When Walmart heir Lukas Walton and his wife, Samantha, unveiled their investment and grantmaking operation, Builders Vision, in October 2021, it was hard to know exactly what to make of it.
The couple’s operation was clearly substantial, with dozens of staff, a $1.2 billion endowment and a focus on investing to advance the founders’ philanthropic vision. Its grantmaking arm, Builders Initiative, had already sent millions of dollars to local and international nonprofits, primarily environmental groups. It even has a snazzy website.
Yet it was hard to get a full picture of its grantmaking. The operation did not post a list of its recent grants, and the foundation’s IRS filings showed the largest awards went to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Lukas’ aunt Alice Walton’s massive Bentonville project. In 2018 and 2019, the museum received 55 cents of every grant dollar the foundation gave away.
Nearly two years after Builders Vision’s public launch, the picture has come into better focus, even if some details remain fuzzy. Years of foundation data show the Chicago-based operation backing a fascinating mix of organizations, large and small, in its home region of the Midwest and beyond, and data shared by the operation show grantmaking is growing.
The foundation and the operation’s donor-advised fund granted $168 million in 2022 — nearly double the previous year’s grantmaking — and $199 million in 2023, and are on track to grant the same amount this year. (On top of that, Builders Initiative gave away another $200 million through a 14-month COVID relief program.) The endowment also continues to rise: At the end of 2023, the foundation’s assets had reached $1.7 billion.
In other words, this operation is no longer just a significant environmental funder — it’s a giant. Builders Initiative’s grantmaking operation is now nearly twice the size of the Walton Family Foundation’s environmental program, and rubbing shoulders with green heavyweights like the Rockefeller and Packard foundations. The operation’s portfolio does include some arts funding and community support, but the bulk of it is environmental, with portfolios in climate and energy, food and agriculture and oceans.
That makes Lukas Walton, a grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, both a key philanthropic heir to watch and an emerging climate megadonor. He’s now a philanthropic power broker on two fronts, as he also serves on the board of his family’s foundation and chairs its environment program committee.
Then there’s the rest of the expansive Builders Vision project. Grantmaking through its foundation and donor-advised fund are also just one branch of the larger family office, which has investing and venture capital arms, and also makes a small number of grants through its Builders Bridge LLC.
“We are still early stage. We’re learning our way into this,” said Bruce McNamer, the president of Builders Initiative, noting the operation only recently released its first impact report. “Some of our theories of change are three years old, two years old.”
One proof of that: At the end of July, the operation told grantees it was ending its Midwest-focused climate equity program. All grant commitments will be honored, but the program’s staff will depart by the end of the year.
In its place, Builders Initiative will hire a new team to lead a global energy grantmaking program focused on technology and innovation. McNamer said the goal is to shift funding in a way that works in coordination with the investment arms of the operation and is more aligned with the other environmental focuses of its grantmaking — oceans, food and agriculture, and the energy transition.
“We’ve made the strategic choice to move from a much more geographic [oriented] and equity-focused program to a much more global, and leaning into emerging technologies, and more rapid transition to net zero [approach] — that can complement and reinforce what we’re doing in other parts of the office,” McNamer said.
“We have substantial resources, but they’re not unlimited resources, and so it’s a question of making choices,” he added.
Lukas Walton, 38, wields a fortune Forbes estimates at around $35 billion, so there’s a lot of runway ahead and wealth to tap for this operation and its still-young founders. Further changes of direction also seem likely. Add to that the thorny question of how to measure a fledgling philanthropic operation against Lukas’ vastly larger fortune, as well as against the source of that fortune, Walmart, long criticized for its labor practices, toll on local economies and role in wasteful consumerism. Here’s what we know so far.
What does the money say?
Builders Initiative does not have a grants database, but several years of its foundation’s IRS filings are now available, giving broad if somewhat dated insight into the seven-year-old funder’s strategy and funding. Those records leave out a lot: The team says more than half of its grantmaking goes through donor-advised funds, which, unlike foundations, aren’t required to disclose what they support.
