A Walton Heir Goes Public With a Sizable Philanthropy and Investment Operation

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One of the few profiles of Lukas Walton describes the third-generation Walmart heir as “fiercely private.” His multi-billion-dollar net worth was not publicly known until just six years ago. And there’s been little public information on his philanthropy, save for dated details from tax filings and grantee donor lists.

But this month, the 35-year-old became the first third-generation Walton heir to launch a substantial public presence for his philanthropic giving and related investments, breaking new ground for the younger heirs to the Walmart fortune. It also marks the official arrival of a new, public-facing Walton family philanthropy, offering fresh insight into the direction of younger donors within America’s richest family. 

As it turns out, it’s quite an operation. Walton and his wife, Samantha, have launched public websites for what is essentially a family office, Builders Vision, and its three branches—Builders Private Capital, a venture-style investment team; Builders Asset Management, which invests the foundation endowment and other funds; and Builders Initiative, the philanthropic arm that includes, but is not limited to a foundation. While the 60-plus-person organization’s transparency has limits, the sites still offer one the most extensive windows into Walton family philanthropy as it exists outside of the sprawling Walton Family Foundation, where Lukas Walton sits on the board.

Beyond what it tells us about the family’s giving, the suite of sites offers another demonstration of how investing and philanthropy are often mixed within the multi-pronged social impact vehicles that are increasingly popular among America’s billionaires. Examples of such hybrid entities include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Omidyar Network. Builders Vision seems particularly interested in telling the story of how it wields these arms to achieve impact. But transparency also varies within these entities. Builders Vision’s philanthropic disclosure is still limited, more in line with Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective; yet its investment choices are more open, similar to CZI.

This article focuses mainly on Builders Initiative, the philanthropic branch of Lukas and Samantha Walton’s family office. This entity includes but is not limited to the Builders Initiative Foundation, as the operation also gives through vehicles such as donor-advised funds, including at least one at the Chicago Community Trust. “It’s about, what’s the tool for the job,” said Bruce McNamer, president, on why they use a variety of vehicles.

Builders Initiative is already a sizable organization, and growing fast, according to the team. The foundation currently has a $1.2 billion endowment—three times larger than a few years ago—suggesting annual grantmaking of at least $60 million. Staff say that overall, the couple committed $2 billion to philanthropy—a sum that includes money given to the foundation endowment, rather than strictly cash out the doorbetween 2019 and 2021. 

While Builders Vision operates independently of Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation, Lukas Walton’s philanthropy cannot be fully separated from either. His roughly $17 billion fortune flows from the company and he’s one of five board members for foundation. Walmart has set ambitious climate goals, but critics have questioned those efforts or view them as irreconcilable with a business model premised on selling low-cost goods to more and more customers, not to mention analyses that have found store openings can harm U.S. rural communities. The Walton Family Foundation recently made an explicit if overdue acknowledgment of climate change as a priority, but it’s also been criticized for its support of denialist conservative think tanks.

With Builders Vision, we’re seeing the latest effort by the third generation of Waltons to chart their own philanthropic path, and in this case, pulling back the curtain on personal giving.

What Builders Initiative funds

The focus areas of Builders Initiative are what you might expect from a young man who studied environmentally sustainable business and chairs the environment program committee of the Walton Family Foundation. Its four priorities are food and agriculture, climate and energy, oceans, and community (with specific attention to Chicago, companion animals, and arts in the Chicago region and rural Midwest).

Its website shows an eclectic group of grantees across these categories. They range from an arts and ecology center called the Wormfarm Institute in rural Wisconsin to the Justice40 Accelerator, which helped nonprofits get ready to win funds under the Biden-Harris administration’s initiative, which promised 40% of benefits of federal investments in environmental and economic development to disadvantaged communities.

According to a list provided by the organization, some of its largest recent grants have gone to support COVID relief, immigrants, the environment and the arts. Its largest single donation was $15 million to Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees’ California Immigrant Resilience Fund, which supported undocumented residents impacted by COVID. (Disclosure: I worked briefly as a consultant on this fund’s launch in 2020.) A number of grants totaling nearly $20 million also went to the United Farm Workers Foundation.

A wide range of environmental organizations also received major grants. CREO Syndicate, a nonprofit that works with wealthy individuals on environmental issues, received $5 million. Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, a fund started by British investor Jeremy Grantham and his wife, Hannelore, received $4 million. The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental nonprofit, and RARE, an environmental organization focused on social and behavior change, each received $3.75 million. A local pooled fund working on both COVID relief and long-term food system resilience, the Chicago Region Food Systems Fund, was granted $3 million.

The lone arts grant in the list provided was a $1.35 million gift to the Chicago Community Trust’s ArtWorks Fund, which supports the city’s cultural organizations. But support for the arts—particularly one organization—dominated the Builders Initiative Foundation’s early years. The foundation gave $2 million in 2018 and $8 million in 2019—accounting for more than half of all giving over those two years—to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the multi-billion-dollar institution started by Lukas Walton’s aunt, Alice Walton. McNamer declined to comment on whether the museum is still a grantee.

One of the philanthropy’s grantees is the Chicago Frontlines Funding Initiative, a regranting group that works to build the capacity of the city’s environmental justice organizations. With a two-year, $1.35 million grant, Builders Initiative is the project’s second-largest funder.

