Twenty Years of the Vijaya Foundation

Uma and I started the Vijaya Foundation in 2006 — twenty years ago this year. It is a private family foundation, registered in Connecticut, and its work has been deliberately quiet. We did not build a public brand around it. We did not name it after ourselves. We have, for the most part, given to organizations we believe in and let those organizations tell their own stories.

Looking back over twenty years, what I notice most is consistency. Family foundations tend to drift — they begin with founder intent and slowly become whatever the trustees of the moment care about. Ours has not. Four threads have run through the work since the beginning and they are still the work today: education, Vipassana meditation, Indian cultural and religious institutions, and Connecticut community causes. Each has its own logic.

Education

The largest share of the Foundation’s giving has gone to education, and it has been there from the earliest years. Some of it has been to institutions where we ourselves were given a great deal: schools and universities that shaped our family. Some of it has been institutional in a different sense — to organizations like Teach For America, whose work is to put exceptional people in front of children who would not otherwise have access to them.

Teach For America was one of our first major commitments. We were among their leadership donors as early as fiscal year 2009 — a moment in the organization’s history when its model of placing recent college graduates into under-resourced classrooms had just begun to draw the attention of the broader philanthropic community. We have continued the relationship since.

Dartmouth has been the other long-running educational thread, and a more personal one. Both of our children attended Dartmouth, and the College has been a formative institution for our family. When Dartmouth launched its Call to Lead campaign in 2018, Uma and I were among the donors to it. The campaign’s emphasis on the teacher-scholar model, on financial aid, and on experiential learning aligned squarely with what we had come to value about the College.

Beyond the institutions named above, much of our educational giving has gone to schools attended by family members and to smaller organizations doing high-leverage work. We have generally preferred fewer, larger, longer-running commitments to many small ones — the same instinct that runs through the investment side of my life.

Vipassana meditation

The second thread is harder to write about, in part because the practice itself is private and in part because the language of philanthropy fits it poorly.

I have practiced Vipassana meditation for many years. The tradition I have practiced in does not accept fees from students; courses are run on the donations of those who have completed prior courses and decided that the gift has been worth giving forward. Most of the support we provide in this area is in that spirit — it is not really philanthropy in the foundation sense, but a continuation of an old chain of generosity, and the Foundation has been one of the vehicles for that.

I will not say more about the specific practice here. I will say only that the three decades of investing I have written about elsewhere are not separate from the meditation life. Long-horizon investing demands a kind of stillness that is not easy to come by, and meditation is, for me, one of the disciplines that makes the stillness possible. I am suspicious of any account of an investment career that does not name the practices that supported it.

Indian cultural and religious institutions

The third thread is the cultural and religious heritage of our family. Our parents and grandparents lived inside an Indian intellectual and devotional tradition that is older and richer than any we will build in a single lifetime — and that is, in the parts of it we know, in some places under-resourced and at risk of being lost.

The Foundation has supported a number of cultural and religious institutions in this area. Some of them are well-known centers and temples; others are smaller efforts run by individuals or families who have taken on the work of preserving particular traditions, texts, or practices. Where possible we have tried to fund the people doing the actual preservation rather than the institutional layer above them.

I will not name individual recipients here. Many of them prefer not to be named, and the practice of not naming is itself part of how this kind of work has historically been done.

Connecticut community

The final thread is the most local. We live in Greenwich, and a portion of the Foundation’s annual giving goes to organizations in Connecticut — community foundations, schools, libraries, and arts organizations — that constitute the immediate civic life of the place. This kind of giving does not show up much in the abstract conversations philanthropy attracts. It is also, in our experience, the giving with the most concrete and observable effects.

On the philosophy of family philanthropy

If twenty years has taught us anything, it is that the dollar amount given matters far less than the patience and attentiveness behind it. The organizations we have supported the longest are the ones that have changed us as well as benefited from us — both because the relationship has informed our understanding of the field, and because the act of returning to the same organization year after year, watching how it weathers changes in leadership and circumstance, is itself an education.

Concentrated investing and concentrated giving have, I have come to think, more in common than the words suggest. Both require the discipline to say no a great deal so that you can say yes well. Both compound. Both are improved by the long view.

The Foundation will keep doing what it has been doing. There are organizations we have given to from the beginning that we expect to keep giving to as long as they continue to do their work. That continuity — quiet, steady, unflashy — is in some ways the point of having a foundation rather than simply writing checks. It is what makes the work institutional rather than episodic.

The Vijaya Foundation is a private 501(c)(3) family foundation, registered in Greenwich, Connecticut. Trustees: Vinit Bodas and Uma Bodas. Founded 2006.