down, the Foundation's Board of Trustees sought guidance from scholarly and management literature on how to govern the terminal years of a limited-life foundation. Learning that such literature was scant, the Board offered to make AVI CHAI's own experience available to researchers, allowing them to document the Foundation's choices, the challenges it faces, and the ways in which it tries to bring about an orderly, effective conclusion worthy of the generous vision of its founding donor, Zalman Chaim Bernstein, z'l. This is the second in what is expected to be a series of annual installments in that research