“The resources from Builders Initiative and other donors at CFFI has been groundbreaking for Chicago,” said Antonio Lopez Jr., project director. “It’s the first deliberate and strategic funding effort to support the environmental justice community in our city.”

The funding has allowed it to help organizations hire their first staff or pay long-time volunteers. It’s given them stability for at least two years. “It’s really kind of shifted the culture from being in crisis mode to being much more strategic,” he said.

Grantee stories, but not numbers

The Builders Initiative website features a variety of richly told journalistic profiles of grantees, including Lopez’s story. But the profiles do not say how much money those grantees have received from Builders Initiative. Nor does the site have a grants database—and there are no immediate plans to create one, according to McNamer. Such a feature has become increasingly common among large foundations (and some major LLCs), helpfully showing how spending lines up with stated priorities.

Asked why, the organization offered no specific reason, only noting that the organization would continue sharing stories and case studies and is “committed to consistently measuring and evaluating our grants” to ensure impact.

Unlike for an LLC, disclosure will come with time. Grants made via the Builders Initiative Foundation will eventually be made public in tax filings. However, even those documents will not show the full range of Builders Initiative’s grantmaking activities, as there are no disclosure requirements for giving through donor-advised funds. 

Even with these limits, Lukas Walton is taking a big step toward transparency, compared to much of the family philanthropy happening outside of WFF. Many Waltons maintain virtually no public presence for their philanthropy, including two cousins with active foundations. Second-generation heirs, who have been giving for much longer, are more public-facing, with Alice Walton maintaining various sites for her philanthropic endeavors, and the Rob and Melani Walton Foundation sharing an array of videos and stories about their grantees, if not actual grant details. Other than a cousin, Ben Walton, who has dedicated a single page of his family office’s website to his foundation, no other third-generation family member appears to have a public platform for their philanthropy.

How investments work with their grantmaking

Sea urchins tell the story of how Builders Vision integrates its parts. Warmer ocean temperatures have helped their populations to explode, and the spiny, hard-shelled creatures have decimated kelp forests. To temper their success, Builders Vision invested in Urchinomics, a startup that harvests sea urchins. Simultaneously, Builders Initiative funded the Nature Conservancy to research kelp recovery, as well as to breed and release starfish in certain areas.

“We may even evaluate together a deal,” said McNamer of the organization’s different arms. “There’s a real kind of collaboration and looking at things together,” though he notes all arms of Builders Vision usually don’t combine on every topic.

There are signs that Lukas Walton—and his late father—have prioritized putting investments to work for the environment for some time. He’s been a major shareholder in First Solar, due to his father backing the company when it was an Ohio startup, and intends to donate a large share of those holdings. Another hint: Some of his gifts to his own foundation have come in the form of Beyond Meat shares. 

The organization’s work to leverage their endowment has won fans. Elizabeth McGeveran, director of investments at the McKnight Foundation, which recently pledged to make its endowment net zero by 2050 at the latest, mentioned Builders Vision unprompted when listing institutions she thought were doing exciting work with catalytic capital. “They have some really talented and interesting people doing impact investing,” she said.

Builders Vision’s goal is to move at least 75% of the Builders Initiative Foundation assets into impact investments by 2022. It also aims to seek out a diverse range of both asset managers and entrepreneurs through those investments. “If we’re not investing the endowment for impact, we’re missing a large portion of our capital to create the change we want to see in the world,” said Noelle Laing, managing director of impact investing at Builders Asset Management.

It’s an ambitious goal compared to larger organizations. McKnight, for instance, estimates 40% of its $3 billion endowment is in “aligned” or “high impact” investments. Ford Foundation has allocated $1 billion for mission investments over 10 years, but that represents only 6% of its $18 billion endowment. The aspiration puts Builders Initiative closer to smaller funders like the Nathan Cummings Foundation, which is working to align all of its $500 million in assets with its mission.

What impact will Lukas Walton’s approach have

McNamer said Lukas Walton likes to be able to walk around the office and check in with everyone. He particularly likes to take employees to lunch on their first day on the job. He also reads grant applications, serving on the review panel for one of the organization’s local food access programs. And as an avid outdoorsman, he loves making site visits to out-of-the-way grantees. 

“That’s how he gets his joy in our grantmaking. It’s not necessarily the multi-million-dollar deal, it’s the $50,000 grant to a very local entity that he has known for a very long time,” McNamer said. “It’s all done very modestly.”

At 35, Lukas Walton is still very young by most philanthropic standards. Forbes gave him just two out of five in its recent philanthropy scores, but he has a lot of runway ahead of him. Unlike say, the tech billionaires of his age group, there is unlikely quite as much demand on his time as the day-to-day work of a CEO. With an estimated $17 billion in the bank, Lukas and Samantha Walton are likely to enter the philanthropic big leagues in coming years.

Builders Vision is not done growing. The four-year-old organization continues to scale rapidly, say staff—the endowment has nearly tripled since 2019 and the team is hiring. Moreover, it may serve as a trial balloon for other cautious Waltons, wary after past backlash to their philanthropy and wondering whether to be more public. Finally, as billionaires increasingly opt for a mixed model of investment and grantmaking, it offers a curated look at one way those pieces can interact.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the amount granted to Chicago Community Trust’s ArtWorks Fund. It is $1.35 million, not $5 million.