10/26 Donors without borders!

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Dear readers,

nine years ago, I stood in Brussels and, as head of the European umbrella association of foundations, formulated an idea that seemed obvious to everyone in the room at the time: A single market for philanthropy. Mutual recognition of non-profit status, so that a donation made abroad counts toward German taxes. And vice versa. Or at least a growing list of verified organizations. Because giving stopped at the border back then. It still does today. That leads to immense costs and consequences, as I write today in the essay.

The 2017 idea turned into a demand from associations, even a legislative initiative. Last year it fizzled out. But I am no longer a lobbyist demanding change from others. As an entrepreneur, I can build alternatives myself. And I am quite proud that with bcause we are making cross-border giving easier and cheaper than ever, effective immediately, with local donation receipts for deposits from 20 countries, and with disbursements worldwide (see Idea occupying my mind).

Three women particularly inspired me on this topic: Liz McKeon has seen it all in philanthropy, from USAID and the Ford Foundation to the IKEA Foundation. In a new podcast episode, she explains the “Strange World of Cross-Border Giving”. With the founding of DAF Commons, Lily Starling Louis is responding to criticism that donor-advised funds tie up billions against their mission instead of distributing them. Because bcause is also a DAF, we developed an indicator for this with the “Flow Rate” (see Number that sticks in mind). And with the idea of a Black-owned bank, Zohra Sandi wants to overcome the invisible boundaries that many people with a migration background encounter within Germany (see Person who inspires me).

With boundlessly optimistic regards,

Felix

✍️ ESSAY: The Boundaries of Giving

Photo: A significantly younger and more naive me, Brussels 2017

My generation grew up in the firm belief that more and more borders would fall, that democracy would prevail worldwide, and that open societies would solve global problems together. Just nine years ago, it seemed to me only a matter of time before the free movement of goods, capital, and services would, at least in Europe, include donations as well. Because neither societal problems nor their solutions stop at national borders.

Things turned out differently. In fact, it has gotten worse. Since last year, a donation to an organization in another EU country is only deductible in Germany if it is listed in the recipient register at the Federal Central Tax Office. It can only register itself, usually by amending its bylaws and providing proven “domestic relevance.” Whatever that is supposed to mean. A donation from Germany to Greek music students: rejected. Outside the EU, not even that applies. What is recognized as charitable hardly differs between Lisbon and Warsaw. Generosity still ends at the border nonetheless.

Worldwide, it is similar. A comparison shows how little remains of it as a result: Of the 617 billion dollars donated in the US in 2025, 33 billion went to international causes—just over five percent. While many donations from Germany also go to projects abroad, almost all of that runs through German aid agencies and the German branches of international organizations. How much goes directly to where the money is needed is not recorded. It is likely barely one or two percent. Such a thing would be unthinkable in the for-profit economy: 52.6 percent of the shares of the 40 DAX corporations are in foreign hands. Half of capital is international. Giving practically is not. Since my initiative in Brussels, stock markets have surged enormously (even adjusted for inflation). Giving across borders has actually declined.

No one has quantified what the detours cost. The last estimate commissioned by the EU Commission dates back to 2009: 90 to 102 million euros a year for European foundations alone. The costs of the countless organizations established primarily to issue local donation receipts are not included in that. One example is Hera, which Liz McKeon told me about on the podcast. The organization protects women in the Global South from extreme heat and, as of this year, exists twice—in the US and in the Netherlands—because European donors no longer wanted to donate to the US. Two boards, two accounting setups, one purpose.

Cross-border giving has always been expensive (see below Idea for further thought), but currently something else is happening that I never would have thought possible: Donations are being actively hindered politically in an unprecedented way. Not only the second Trump administration, but also Russia, India, and a growing list of other countries are restricting funds from abroad because they could finance a critical civil society. The justification: protection against alleged foreign influence.

“Authoritarian governments don't want independent money. And they want to spend less on problems outside their borders.” My Handelsblatt column on the topic from Oct 23.

