Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on July 8, 2025.
Few names in American culture carry the weight and global resonance of Disney. What began in 1923 as a modest animation studio founded by brothers Walt and Roy O. Disney has grown into a multibillion-dollar entertainment empire with millions of fans around the world. And it’s hard to believe that the happiest place on Earth, Disneyland, just turned 70 years old.
Yet behind the tale of the corporate powerhouse lies a story of family legacy and philanthropic giving that is lesser known — and evolving in important ways. In 2021, as one of my first pieces in partnership with the National Center for Family Philanthropy, I wrote about a grantmaker near the center of that story, the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Foundation (RPDFF), which sprung out of the original Roy Disney Family Foundation.
Under its original name, the foundation’s roots go back to 1969. Roy E. Disney, the son of Roy O. Disney, along with his wife Patricia, operated it as a small family foundation without much in the way of formal structure or professional staff until the foundation received a large bequest following Patricia’s passing in 2012. It was then that it took on its current name. The foundation employs a place-based approach, granting up to $5 million each year through an invitation-only process.
In case you were wondering, RPDFF isn’t the only philanthropic vehicle associated with the Disney clan. Outspoken progressive philanthropist and activist Abigail Disney, a daughter of Roy E. and Patricia Disney, runs the Daphne Foundation with her husband Pierre Hauser. And her brother, writer-producer-investor Tim Disney, runs the Adamma Foundation (meaning “beautiful child” in the Nigerian language of Igbo), which has similar aims as Daphne but focuses on Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the late Diane Disney Miller, Walt Disney’s daughter, was the founder of both the Walt Disney Family Foundation and the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.
When I first connected with third-generation family member and former RPDFF board chair Susan Lord Disney, daughter of Roy E. and Patricia, and CEO Shawn Escoffery, we spoke about the foundation’s gradual evolution from a more conventional family foundation into a grantmaker that prioritizes social justice and bringing nonfamily voices to the fore — trends that have long been playing out over the longer term at many family grantmakers.
But what has changed at RPDFF over the last few years? Well, quite a bit, as leadership of the foundation has now transitioned into the fourth generation. Olivia Hauser, Susan Disney’s niece and Abigail Disney’s daughter, held the role of chair for the past few years. And now, Max Disney, Susan’s son, has recently become chair.
In conversations with Escoffery, Susan Disney, and Max Disney, I found out more about what’s been new at RPDFF, including participatory grantmaking and global human rights work, how the foundation has engaged in mission-aligned investing, and how a new generation of Disneys is shaping grantmaking into the next decade.
How three generations of Disney children have taken up leadership at RPDFF
The original iteration of the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Foundation was launched in the 1960s, around the time that Roy O. Disney reportedly owned about 20% of the company. (Today, the whole family owns less than 3% of it and much of the family has stayed out of the business.) When Roy O. Disney passed, Susan’s father Roy E. Disney steered the foundation, donating to causes that were personal to him and Patricia. Then, when Susan and her siblings each turned 18, they were brought on to the board and allowed to make small, annual grants.
Around 2000, when Roy E. Disney was in his 60s, Susan and her siblings began to fully steer the foundation, whose three core buckets are criminal justice reform, affordable housing preservation and environmental justice.
To get the lay of the land, Susan and her siblings met with John Hamilton Adams, cofounder of National Resources Defense Council. “We had just kind of taken hold of this foundation and tried to figure out what we were going to do. His advice to us was ‘find a fish and save it,’ Susan said. “And we’ve all really taken that point to heart.”
As she did when we spoke for my 2021 piece, Susan was ever careful to make a distinction between the broader Disney legacy and her family’s personal philanthropy. She admits that dropping the Disney name opens doors and can get the ball rolling, but she ultimately had this to say: “We don’t think of ourselves as the Disneys. We think of ourselves as a family who’s trying to make the world better as best we can.”
Today, RPDFF has 21 eligible board members. With the fourth generation getting more involved with the foundation, Susan points out that RPDFF has always allowed family members to enter and exit the board on an ad hoc basis. She said it’s not realistic to expect 20-something recent college graduates to have a lot of bandwidth for philanthropy. So instead, she allowed them space to find their way back to the foundation and observed the fourth generation coming back into the fold in their late 20s, once their careers were more established.
