Promote Giving: Why $35 Billion in AUM is Moving to Philanthropy
👋 Hey, Nick here. A big welcome to the new subscribers from Ares, PIMCO, and Anchorage Capital.
This isn’t my usual newsletter.
This week, I want to write about something bigger than private credit.
If you are open to that, read on.
If you’re here exclusively for deals, fundraising, and partnership updates, I’ll be back next week.
Connecting fund performance to philanthropy
I started this newsletter three years ago to learn from great credit investors. Along the way, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with a number of them.
A conversation with Joel Holsinger (Co-head of Ares Alternative Credit) a few weeks ago raised a different question:
Can we be more than great investors?
Joel grew up with a nurse for a mum and a pastor for a dad. Giving back was normal. Years later, he joined the board of PATH, a global health NGO.
On his first trip with PATH in 2018, he visited the slums of Mumbai to see a tuberculosis programme in action.
He came home with one thought: “I need to be doing more.”
Not long after, Joel walked into Ares CEO Mike Arougheti’s office with a simple proposal:
“I suggest we implement a charitable tie-in to a new fund. Let’s commit a slice of the promote (carry / performance fees) to charitable organizations.”
At that time, the ask was painless, “a percentage of zero.” There was no fund yet. No AUM. No carry.
As of September 2025, around $19 billion of AUM sits in Ares Alternative Credit vehicles with that pledge attached, and they have already accrued over $40 million for charity.
That experience is what eventually led Joel and the Ares team to help launch Promote Giving.
From casual generosity to structural giving
Most of us give to charity in the usual way:
Someone runs a marathon, we click a JustGiving link.
A colleague hosts a charity dinner, we buy a table.
At year-end, we donate to a couple of household names and move on. It’s generosity. But it’s not deliberate.
Promote Giving is an attempt to change that.
What Promote Giving Is (and Isn’t)
Promote Giving isn’t a charity. It’s a collective and community made up of nine founding signatories. The pledge is simple:
Donate the equivalent of at least 5% of performance fees from a fund (or family of funds) to charities focused on healthcare, education, or human well-being.
No constraints on investment decisions. No trade-offs for LP returns. Just a small, pre-committed slice of promote that is structurally routed to philanthropy.
So far, ~$35B+ in AUM has pledged to participate.
Each signatory:
Sets up its own giving infrastructure.
Chooses its own charities that align with its firm.
Decides whether giving is centralized or employee-directed.
Promote Giving helps:
Connect firms that share similar charitable themes.
Pull in external expertise; they’ve connected people with GiveWell, Effective Altruism, and other strategic giving groups.
Provide guidance on where to start.
“What about my carry?”
“If you carve out 5–10%, doesn’t that mean there’s less carry to go around?”
Promote Giving isn’t meant to undermine your ability to recruit and retain by forcing a tax on compensation. The goal is that people participate because they believe in it, not because they’re coerced.
Joel described the response inside the team as a rule of thirds:
One third: Think: “Just pay me my bonus.” They’re not hostile, but they’re not emotionally invested.
One third: Genuinely like that the firm does this; it’s part of the culture.
The final third: “It’s the air they breathe.” It’s one of the reasons they will never leave.
You don’t need 100% evangelists. You just need enough people in that last third that the culture shifts.
And importantly, you don’t have to start with your whole platform. Start with one vehicle. You can grow from there.
Compounding purpose
Promote Giving gives teams a dual mandate:
Deliver the highest possible returns to pensioners, retirees, and insurance policyholders.
Know that a slice of the upside from doing that well is going to save lives, educate kids, and support communities.
It changes internal conversations, instead of “Look at my bonus.”
You can say:
“If we achieve our base case on this deal, $600,000 of promote will go to charity.”
Or:
“We approved six new grants this year—one is funding a surgical center in Zimbabwe.”
That’s compounding purpose. And that’s what Promote Giving is really about.
“We wouldn’t know where to start.”
Promote Giving has spoken with 50+ organisations and groups that are setting up foundations or structured giving for the first time.
And the investor mindset is an advantage. We already ask:
“Where will each dollar have the most impact?”
“How do we measure outcomes?”
The key is to start and to involve the whole organization. Make it cultural, not just an executive decision. Once you start, you’ll almost certainly do more.
The 13-year-old and the 95-year-old
One of the founding signatories, Jeremy Coller, Managing Partner of Coller Capital, has a simple test:
Would your 13-year-old self be proud of you?
Would your 95-year-old self be proud of what you did?
Joel Holsinger has a similar view: when you’re 95, there are only three things that really matter:
Your close friends and family.
Your experience, not your goods. The trip, not the car.
And did you give back? Did you make the world a better place?
Promote Giving is a way of hard-coding that third point into the business model we already live inside.
A Christmas ask
So here’s a very specific Christmas request:
If you’re a GP/manager of a fund
Pick an upcoming vehicle or existing vehicles and ask: “Are we willing to pledge the equivalent of at least 5% of the promote from our fund(s) to charity?”
If you’re an investment professional
Bring this into your next offsite or partner meeting and ask: “If we were starting from scratch, would we design the firm to give like this?”
If you’re an LP
Add one line to your DDQs: “Do you operate a structured, manager-funded giving model (e.g. Promote Giving)? If not, why not?”
If you want background materials or examples, email info@promotegiving.org or hit “Take the Pledge” on their site. The team runs regular Zooms with interested managers.
Thanks again, and see you all in the New Year
Nick.
Great end of year reminder of what matters.
Endearing and thought-provoking content as always, thank you for your persistence in writing Nick. Happy New Year!