Welcome to Cause & Capital.
My goal: Inform your giving strategies.
Every month in Cause & Capital, I break down a brand’s corporate giving campaign or one of the world’s leading philanthropists, uncovering what worked, why it worked, and how you can apply those insights to your own cause investments, whether you’re giving as a brand or an individual.
Let’s get into it.
In 1932, a Danish carpenter named Ole Kirk Kristiansen started making wooden toys in his workshop in Billund, a town so small that for decades the company was more or less the town. He had lost his wife, the Depression had killed his construction work, and the toys were what he could sell. He named the company LEGO, from the Danish “leg godt,” which means play well.
Ninety-four years later, the company he founded is the largest toymaker in the world, still private, still family-controlled, and still headquartered in Billund. But here is the part almost nobody has heard. A quarter of that company does not belong to the family at all. It belongs to a charity.
Today, we’re breaking down how the Kristiansens wired giving into the ownership of the company itself, and what you can take from it.
Who They Are (And Why It Matters)
The LEGO Group has passed through four generations of one family. Ole Kirk’s son Godtfred took over in the 1950s and led the shift from wooden toys to the plastic brick. The company stayed private the entire way, with ownership eventually consolidated in KIRKBI, the family’s holding company. Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the founder’s grandson, ran the company for decades, and in May 2023 the chairmanship passed to his son Thomas, the fourth generation, in a handover that took years and produced no drama at all.
The current CEO, Niels B. Christiansen, is a professional manager brought in from outside the family. Thomas has described the family’s job in one line I find worth keeping. The point of the ownership, as he puts it, is to maximize the impact of the LEGO brand, and the dividends come second to that.
The LEGO Foundation itself was established in 1986. It holds 25% of the LEGO Group. KIRKBI holds the other 75%. There are no outside shareholders and no stock listing, and there never have been. The Foundation is legally independent, based in Billund, and it is one of the ten largest charitable foundations in Denmark. Its current CEO, Sidsel Marie Kristensen, took over in 2023.
That ownership stake changes how the money behaves. The Foundation does not run on donations or on an annual budget somebody approves. It owns a quarter of a company that recorded 83.5 billion Danish kroner in revenue in 2025, the strongest year in its history, and its money arrives the way any shareholder’s money arrives, as dividends, year after year, whether or not anyone at headquarters is feeling generous that quarter.
The Big Promise
The Foundation has spent four decades on essentially one idea: children learn through play, and the years from birth to age six shape more of a life than many people want to believe.
The people in Billund like to cite the neuroscience, and it happens to be an area I know something about from my own work. A very young brain forms more than a million neural connections every second, a pace it will never hit again. Investment in those years changes a life at the cheapest possible point, and the cost of every intervention climbs from there.
So the promise is a future where learning through play makes children creative, engaged, lifelong learners, and the Foundation funds that promise at a scale few people appreciate. In 2025 it committed 1.7 billion Danish kroner in grants, roughly a quarter of a billion US dollars, and in its biggest recent year, 2021, the figure ran to 2.8 billion kroner. Numbers like that keep it among the largest private funders of early childhood development in the world.
Full Breakdown of the Strategy
The Ownership Engine
Corporate giving usually lives inside a budget line. Somebody proposes it, somebody approves it, and somebody can cut it when margins tighten. The LEGO Foundation’s funding lives inside the cap table, and a cap table is much harder to renegotiate.
As long as the LEGO Group earns money and pays dividends, a quarter of those dividends belongs to children. Nobody re-decides this each year. The generosity was decided once, structurally, decades ago, and it has survived every management change and market cycle since. That structure is paying off as we speak. The LEGO Group just closed 2025 with net profit up 21%, so the charitable quarter of the company has never been worth more.
I have spent 30+ years watching giving programs expand and contract with the mood of whoever holds the budget. I cannot think of many structures more durable than this one.
The Grants
When the Foundation gives, it tends to give in large amounts and over long time horizons. In 2018 it committed 100 million dollars to Sesame Workshop, working with BRAC and the International Rescue Committee, to bring play-based early learning to children displaced by the Rohingya and Syrian refugee crises. The grant ran over five years, with funds released as the work hit milestones.
During the pandemic it put 50 million dollars into helping children and families through the disruption. Grants of that length let an organization hire ahead of need and take on problems that will not resolve inside a twelve-month reporting cycle. Ask anyone who has run a program on year-to-year funding what they would give for a five-year runway.
The Challenge
For the LEGO brand’s 90th anniversary in 2022, the Foundation ran its largest open competition ever, the Build a World of Play Challenge, and put 900 million Danish kroner on the table, about 143 million dollars. It handed the search to Lever for Change, a nonprofit affiliate of the MacArthur Foundation, which meant giving up control of its own selection process.
Some 627 eligible organizations from 86 countries applied. Five won. Three received roughly 28 million dollars each and two received about 14 million each, and the ten finalists who did not win still walked away with a million dollars apiece to strengthen their plans.