Members of the fourth generation take the reins beginning in 2022
RPDFF’s board leadership has now formally transitioned from the third to the fourth generation. Susan Lord Disney first passed the baton to Olivia Hauser, her sister Abigail’s daughter, in 2022. And in early 2025, Susan’s son Max assumed the role of chair.
Like his mother, Max Disney, 34, originally joined the foundation board when he was 18, but he’s been grappling with the family legacy for much longer. He went back to when he was nine years old and his mother was putting him and his twin sisters to bed. “‘Why are we so lucky?’” Max recalls asking Susan. “You’re going to be asking that question for the rest of your life,” she replied, closing the door behind her.
Around the time Max joined the foundation, a few of his cousins, including Olivia, also joined. He says that for his generation, those early years at the foundation were about quietly learning and soaking in everything they could.
Max is glad his mother and the rest of the third generation made a point of ensuring that everyone felt like they had equal footing in board meetings. “There’s no one person who bigfoots or who inserts themselves into everything,” he said, adding that as someone who is involved with several other nonprofit organizations, including Boldly Go Philanthropy’s advisory council, he knows that this isn’t always the case with family philanthropy.
Max says that when Olivia was at the helm, she was able to set the fourth generation on a leadership pathway. And now that Max is chair, he’s looking at ways to engage their younger cousins, especially those who are in college or just entering the adult world. “My leadership style is trying to be that adult in the room that I wanted to be when I was younger, but also still just ‘cousin Max’ and ‘brother Max.’ … These are people who have known me through all of my good and bad, they’re just going to laugh if I sound too much like a serious person.”
RPDFF’s journey into participatory grantmaking and becoming “100% mission aligned”
Perhaps the most striking hallmark of the foundation’s transformation is its embrace of participatory grantmaking, an effort that the fourth generation is leading. The model empowers community members with lived experience to play a leading role in grant decisions. While it remains by far an exception to the norm across the philanthrosphere, the participatory approach has also gained traction among many grantmakers who see it as the cutting edge of wider trends toward more trust-based giving.
“It’s the thing we’re the most excited about as a younger generation,” Max said. “… the only solution that’s going to come [for problems] is from the people who have lived the problem… we want to be good partners and we take that super seriously as a group.”
Shawn Escoffery joined RPDFF in 2018 as CEO, after previous stints at the Surdna Foundation and the New Orleans Neighborhood Development Collaborative. Susan and Max credit him for a number of the foundation’s new approaches. Escoffery said that RPDFF first launched a participatory grantmaking program in 2021, focused on L.A. During the pandemic, the foundation wasn’t as active in the community as they would have liked to have been, he says, so the team needed a new way to identify potential organizations to support; at that point, the foundation was just beginning conversations around democratizing its grantmaking.
RPDFF initially identified seven community members with backgrounds in the nonprofit sector, academia, and local government as its inaugural reviewers. Sixteen organizations were selected in its inaugural round. In 2022, the foundation had two cycles of participatory grants, with the first round allowing it to explore community land trusts and other issues outside its direct priorities, while a second round focused on criminal justice reform work centered on prevention. “In all three rounds, we used a different set of seven community members with various backgrounds. And all reviewers were compensated for their time — approximately $2,500. Most grants ranged from $10,000 to $30,000,” Escoffery said.
More recently in 2024, the foundation expanded its participatory grantmaking to New Orleans, partnering with the Foundation for Louisiana, and began to outsource its L.A. participatory component, working with the Liberty Hill Foundation. Both organizations had significant experience running participatory grant programs already, Escoffery said. RPDFF supported the work of Liberty Hill’s Community Review Board, and with the Foundation for Louisiana, RPDFF co-created a project focused on gun violence and safety. The funders also co-created a participatory grantmaking project focused on missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and two-spirited people with Return to the Heart Foundation.
In 2025, RPDFF has renewed its partnership with the Foundation for Louisiana and is piloting a participatory grantmaking project with the Tacoma Community Foundation. “We are also exploring the continuation of our Native American work and L.A.” Escoffery added.
