Stephen M. Schuck of the Schuck Initiatives discusses donor intent

Editorial note: this interview is adapted from “A conversation with The Schuck Initiatives’ Stephen M. Schuck,” posted in July 2025 at The Giving Review.

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“I’ve got to be my own boss,” Steven M. Schuck told me during a conversation we had six years ago. As his own boss, Schuck is a successful real-estate developer based in Colorado Springs, CO, an activist on behalf of projects and sometimes policies to encourage dignity and independence, and a civic builder. He is chairman of The Schuck Initiatives.

Schuck’s lifetime’s worth of active civic involvement has included service on the board of The Daniels Fund in Denver. He was part of the strenuous effort to preserve the donor intent of his friend Bill Daniels.

Naturally enough, people like Schuck who are their “own bosses” are also people who care about protecting and effectuating the intent of donors after their deaths. He is a passionate believer in—and something of an evangelist, equally passionate, for—the cause of donor intent.

Active engagement, specific definition

At The Schuck Initiatives, founded in 2005 as The Schuck Foundation by Schuck and his wife Joyce, “we do not consider ourselves philanthropists as much as activists,” Schuck told me during another conversation earlier this year. “We’re not passive donors. We engage, and we try and drive the agenda.”

On the reason why donor intent is even an issue in philanthropy, he says,

I think the biggest problem we face is donors failing to properly define their intent. You know, they do it in broad terms, in generalities and platitudes, but not with any specificity. So I think the challenge is not so much people not following the intent as it is failing to define the intent in the clearest and most-actionable terms, with intentionality, with specificity, so that the successors to the donor understand exactly what the donor wanted to accomplish. And using platitudes in generalities—like “I want to help the poor. I want to help the disadvantaged …”—is an absolute guarantee for mischief. …

The lack of specific definition of what the donor’s trying to accomplish allows his, or her, or their successors to interpret it any way they want. … Absent the specificity of donor intent, there is no real donor intent and it’s just becomes a jump ball, just up for grabs.

Schuck’s goal is “to encourage convince donors, especially conservative donors, to define in the clearest of terms what their objectives are,” he continues.

Offering a specific example, Schuck says, “When I was on the Daniels board, we supported both the Denver Rescue Mission, which is a traditional, what I’ll call enabler. They house, feed,” offer medical care, and provide clothes “to substance abusers without any conditions. We also supported one of your favorite causes, Step 13, now called Step Denver, which is just the opposite. … We didn’t support men unless they made a commitment to clean up, to get sober, to get clean and to rejoin productive society,” in which case “we gave him all the tools and support needed to do so. …

“Bill Daniels told us he wanted to support those addressing substance abuse, but he didn’t tell us whether he favored the Denver Rescue Mission approach or the Step 13 approach,” according to Schuck. “Not only did Bill not tell us, some” at the foundation after his death were “more interested in making everybody feel good. … So there was no definition of what we’re trying to accomplish.

“I’m sort of a missionary right now to try and get donors to answer the tough questions that if they don’t answer, somebody else will do for them,” Schuck says.

A “seared lesson”

Conservative donors need to know that if they don’t do so, “it’s going to go left, and there’s a reason for that. It’s the professionalization of foundations and the management of foundations,” he tells me. Those “going to the philanthropic world are naturally, by inclination, going to be much more progressive, if you will. They’re not entrepreneurs. They’re not necessarily champions of the marketplace and marketplace Dynamics and all that kind of stuff. … The natural inclination is to go left.”

Schuck notes that “[i]f I was on the left, I would argue for the same kind of intentionality and say, ‘If that’s what you want, be specific about it,’” but “the burden is not going to be as great for those on the left.”

Again citing his Daniels Fund experience, “the objectives were left unsaid” and were “therefore subject to being interpreted by whoever was in charge at the time,” according to Schuck. “So that left a lot of opportunity and opening … for individual interpretation. And there was an attempted coup, takeover.

“Thanks to a very, very strong, principled group of board members, it was rejected,” he recalls,

but it took years and years, millions and millions of dollars. The opportunity cost and what it cost us to address that problem and resolve it distracted us from what we should have been focusing on. So the cost of salvaging and saving Daniels was great, but ultimately it got done.

The episode “seared a lesson in my mind,” Schuck says. “I said, ‘When it’s my turn, I’m going to be a lot more prescriptive in what I expect from the successors to my late wife’s and my foundation.’ … I have 14 three-minute, four-minute” professionally videotaped vignettes that “deal with individual approaches, so that there can be minimal doubt about what Joyce and I would want to see accomplished.

“I want to be very clear about this. It isn’t perfect,” he cautions.

It’s just the best I’ve seen so far. And I hope that that somebody else takes a look at those 14 and figures out how to do an even-better job and that becomes a better model than what we did. But to my knowledge, we’ve probably gone as far as almost anybody has in being definitive.

There is an “overwhelming majority of foundations that were created by capitalists and free enterprisers that are now the enemy of the very system that allowed that wealth to be accumulated,” Schuck laments. “And the blame—it’s great to be able to do with retrospect—but the blame really falls on them because they didn’t tell their successors what to do and what not to do.”

Hard work, moving the needle, and the open field

On those who propose time limits on foundations, “They all say ‘We’re going to spend it down because I don’t trust my successors,’” Schuck tells me. “To me, that’s sort of quitting. That’s sort of throwing in the towel. …

“What I’m talking about doing is hard work,” he continues.

It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I made money, lost money—two or three times lost it all, made it back. That was a cakewalk … compared to figuring out and defining how to give it away effectively. So it’s hard work, so most of our guys don’t want to do that, go to that kind of effort. And if they don’t, then you and I have seen the movie, and it’s going to end up like Ford or Rockefeller or MacArthur or Pew …. I think I have a responsibility to be to go to the effort and do the work necessary.

He asks rhetorically, “Is my approach perfect? Hell no, not a chance,” he good-naturedly answers himself, “but it’s moving, hopefully, moving the needle in the right direction.” In his videos, “I don’t talk about the methodology or the means. We don’t talk about that. We talk about values, objectives.

“The primary objective of The Schuck Initiatives,” according to Schuck,

is to move people from dependency to independence. It could be dependence on substance, or dependency on the government. I want people to become independent. That’s applicable in education, for school choice. It’s applicable in substance abuse. It’s the values that drive our goals for the future, not organizations or methodology or any of that kind of stuff. I’m a long way from being smart enough to be able to anticipate everything, but stating values and objectives is, again, we think survivable. It will survive most attacks.

For those who may be uncertain or skittish about meeting the donor-intent challenges Schuck lays out, “We will do the hard work, we’ll ask the tough questions for you and distill it all down to use a usable format, etc., etc.,” he says, “but don’t just give up. You sort of have a responsibility. … I mean, there are all kinds of people who are available if somebody cares enough and if they don’t want to do the work.

But “don’t do nothing. Don’t leave it up to chance,” he concludingly urges. “I’ve seen that movie, and that’s why the left is so powerful today … because we have left the field open. We’ve created this vacuum. Just our passivity has created the vacuum that they fill. And shame on us. We have nobody to blame but ourselves.”

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/stephen-m-schuck-of-the-schuck-initiatives-discusses-donor-intent/