The data shows the operation cutting checks for groups working on issues including livestock, corporate accountability and ratepayer advocacy. The Midwest and its home city of Chicago is a focus, but awards go to states from Maine to Arizona. There’s also a striking willingness by the foundation to send large checks to groups of all sorts.
Grants of roughly similar sizes — often $500,000 — have gone to green giants like the Environmental Defense Fund and Nature Conservancy, Chicago groups like the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, international nonprofits such as Sunrise Project, universities across the country, and environmental justice outfits like Emerald Cities Collaborative.
The foundation has also been sprinkling its money across the country, particularly in 2022. While about 43% of its grants that year went to nonprofits in its home state of Illinois, more than two dozen other states also received one or two awards. California — long a common base for environmental groups — was the second-largest grant recipient, at about 15%.
Its top recent grantee is a bit of an outlier: Best Friends Animal Society, which operates a homeless pets sanctuary, has received more than $6.8 million since 2020, by my count. All of that flows to a location in Kanab, Utah, a town of 4,683, where the nonprofit maintains what it calls the largest sanctuary of its kind in the United States. No other major checks went to companion animal causes.
Other top recipients include the environmental nonprofit Rare ($3.8 million), Elevate Energy ($3 million), ICONIQ Impact Ocean Co-Lab ($3 million), Chicago Region Food Systems Fund ($3 million, via Forefront), PACT ($3 million, via Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors), and CREO Family Syndicate ($2.5 million).
A handful of grantees outside of the environmental space also got significant awards between 2020 and 2023, some of which reflect Lukas Walton’s membership in the more liberal wing of his family. Examples include the Obama Foundation ($3 million) and Planned Parenthood of Illinois ($2.5 million).
A rapidly growing grants budget has led, unsurprisingly, to a lot more grants. The operation made 300 or more in each of the past two years, which is double the number in 2020, and up from just six in 2018, according to data provided by staff.
The foundation is also cutting bigger checks. Awards of $400,000 or above represented about 62% of total spending in 2022, versus 39% in the two preceding years, according to my analysis. You might say, to borrow the words of philanthropy historian Stan Katz, Builders Initiative is shifting from “retail to wholesale philanthropy” — at least it is doing more of the latter.
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Team says DAF funding is similar, with two exceptions
What about the other half of Builders Initiative’s grants — i.e., the portion made via its donor-advised fund at the Chicago Community Trust? According to McNamer, those awards are virtually indistinguishable from the foundation’s.
The operation declined to share a list, but provided a handful of examples, including a five-year, $5 million grant to the U.N. Global Fund for Coral Reefs, a two-year, $1 million grant for Fresh Taste’s Austin Fresh program, and a two-year, $700,000 grant to Crossroads Fund for the Chicago Racial Justice Pooled Fund.
There are two key differences between the portfolios, according to the team. First, McNamer said the DAF giving includes “very rare” cases of awards that Builders Initiative or the grantee prefer to keep anonymous, which account for a small percentage of grantmaking.
Second, the list of DAF grants includes two much larger awards. One is a five-year, $150 million commitment, announced in 2022, to the Catalyst program at Breakthrough Energy, the climate tech investment and grantmaking platform launched by Bill Gates.
The other is a five-year, $100 million pledge, also made public in 2022, to Climate Imperative, a nonprofit headed by climate philanthropy veteran Hal Harvey. Climate Imperative’s six-member board includes a representative from S2G Ventures, a climate tech investment firm which, until recently, was part of Builders Vision.
Those two grantees account for $50 million a year, assuming they are evenly paid over their terms, but that still leaves a considerable amount of money to go around. By my calculations, the rest of the DAF portfolio totalled around $30 million in 2022 and more than $50 million in 2023.