RPDFF’s Environmental Justice Awards program, meanwhile, eliminates traditional grant requirements. Selected BIPOC-led environmental justice groups receive three years of general operating support, without having to apply or submit reports, Escoffery said.
Susan is also optimistic about this participatory grantmaking lens. “I think it’s wonderfully empowering for people who are doing the actual work to be able to have a say and to understand the point of view of having to make decisions about grants,” she said.
At the end of last year, RPDFF also agreed to shift its assets to become 100% percent mission aligned with its gender, racial and economic justice goals. “We’re in the process of redeveloping our investment policy statement and aligning our assets,” Escoffery said.
As Max tells it, the shift toward fully mission-aligned investing came about as part of a broader conversation about the very existence of a family foundation. Some in the fourth generation advocated for a spend-down, convinced that money deployed quickly to pressing problems would be the best use of their wealth. Other family members defended the idea of legacy and making an impact decades from now. Max says that there were passionate and compelling arguments made on both sides, but ultimately, with the help of Escoffery’s mediation, this was the compromise that was reached.
Susan sees the logic clearly: “It seems obvious that we want to realign everything we do with our mission. It’s harder than it looks and we’ve been educating ourselves on how to do it. Shawn [Escoffery] drives it, but we are all 100% with him.”
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The foundation’s expanding global focus, with an eye on the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Given the ongoing decimation of public sector support for international nonprofit programming, it was heartening to learn that the foundation has continued to expand its international footprint. The foundation’s current support most notably focuses on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, RPDFF backs a coalition of grassroots organizations tackling a range of issues including gender-based violence, climate resilience, and labor conditions in notorious cobalt mines — mines whose output goes toward many modern conveniences like smartphones and electric vehicles.
This global expansion is deeply personal for members of the family. Max spent time living in Liberia in his youth, inspired by his aunt Abigail Disney’s documentary work on African conflicts. “I’ve always been obsessed with Africa,” he said. “But as a group, it was really through Abby’s work with Kennedy Odede [founder of Shining Hope for Communities] in Kibera [in Kenya], the largest slum in Africa… once we saw what he was doing, we thought ‘this is transcendent work.’”
Yet even as its scope expands, the foundation remains grounded in its longstanding domestic commitments. In my 2021 piece, for instance, I wrote about the foundation’s housing giving in the Big Easy, a city where Escoffery also has ties.
Looking ahead: Max Disney’s thoughts on the next chapter for RPDFF
Max Disney just stepped into his role as board chair, and his first major initiative is a 360-degree survey of the family’s engagement, values, and knowledge. He wants to bring in more analytics and data to get a sense of exactly how RPDFF is making an impact — without losing, as he calls it, the “human element.” His ultimate goal is to provide perspective on how far the foundation has really come, but also to start to chart out the next 10 to 15 years. “We’ve agreed that we want to exist. So what now? I’m in a unique position. I have a two year old and a four year old, so I’m looking ahead,” Max said.
Max also hopes to create better structures for onboarding younger cousins, many of whom don’t share the same formative experiences he and Olivia had in their twenties. “There’s not the same nexus point for them. So we’re still figuring that out.”
Going back to the conversation Susan and Max had more than two decades ago when Max was nine, the fourth generation and the broader Disney board are still navigating those unavoidable questions of privilege and legacy. On how he wrestles with wealth today, Max offered that maybe it’s not about answering that question at all, but instead refining it over time. “Maybe it’s not about being OK with it, but being worthy of it,” he said. “Something that I can feel comfortable in, and something that does make sense to me.”
Susan Disney remains vice chair of the foundation, staying involved and filling in gaps as needed. She and her son both said that perhaps the biggest value of working together is becoming even closer as a family. “I feel like I like my family more. I’ve always loved them. But I feel like I like them more now because of this process,” Max said.
For a foundation sporting one of the most recognizable surnames in American culture, the story of RPDFF isn’t just about legacy — it’s about reinvention. And if the fourth generation has anything to say about it, the next chapter will be even more different than the last.