With the dismantling of USAID, the largest development agency in the world, government development aid from industrialized countries fell by 23 percent last year—the sharpest cut since records began. Private money could now play a new role. There is plenty of it. What is missing is the conduit. In the US in particular, wealthy individuals fear their engagement will be interpreted politically. I am now hearing that in Europe as well. Others don't know how much of their money actually arrives. Very few want to establish new organizations for this purpose. With 100 euros, that doesn't matter. But nobody gives 100,000 euros or a million if thousands of euros in consulting fees are incurred beforehand and a multi-percent fee afterwards.

It is a market failure with terrible consequences for those working internationally against poverty, disease, and heat. And in donor countries, these costly detours fuel the suspicion the public already has anyway: that the non-profit sector is opaque, inefficient, and slow.

But there is no point in demanding that politicians solve the problem—that much I have learned. The sector has to help itself. The fact that it hasn't done so yet is also due to the fact that many make a good living from it. Consultants bill for establishing the next support association, intermediaries take their fee, and the tax administration saves itself the effort of examining foreign articles of association. And associations have to cater to their members, including many organizations that wouldn't need to exist, or could exist with less staff and budget. I know that from experience.

“I have to believe that the future of philanthropy is digital. And that it is borderless. And that it operates at near-zero cost.” My colleague Luke Kincaid at a philanthropy roundtable in Zurich in September 2026

Technically, the problem is solvable. Every banking app sends money across dozens of currencies in seconds. But the solution for European philanthropy will not come from Silicon Valley. Nor will it come from Switzerland or Liechtenstein. So far, no country is actively courting wealth that wants to make an impact. Yet right now, many are looking for a place for it: Americans who want to move their philanthropic engagement out of the firing line, entrepreneurial families with members in London, Lisbon, or Singapore who want to engage in or from Germany.

More than nine years ago, I believe it would be a political no-brainer to make the country with the largest number of millionaires in Europe, the highest exports, a country with a stable legal system and the euro as a common currency, also the best location for wealth that wants to make a societal impact. If a fairy came along, one of my three wishes would be a single sentence in the law: “Whatever is recognized as charitable in another EU member state also applies here.”

Until that happens, we at bcause are making a small contribution to reducing the costs of unnecessary legal shells and expensive forwarding (more on this below). I am still as idealistic as I was back then in Brussels. But today, I am also an entrepreneur on top of that.

A person who inspires me: Zohra Sandi

Zohra Sandi comes from Western Sahara and built a career in Germany’s banking sector, including in the financing business of GLS Bank. She has experienced how the obligations and expectations of banks completely miss the needs and realities of people with a migration background in particular. A shampoo for Afro hair has to prove its market to people who cannot understand the product. Equity and collateral presuppose wealth built up over generations. Parents who spent their working lives supporting relatives in two countries don't have that.

Zohra reached out to me on LinkedIn. And then she impressed me during our conversation. Because she doesn't just want to set up another funding project. Rather, she thinks in structures: a Black Finance Month, eventually a cooperative bank owned by the community, and as a first step the Diaspora Finance Lab, a design process under the umbrella of AiDiA (c/o Business Empowerment Hub) in Hamburg. With around 100,000 euros, the founding could be conceptualized there. The diaspora, says Zohra, sends more money to Africa than development aid. When it comes to money crossing visible and invisible borders, she knows more than most in my industry.

Here you can support Zohra's project with a donation. I've already started with my small FO Foundation.

bcause for Organizations

bcause enables non-profit organizations to collect donations digitally, manage them centrally, access them flexibly, and earn interest on them in the meantime.

Finally, there is an alternative to setting up a support association abroad: As a German organization receiving donations from Switzerland, Austria, or the US (or vice versa), the common practice so far has often been to found a dedicated organization in the respective country. Via bcause, donors from 20 countries can now make deposits with a local donation receipt and forward the money to the target organization. No second legal entity, no second board, no second accounting system.

For specific questions about using bcause, simply book an online appointment with my colleagues Nicole and Simone . More information

A number that sticks in mind: 80.2 percent

Photo: With DAF Commons co-founder Lily Starling Louis and Sid Efremovich in New Jersey, July 2026

That is how high the Flow Rate is at bcause: the share of deposits that, from our founding to today, has already flowed to organizations or been invested in impact. With this new indicator for our mission, we are anticipating a criticism that we have not yet experienced ourselves, but which has now become a major debate in the US.