The winners tell you what the Foundation values. The Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health received 27.8 million dollars to expand Family Spirit, a home-visiting program built with Navajo and Apache communities starting in 1995, opening 20 new sites with Indigenous partners in the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Ubongo, which produces educational programming reaching millions of families across Africa through TV, radio, and mobile, received funding to scale its Akili Family program. The Clinton Health Access Initiative won support to get assistive technology, wheelchairs and hearing aids, to disabled children in eight countries so they can play at all.
Scale, Spend, and Reach
Ownership stake: 25% of the LEGO Group, held since the Foundation’s founding era, with KIRKBI holding the remaining 75%. No public shareholders.
Annual grantmaking: 1.7 billion Danish kroner committed in 2025 (roughly 250 million US dollars), with 2.8 billion kroner in the peak year of 2021, placing it among the largest private funders of early childhood development globally.
Build a World of Play Challenge: 900 million Danish kroner (about 143 million dollars) awarded across five winners and ten finalists in 2022, from a pool of 627 eligible applicants in 86 countries.
Flagship refugee grant: 100 million dollars to Sesame Workshop with BRAC and the IRC, released over five years against milestones.
COVID response: 50 million dollars committed to children and families during the pandemic.
2025 reach: LEGO Play Boxes reached more than 2.1 million children across 27 countries, the Foundation entered a new five-year partnership with BRAC for children in crisis-affected settings, and it made its largest Danish grant ever, 100 million kroner to strengthen early childhood educators across 17 municipalities.
What Actually Worked (And Why)
The giving cannot be cancelled in a budget meeting. A CSR budget is a decision someone makes every year, and every year is a chance to make it smaller. An ownership stake is a decision someone made once. The Foundation’s quarter of the company has now outlived three generational handovers, a near-bankruptcy in the early 2000s, and a pandemic, and the dividends kept coming through all of it. If you want to know whether a company’s generosity is real, look at how hard it would be to undo.
Patient money changed what grantees could attempt. Five-year grants with milestone releases let Sesame Workshop and its partners build programs in refugee camps that no twelve-month grant could support. In my experience the organizations doing the hardest work are the ones that need runway badly, and they are usually the ones getting the shortest grants. The Foundation inverted that.
Focus compounded. Forty years on essentially one idea, learning through play, built a body of evidence that the Foundation now carries to governments and education ministries, which can reach children at a scale no grant ever could. The funders who try to fund everything tend to leave the faintest mark, and I have found that the ones who stay with a single cause for decades are the ones governments eventually call first.
Giving matched what the company knows. LEGO funds children and play because children and play are the business. The work reads as sincere because it grows straight out of what the company does every day, and I would guess that coherence is part of why nobody rolls their eyes at it the way they do at so much corporate philanthropy.
What Could Limit the Impact
Every kroner depends on selling toys. The Foundation’s income is a quarter of one company’s dividends, which means a long slump in the toy business, or a decade where children drift to screens LEGO cannot follow, would shrink the giving right along with the profits. Concentration like that would make any endowment manager uneasy, and there is no diversification story to tell here.
The Foundation funds the research behind its own thesis. A meaningful share of the evidence for learning through play exists because the LEGO Foundation paid for it. I happen to believe the thesis, and the pediatric science I know supports it, but it is fair to ask whether one institution should be both the evangelist and the evidence base.
The halo lands on the brand. All this generosity also makes people feel warmly about a toy company, and it would be naive to pretend the family has not noticed. I do not think the brand benefit cancels the good work. It belongs in an honest accounting of it, though, and any donor studying this model should go in knowing that the structure serves the brand while it serves the children.
Lessons Whether You’re A Brand Or Individual
Structure your giving so it survives your own moods. A gift you make this year depends on how this year went. Ownership placed in charitable hands, or even a standing commitment that follows your revenue automatically, keeps giving after your attention has moved on. It is harder to set up than writing a check, and in my view it is worth the trouble for anyone who wants their giving to outlast them.
Give where your knowledge already lives. LEGO gives to play because play is what LEGO understands. The giving programs that ring false are usually the ones that got bolted onto a business from the outside. Whatever you or your company knows deeply, that is probably where your money will work hardest and ring truest.
Long grants buy what short grants cannot. If you fund organizations, the length of your commitment may do more good than the size of it. A five-year commitment lets a grantee hire, plan, and attempt harder problems. I have watched this from the receiving side for three decades, and runway is the gift that gets the least credit.
Let go of the selection when you can. Handing 143 million dollars of decisions to Lever for Change cost the Foundation control and bought it 627 applications from 86 countries, nearly all of which it never would have found alone. Donors tend to overrate their own sourcing. An open process with outside judges is humbling, and it works.
Focus is a forty-year decision. The Foundation’s influence comes from staying on one idea long enough to build the evidence and the relationships that move governments. Pick something you are prepared to still care about in twenty years, and then stay.
PS: Most corporate giving lives in a budget line someone can cut. LEGO’s family built theirs into the cap table instead. If your company is thinking about how to make its giving structurally durable rather than annually re-decided, I’d like to talk. I’m the Chief Development Officer at the American Academy of Pediatrics, reaching 67,000 pediatric clinicians who shape child health nationwide. If you’re at an enterprise-scale company working in corporate giving, reply to see if you qualify to partner with AAP.