The Call That Started Populus Fund

The Call That Started Populus Fund

The Great Wealth Transfer is often described as if trillions of dollars are simply moving from one generation to the next.

We talk about wealth moving to women.
We talk about wealth moving to children and grandchildren.
We talk about younger generations inheriting responsibility, possibility, and power.

But that is not the whole story.

A great deal of this money is not moving directly into people’s hands.

It is moving through trusts.
Through donor-advised funds.
Through corporate trustees.
Through estate documents.
Through advisors.
Through institutions.
Through grief.

Cerulli projects that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, including $105 trillion to heirs and $18 trillion to charity. Those numbers are almost impossible to comprehend. But behind every number is a family, a loss, a decision, a structure, and someone trying to figure out what to do next.

For me, this is not abstract.

My own wealth transfer event happened more than 30 years ago, when I lost my parents young. What unfolded was the opposite of what I expected. That is a story for another day.

But in early 2026, something unexpected happened again.

In January, three months before I would lose two of my closest friends, I received a call from the corporate trustee for one of them. My friend was living with pancreatic cancer — the same disease that took my mother and my PhD advisor.

The trustee told me that I would be receiving both a personal inheritance and a charitable inheritance.

Then they asked me a question I was not prepared to answer.

Did I already have a donor-advised fund?
If not, where would I like to create one?
What would it be called?
Could I send that information back by the end of the day?

The request was practical. Administrative. Efficient.

But the experience was anything but.

I had not yet had the conversation with my friend. I was still inside the heartbreak of what was happening. I was grieving, anticipating grief, trying to be useful, trying to be present, and suddenly being asked to make decisions about money, philanthropy, legacy, and structure.

It was surreal.

It was also clarifying.

Because this is what the Great Wealth Transfer actually looks like up close.

It does not arrive as a headline.
It arrives as a phone call.
It arrives inside illness.
It arrives through legal documents.
It arrives before you are ready.
It arrives with forms, deadlines, account names, tax questions, and banking information.
It arrives while you are still trying to say goodbye.

Because I lost my parents so young, I have spent much of my life building relationships with people who became chosen family: mentors, big sisters and brothers, aunties, uncles, elders, guides, and surrogate parents.

I know what it means to be shaped by people who are not technically your parents, but who help parent you anyway.

So when this inheritance arrived, it did not feel like a transaction.

It felt like responsibility.

It felt like love.

It felt like grief being handed a bank account and a legal structure.

That is part of the origin of Populus Fund.

Populus Fund is a donor-advised fund at the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, advised by me, Dr. Stephanie Gripne. It is being developed as a living example of how philanthropic capital can support impact investing, community capital, systems investing, peer leadership, Full Spectrum Capital education, and resilient mountain communities.

The name Populus comes from Populus tremuloides — the quaking aspen.

Aspen groves may appear to be many separate trees. But beneath the surface, they can be connected through a shared root system.

That image has stayed with me.

We may appear separate, but we are connected.

This blog series, The Chronicle, will document the origin and activities of Populus Fund. It will follow the questions, decisions, experiments, and steps we take to make this donor-advised fund as impactful as possible.

Not perfect.

Impactful.

Rooted.

Accountable.

Alive.

Because the Great Wealth Transfer is not only a financial event.

It is a human one.

And if trillions of dollars are going to move through trusts, donor-advised funds, advisors, families, women, heirs, and institutions, then we need more than estate plans.

We need language.
We need preparation.
We need courage.
We need better questions.
We need structures that can hold grief and possibility at the same time.

Populus Fund begins there.

With a phone call.
With a loss.
With a name.
With a root system.
With the belief that capital can move differently.

And with the question:

What could this inheritance make possible?