In this final bonus episode, members of the Kendeda Fund’s small team reflect on the values, spirit, humor, and wisdom that motivated philanthropist Diana Blank and guided her unconventional approach to giving. 

At the end of 2023, Diana Blank’s foundation, The Kendeda Fund, will complete a philanthropic journey spanning nearly thirty years and more than $1 billion of charitable giving. With its departure, Kendeda joins a small but growing list of foundations opting to sunset rather than continue in perpetuity. This episode pulls back the curtain to reveal why Kendeda chose to wind down its work, what it took to pull it off, and what that choice means in a world riven by complex, existential threats like climate change, gun violence, racial and economic inequality. 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States government ran or supported more than 400 boarding schools designed to erase Native culture, assimilating America’s Indigenous people into White, western culture. Students endured rampant physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Hundreds of deaths went unreported and unprosecuted; thousands of children never came home. It is a horrific chapter in our shared history, one which many Americans know little or nothing about. Leveraging a transformational investment from the Kendeda Fund, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is committed to understanding and addressing the ongoing trauma created by the policies that separated Indigenous children from their families and worked to strip them of their culture and their dignity. This is a story of people and culture persevering in the face of institutional eradication efforts.

Colonel Eric Hastings is a veteran who spent much of his life turning to the outdoors for healing, during and after many years in active military service. He especially likes to fly fish. On the Quiet Waters Ranch in Bozeman, Montana, Hastings and his team help veterans find peace and reintegrate into daily life. They expose “wounded warriors” to nature-centered experiences and teach critical backcountry skills, giving the returning soldiers space to pursue healing, meaning, and new life directions. It was on this ranch where, on a foggy September morning, Colonel Hastings and the Kendeda Fund’s founder, Diana Blank, spent time together, walking in the woods, sharing stories about their pasts, and talking about their own relationships with nature and healing. 

Morganton, North Carolina has a rich manufacturing history dating back multiple generations. But that history has been challenged in recent years by cycles of outsourcing and job loss, leaving many workers stranded. Turning challenge into opportunity, Kendeda Grantee The Industrial Commons is building on Morganton’s existing infrastructure while creating a new economic model that keeps resources and knowledge in the local community. Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis, The Industrial Commons’ story is one of creativity and entrepreneurship, resilience and renewal. It reveals how community wealth-building strategies can help businesses provide jobs, goods, and services, while keeping assets in communities and growing local economies in ways that benefit workers, their families, and business owners.

Film holds a unique power to change the way we understand the world. Movies can shift our thinking, change our feelings, and focus our attention on critical issues like few other forms of storytelling. This lively conversation between two long-time Kendeda Fund grantees (former Sundance Film Festival director Tabitha Jackson award-winning documentary filmmaker Jeff Orlowski-Yang) examines the confluence of art, ideas and social change – with useful lessons for experienced media funders, emerging philanthropists, and film buffs everywhere. 

Sitting prominently on the campus of Georgia Tech, The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design stands as the greenest commercial building in the Southeast. Opened in 2019, it is the first building in Georgia and 28th in the world to earn Living Building Challenge (LBC) certification, the world’s most ambitious and holistic green building achievement. While skeptics questioned if it was even possible to design a building in the hot, humid South that would produce more energy and water than it consumes, Georgia Tech and the Kendeda Fund made it happen. Welcome to the future of the built environment, a place of learning, wonder and inspiration!

Atlanta, Georgia is home to tremendous promise and opportunity. The city is riding an economic boom. Nearly twenty Fortune 500 companies call Atlanta home, and the population is steadily climbing. Unfortunately, Atlanta is also the number one city for income inequality in America. If a person is born into poverty in the city, there is just a four percent chance they will ever emerge from it. Almost 70 percent of Atlanta’s Black families lack liquid assets, compared to 22 percent of white families. And the median household income for Blacks is just one-third that of whites. The Grove Park neighborhood, west of downtown Atlanta, embodies many of the challenges of this pernicious racial wealth gap and many of the solutions needed to reverse it. What does it take to build healthy, equitable and vibrant communities where all families can thrive and succeed? And how can philanthropy play a role in helping achieve that vision?

Blessed with wealth she never envisioned having, Diana Blank began a remarkable and unconventional philanthropic journey in the early 1990s. Ten years ago her daughter, Dena Kimball, joined Diana on that journey. In this opening episode, mother and daughter sit down for an intimate, at times hilarious, discussion about The Kendeda Fund’s origins, what it means to give away more than $1 billion, and the impact that Diana’s philanthropy has made over the past thirty years. 

Welcome to Stories from The Kendeda Fund.