McNamer, who was previously the president and CEO of the Greater Washington Community Foundation, a DAF sponsor, like many community foundations, cited several common reasons for using a DAF: commitment to a region (specifically Chicago), backend support for a lean team, and DAF tax advantages allowing it to maximize grantmaking.
The biggest reason, he says, is that Builders Vision wants to “proselytize a little bit” on its favorite topic: mission-related investing. Builders Initiative Foundation announced two years ago that it had moved 90% of its endowment into such investments.
“How do you get money off the sidelines when the stakes are so high?” McNamer said. “What can we do to help other people on this journey?”
Asked about a grants database, he said he expects a full list of grants will be posted in the next year. “We want to do that,” he said. “We want to err on the side of transparency.”
What about the new global energy program?
The global energy-focused grantmaking that’ll take the place of Builders Initiative’s Midwest climate equity program is still taking shape. The team intends to go through a strategic planning process to define its new initiative, one that will include the investment team.
One certainty is that the program’s focus will be worldwide, according to McNamer. Just like the team’s investments, funding will not target a particular country or region, but follow ideas wherever they arise. “New technologies, new approaches can come from anywhere,” he said.
Grantmaking for the new program will begin in earnest early next year, with the portfolio growing as the Midwest climate equity program winds down. (I will cover the closure in more detail in a follow-up piece.) But McNamer says certain practices will not end, even as that program sunsets.
“We do put an equity lens on our grantmaking and on our investing, and we’ll continue to do that. But less explicitly foot-forward on climate equity,” he said.
It’ll be interesting to see if it also includes partnerships with other major philanthropies, which have been central for Builders’ Initiative’s work so far. The operation has teamed up with Heising-Simons, Kresge and Summit foundations on the Equitable Building Electrification Fund, and with fellow billionaire-backed outfits like the Ballmer Group and Bloomberg Philanthropies, among many others, on the Ocean Resilience and Climate Alliance. It is also a member of the Walton Family Foundation-organized Platform for Agriculture and Climate Transformation, known as PACT, and the Health and Environmental Funders Network.
Others will be watching closely, too. Several grantees — who praised the shuttered program’s approach and its staff — expressed disappointment and frustration that one of the field’s few robust climate equity programs was no more.
But some funders see a peer they can learn from, albeit for other reasons. One program officer at a national foundation, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about a peer, highlighted Builders Vision’s rare mix of private-equity-style investing, impacting investments and grantmaking.
“They’re out ahead of so many of us in that respect,” said the grantmaker, who added that made for interesting combinations of work on things like the commercialization of carbon credits. “They’re tackling parts of the problem spaces a little bit differently.”
Is it too early to talk about philanthropic legacy?
Lukas and Samantha’s grantmaking operation has fast become a massive player in climate philanthropy. Yet it is still a mouse compared to the elephant in the room: Lukas Walton’s nearly $35 billion fortune.
Walmart casts an even longer shadow. It is the source of that wealth, and has a checkered history on workers’ rights, community impact, global corruption and consumer culture. (The company’s climate work, including a pledge to reach net zero by 2040, is promising, but there remains much to be repaired.) Lukas Walton is far from solely responsible for that record, yet, as is true for so many other philanthropic heirs, every dollar he gives away carries the weight of its origins.
Asked about that balance, McNamer said Lukas’ desire is to be “all-in on impact,” with his wealth and his philanthropy acting in unison. “Lukas still owns Walmart shares… and there’s sort of a bit of church and state there, but on Lukas’ own assets, that’s how he thinks about it,” he said.
We now have a better sense of how Lukas and Samantha’s team have put their philanthropic dollars to work so far, and the operation’s first steps have won it admirers. Time will tell whether Lukas, who is now in his late thirties, and Samantha, can build a philanthropic project whose impact rivals the wealth and influence that Lukas inherited in the form of Walmart shares — and which cannot be divorced from the retail giant’s immense societal and carbon footprint.
Editor’s Note (10/1/24): This article has been updated to clarify Bruce McNamer’s comments about a potential grants database.