There are now 326 billion dollars sitting in Donor Advised Funds there, across more than three million accounts; a fifth of all private donations run through them. The tax deduction applies immediately, while the money waits. According to DAF Commons, the invested assets of a typical fund are ten to twenty times larger than what it pays out in a year. While that is more than US foundations, they at least have a 5% distribution requirement. If they don't meet it, they lose their tax privileges.

In Germany, the picture is even more extreme. In this country, there are no mandates for foundations; they can decide at their own discretion and that of their local tax office and foundation supervisory authority whether and how much money actually leaves the door to fulfill their purpose. I have criticized this many times before. (see “Dug Up” section below)

“Are we actually getting money out the door?” Liz McKeon on the podcast “Das Neue Geben” #61 discussing the benchmark for foundation work

DAF Commons is a new initiative by fundholders that takes this criticism seriously and does something about it. They demand reforms, transparency regarding fees and distributions, and above all, they want one thing: that the billions waiting to be distributed make an impact in the meantime. Their goal is 50 billion dollars from DAF assets channeled into impact investments.

My conversation with Lily this summer was the starting point of an internal debate at bcause about how we actually measure whether we are putting money to work or tying it down. Our Flow Rate adds the allocations of donations to recipient balances (63%) and the portion of our invested assets that flows into active impact investments (approx. 50% of currently invested assets, which corresponds to 17.2% of all deposits). The rest is held in liquid investments (mainly green ETFs and cash) so that we can disburse new allocations quickly.

Or put simply: 80.2% of donations via bcause are actively at work for society. That is the standard we now hold ourselves to.

Club Neues Geben

Nothing motivates giving quite like seeing others around you doing it too. But where can you see that? In the Club Neues Geben, this happens in a confidential setting during webinars. From our major gifts database, which we are now analyzing monthly in the Club Neues Geben, one number caught my eye this time: Just over a fifth of large donations on bcause go abroad: in 2026 so far, €1.29 million to 32 organizations, and more than one in three active foundation accounts was involved. The share remains stable at 22 percent, but the direction has shifted. Alongside global poverty alleviation (e.g. via Effektiv Spenden) and emergency relief, more money is flowing to Europe—five times as much as in 2024, for example for trauma therapy in Ukraine or Ashoka in Poland. New additions include cultural and media projects in the Middle East. A good €300,000 went directly to organizations based abroad, without a German intermediary. This is now becoming easier and cheaper—we are keeping an eye on it.

The Club Neues Geben is for anyone who commits or wants to commit five figures per year financially. Feel free to write to katharina.bauch@bcause.com.

More on the Club Neues Geben

An idea for further thought: A cost cap on donations

A donation receipt is a valuable piece of paper. After all, it gets you a tax benefit in most industrialized countries (not all, but that's another story). In Germany, a donation of €100,000 can be worth up to €45,000 in actual cash tax savings.

Yet that piece of paper is also quite expensive when you look closely. For the recipient organization. Particularly if it is based abroad or receives the donation from abroad. In that case, it doesn't receive €100,000, but has to deduct the costs incurred just so it can offer the donor the donation receipt in the first place.

“Why don't you just set up another association? Or a foundation!” That is often the advice from lawyers or tax advisors in this scenario. Legally sound, but economically absurd. It costs incorporation fees, board management, accounting, auditing, and time—and all that just so that in the end a single sheet of paper is produced with the home country's donation receipt?

The alternative is networks that handle the routing of individual donations. They work like this: Someone donates in their home country to a local intermediary foundation, which sends the money to another intermediary foundation in the target country, which then transfers it to the target organization there. Three transactions instead of one. In 2025, the costs at Giving Europe, the largest such intermediary network, were 5% of the donation amount. Dedicated professionals are behind it. They managed 12,749 transactions last year. Those are 12,749 transactions that might not have happened without them. But I cannot believe that this comes anywhere close to meeting the demand of a continent with 450 million inhabitants.

Since this month, things work differently at bcause. From 20 countries, you can pay into a foundation account and receive the donation receipt of the country where you pay taxes. From there, the money flows to organizations worldwide. The cost is two percent. We use the infrastructure of multiple partners for this, in each case the most cost-effective.

The idea behind it is bigger than a product feature. When giving becomes as simple as a bank transfer, an argument that has kept generosity suppressed for decades disappears: Who really knows if and how much of it actually arrives?

