News out of Charlotte, North Carolina, provides a fascinating real-time example of how a donor’s planned gift can galvanize a step change in his foundation’s grantmaking.
Established in 1980 by Family Dollar Stores founder Leon Levine and his wife Sandra, The Leon Levine Foundation (TLLF) has been a reliable supporter of organizations in the Carolinas addressing its four mission areas — healthcare, human services, education and Jewish values. For the fiscal years ending June 2020 through 2022, TLLF disbursed an annual average of $27 million in grants, a substantial portion of which came in the form of operational support.
After Levine passed away in 2023, his estate made what TLLF President and CEO Tom Lawrence called “a tremendous gift” to the foundation, pushing its assets to over $2 billion.
Thanks to Levine’s contribution, TLLF paid out $58 million in grants in fiscal year 2025 — a 93% increase over the $30 million it disbursed three years ago — and is on target to disburse $100 million in the next two to three years, including a small percentage of estimated qualified expenses. TLLF’s press release notes that it is now the second-largest private foundation in North Carolina, among the top 10 in the Southeast and in the top 75 in the country.
Research suggests that most family foundation leaders would sit back and let the magic of compounded interest grow the assets for perpetuity, but TLLF is charting a different course. In addition to announcing that its assets had eclipsed $2 billion, its July 8 press release revealed it will be spending down in 50 years.
“The idea behind [the spend-down] is beyond just increasing our annual spend,” Lawrence told me. “It’s about leveraging that opportunity to create permanency of pathways to self-sufficiency for underserved Carolinians and deeper engagement for Jewish Carolinians through our nonprofit partners. We’ll be working to explore and create opportunities over the next five decades for initiatives that are driving bold, innovative, systemic growth and addressing some of the more significant needs that align with the mission of the foundation.
An overview of The Leon Levine Foundation
Born in 1937 in Wadesboro, North Carolina, Leon Levine founded Family Dollar Stores in Charlotte in 1959. Serving as its chairman and CEO, he turned it into a discount retail giant before retiring in 2003. After stepping away from the company, he turned his attention to building up TLLF.
Lawrence joined TLLF as its first full-time employee in 2002 and first executive director in 2012. Three years later, after Dollar Tree acquired Family Dollar for $9 billion, the Levines contributed $150 million to TLLF, pushing its assets above $500 million. Since its inception, it has awarded $590 million to over 400 grantee partners.
Lawrence pointed to a handful of grantee partners doing impactful work across TLLF’s mission areas.
In healthcare, for example, a big priority is identifying and supporting scalable models of care. To this end, TLLF provided a grant to the Gastonia, North Carolina-based Kintegra Health to launch school-based mental health services to 46 previously underserved schools in Gaston, Catawba, Caldwell and Yadkin counties.
Another grantee, South Carolina First Steps, is an early childhood initiative focused on getting children ready for kindergarten and beyond. In mid-July, it announced a $2.25 million grant from TLLF to pilot a new “continuum-of-services model to ensure families living at or below 185% of the federal poverty level can access programs proven to improve early development and school readiness.” Once proven successful, the pilot “has the chance to scale even further,” Lawrence said.
The foundation is also committed to providing experiential opportunities for Jewish youth across the Carolinas. Representative grantees include two summer camps, Ramah Darom and Camp Judaea.
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The Leon Levine Foundation is embracing impact investing
Levine’s massive planned gift compelled stakeholders to revisit how they could best advance its mission. For starters, it meant staying true to TLLF’s track record of providing organizations with multi-year unrestricted operating grants. This type of support “was always very important to Leon Levine and is part of the culture of grantmaking that’s defined by the trust we have with leaders of over 400 nonprofits across the Carolinas,” Lawrence said. “It’s important that that work continues.”
TLLF is also embracing impact investing. “We’ve historically managed the portfolio and the endowment in a fairly traditional manner,” Lawrence said. Now, he and his team are “looking at ways to further leverage Mr. Levine’s gift beyond the 5% required minimum distribution to create impact with the other 95%.”
The foundation’s board and Investment Committee recently approved a plan to convert its portfolio so that it invests in companies that generate what Lawrence called a “market rate of return on a risk-adjusted basis” as well as “intentional and measurable social return on the communities that we seek to serve with our mission.” While the policy will take several years to be implemented, Lawrence said he and his team have “a lot of intentionality to move quickly so we can get these dollars to work to help leverage even further this impact. Implementation of the impact investment model has already begun; we’ve probably made over a dozen investments so far and are increasing rapidly.”
TLLF’s spend-down aims to empower grantees with “tools that create permanent solutions”
All of which brings us to TLLF’s plan to spend down in 50 years. Foundations rarely take a singular path toward shuttering their doors. Some donors create the foundation as a time-limited funder from the outset, while others decide to wind down years — or sometimes decades — into the foundation’s existence. There are also cases where a founding donor passes away without resolving the issue, effectively putting the decision in the hands of a surviving spouse or the foundation’s leadership.
Levine did not establish TLLF with the intention of spending down 50 years after his passing. Rather, spending down was “determined in the period during which growth was planned for,” Lawrence said. “Now, he’s given us 50 years to create permanence with that legacy of grantmaking.”
I found Lawrence’s usage of the word “permanence” striking. Most donors create private foundations with the foundation’s permanence in mind. They envision the entity as a steady source of funding for grantee partners or a vehicle to strengthen and extend the family’s legacy. TLLF’s sunset flips this idea of permanence on its head: It won’t exist in 50 years, but it will have left a lasting impact by empowering grantees with what Lawrence called “the tools that create permanent solutions for those communities.”
TLLF has also published a microsite that answers the kinds of questions grantee leaders would ask upon learning a major funder is going away. Nonprofit leaders will learn that TLLF is keeping its previous financial commitments, maintaining its geographic focus of North and South Carolina, and has no plans to stop accepting or approving grant applications.
In the short term, Lawrence said TLLF will be announcing its next round of grants in September. He also stressed that it accepts letters of inquiry on a rolling basis — a refreshing strategy in the frequently opaque world of family philanthropy.
“It’s a challenging time to be an underserved or Jewish Carolinian today, and the stresses and challenges that nonprofits across the Carolinas are facing are significant,” he said. “It’s important for the foundation to continue to be a stable partner and support our nonprofit partners as much as we can, and we look forward to finding ways to continue that, to support and look for other opportunities to extend into the gaps of need that exist over the coming years.”