I think we should consider whether a cost cap on the forwarding of donations wouldn't be helpful against this objection. In the commercial financial world, there is intense price competition for this. And, of course, transparency and regulation.

“At a cash exchange bureau, if somebody charged us 5% to change our money, we'd probably look elsewhere.” Liz McKeon in the podcast “Das Neue Geben” #61

Incidentally, there is only one other legal financial transaction that is as expensive as cross-border donations. Global remittances—funds sent by emigrants back to their home countries—cost an average of 6.4 percent digitally. Here, the G8 nations decided in 2009 that things couldn't stay that way, and since then, costs have fallen by a third. It's time we changed this for donations, too.

💡 Read, Listen, Watch

🎧 PODCAST #61 (English): “The Strange World of Cross-Border Giving” with Liz McKeon. Why an organization needs two legal entities, what separates “dead donors” from “living donors,” and why philanthropy's infrastructure comes “from a terrible backwards place.” Available wherever you get your podcasts.

📺 TV PITCH: Feature about bcause on the n-tv Startup Magazine from Oct 2, 2026

🗞️ Handelsblatt “You're just a social worker anyway” (Oct 16) with 17,000 readers on the first weekend: Non-profit organizations hold around 74 billion euros in banks, 45 billion of which are in checking accounts earning almost no interest. The gap to the market interest rate costs the sector around 850 million euros a year, almost a fifth of all private donations. That infuriates me.

🗞️ Handelsblatt: “Three reasons why global giving hits borders” (Oct 23): Expensive, slow, and opaque—an industry that moves its money the way non-profit organizations often do shouldn't complain about criticism. Where does the inefficiency come from?

📅 Dug Up

#3/25, Figure “421 million dollars”. That's how much Elon Musk's foundation fell short of meeting the statutory minimum payout of five percent for the third year in a row. The story was an occasion to praise what is actually a good rule: The mandatory payout requirement ensures that US foundations don't sit on their money and invest it with greater risk appetite than their German counterparts. The fact that we measure the Flow Rate at bcause has its origins here.

🔍 Needs & Leads

🤖 “Herr Nilsson” is a project by Anna Alex and Friederike von Waldenfels. The two want to find out which AI tools would genuinely help conservation organizations—with funder reporting, back-office operations, or field monitoring. Building will only begin once the demand is clear. If you work in a conservation organization: The survey takes five minutes, www.mrnilsson.ai

🗳️ Felix Silberzahn is eleven years old and has been collecting in-kind and financial donations for three years through his initiative “Kinder gegen Obdachlosigkeit” (Children Against Homelessness) for Housing First, which provides housing to unhoused individuals and supports them with a fresh start. KiKA nominated him for the German Engagement Award 2026; he is among the top ten percent in the online voting. The prize money goes entirely to support for the homeless. Vote here: https://www.deutscher-engagementpreis.de/publikumspreis/nominierte/6934-felix-silberzahn

🥕 Many children know what a carrot looks like, but not how it grows. Yet the nearest farm is often just a bus ride away. With “Essen entdecken!” (Discover Food!), the Sarah Wiener Stiftung enables daycare children to have special educational experiences on organic farms. There, they discover with all their senses where our food comes from. In 2025, 6,450 children from 258 daycares were already able to participate free of charge—funded entirely by donations. To ensure children can continue to have these experiences in the future, 100,000 euros are currently still needed to fund the program.

💙 How do you stay friends with people who think differently and vote differently? Roger Berkowitz, founder of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, believes the crisis of democracy is also a crisis of friendship. He will discuss this at Deep Talks, a discussion salon hosted by Ukrainian Julia Singh, which I have attended several times myself—on November 6 from 1:00 to 3:30 PM at the Serpen Gallery in Berlin-Mitte. Tickets here.

Feel free to write to me with your needs and leads.

Felix Oldenburg is a founder and author on a mission for a society that finances solutions rather than managing problems. 🔗 Book "Der gefesselte Wohlstand" order here 🎧 Or as an audiobook while jogging, cooking, driving... 📱On LinkedIn and (more rarely) Instagram for thoughts and conversation starters. 🔁 SHARE THIS NEWSLETTER

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