The story of the Bainum family begins modestly in the Midwest. Born in 1919 in Detroit and raised in Cincinnati, Stewart W. Bainum Sr. hitchhiked 400 miles to Washington, D.C., with $3 in his pocket and a cardboard suitcase. He found work as a plumber’s assistant before saving enough money to start his own plumbing business and then move into real estate development.
Stewart ended up founding nursing home giant HCR Manor Care as well as hospitality behemoth Choice Hotels International. Based in North Bethesda, Maryland, Choice Hotels is one of the largest hotel chains in the world, with subsidiary brands including Radisson Hotels, Econo Lodge, Quality Inn, and Country Inn & Suite. By the mid-1980s, his net worth was estimated at $240 million.
Along the way, Stewart also married his wife Jane; the two met while attending college in the D.C. area. Stewart died in 2014 and Jane passed away a few years ago. The couple’s philanthropic legacy lies with the Bainum Family Foundation, which they started in 1968 as the College Foundation. It held around $746 million in assets in 2022, with around $6.6 million in giving.
The foundation initially supported inner-city high school kids who wanted to go to college. At the time, the family wanted to give back to the D.C. area where they made their roots and built their fortune. But while the Bainum Family Foundation has pretty much had one singular focus — youth — throughout its five decades of work, it has evolved quite a bit over the years. Today, three additional generations, the founding couple’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, are involved in a range of early childhood philanthropic activities that have both local and global impact.
Stewart Bainum emphasized family involvement, including the branch of the family that lives on the West Coast, where more than half of the family lives. In addition to the D.C. area, the foundation also funds in Florida, where in 2010, it partnered with Florida Hospital Foundation and LIFT Orlando to build and operate a 150-seat early learning center as part of a revitalization effort in the West Lakes neighborhood in the Orlando area.
Inside Philanthropy recently connected with multiple generations of Bainums to find out about this gradual evolution from a foundation that ran its own programming to a foundation that put trust and power in community leaders and explicitly dedicated itself to antiracism. The family even set up a 501(c)(4) to reach some of its early childhood goals through policy advocacy. And now, alongside fresh news that the foundation will commit an additional $100 million over five years to early childhood education and widen its geographic scope, here’s a deep dive into the story of the Bainum Family Foundation.
The early days
Barbara Bainum, outgoing chair and longtime president and CEO of the Bainum Family Foundation, doesn’t recall her parents, Stewart and Jane, explicitly using the word “philanthropy.” But she did pick up lessons from how they moved through their community. Jane volunteered at the Washington Adventist Hospital gift shop and sometimes bought supplies for grade school students, Barbara says. Seventh-Day Adventism is an important part of this family’s story and certain family members are still involved with the church today.
But it wasn’t until 1968, when her parents launched what was then known as the College Foundation, that Barbara got her first lessons in full-fledged giving. Stewart Bainum focused on college because he himself did not complete his degree, but he wanted to ensure that others had the opportunity to do so. And he credits the faith-based boarding school he attended for helping change his fate.
Scott Renschler, a clinical psychologist in his mid 50s, is the oldest of Stewart and Jane’s 10 grandchildren. He considers himself fortunate that his grandparents were only in their 50s when he was born so he was able to have a long relationship with them. “I grew up with an awareness that my grandfather was an affluent person and worked hard and had good luck, as well, and had made money. And I also grew up with an awareness that he was, I think, particularly attuned to some of the disparities particularly in the D.C. area,” Renschler said.
One of those major disparities, according to Renschler, was economic and racial inequity in a city with a large and historic Black population — in the 1970s, Black people accounted for around 70% of the total population, and around 60% in 1980. Renschler says his grandfather loved Washington, D.C., and felt indebted to the communities that helped his businesses grow. But he was also aware that he had opportunities that other people did not.
By the 1980s, the Bainums were focusing their philanthropy specifically on young people of color. Along with several other local philanthropists, Stewart Bainum got involved with the I Have a Dream program in D.C., following the national model of I Have a Dream Foundation, started in 1981 by businessman Eugene Lang. Their aim was to provide a pathway to college for inner-city youth in Southeast Washington at public schools in Wards 7 and 8.
That cohort of Dreamer 1988 scholarship recipients was the subject of “Southeast 67,” a documentary film that tracked the students as they came of age during the crack cocaine epidemic. The Bainum family continues to stay in touch with those students, who today have kids and even grandchildren.
“Phase two:” New ideas and a shift in strategy
The ’80s were also a time when the next generation of Bainums first started engaging with the foundation, including Barbara. She says that she first got involved in the early 1980s on a volunteer basis, connecting with the D.C.-based housing development organization Jubilee Housing, of which she speaks highly.
Joining Barbara on the board was her sister, Roberta, who served on the board for more than two decades, and her brother, Bruce, who served for nearly three decades. Stewart also later invited Barbara’s nephew Alex Froom to join; he was elected in 2008. “We have term limits for our family as well as for the outside directors,” Barbara said.
The I Have A Dream program launched in 1988 and continued until 1994. Later, this program evolved into the Pathways to Success Scholarship Program, aiming to give students living in poverty the chance to attend faith-based college preparatory schools where they could increase their academic skills, gain work experience and expand their knowledge of life beyond their local communities. The program held annual scholarship award dinners to recognize the students and provide useful insights on the boarding school experience to students and their families.
Renschler, who became involved with the foundation in 1993 after graduating from Pomona College, calls some of these early efforts with I Have a Dream “well intended.” But eventually, his grandfather started to realize that solving these problems would require deeper, systemic solutions. “All these families are part of an environment characterized by economic impoverishment, social injustice and racism,” Renschler said. “We learned how naïve we were and what it really takes to solve these kinds of problems.” Renschler later clarified that when he said “naïve,” he meant that, initially, “our hypothesis did not reflect the complexity of the problem we were trying to address.”
Renschler calls the next phase of the foundation’s work “phase two.” This is when the Bainum family realized that rather than running programs themselves, there were likely other organizations already doing this work. So the goal of the foundation became to find them and fund them.
“It wasn’t easy”
In 2008, another transition took place at the Bainum Family Foundation when Stewart Bainum, 89 years old at the time, handed the reins over to his daughter, Barbara. “It wasn’t easy, let me say. He was used to being in control,” Barbara said. Stewart remained on the board until 2012, two years before he died.
Barbara recalls some contentious conversations. But she believes Stewart reached a point where he trusted her to hold the reins of the foundation. “So he did have to go along to a certain degree. He had a lot of ideas. He was an idea man,” Barbara said.
The next step was to transform the board. Barbara says her father had a lot of business relationships that informed the board’s makeup, alongside friends and family. Barbara was fine with certain business voices remaining, in part because she’d known some of them for many years. But she also wanted to mix things up and bring in outside voices. “I wanted to professionalize it a little more with more of a mix of outside directors that had expertise in the areas we were interested in and focused on, as well as family. And that’s what we still do today,” Barbara said.
The foundation started to put more of an emphasis on community voices and making life easier for grantee partners and scholarship applicants, a transition Barbara called gradual. For instance, Stewart once added a work requirement for students to get funding for tuition, but the foundation started easing up on that once Barbara came aboard.
“Where we are now is really listening to communities and going in and seeing how we can be helpful but relying on their expertise,” Barbara said.
Phase three: Being more “community-centric”
Scott Renschler calls this current evolution of the foundation’s work “community-centric.” The foundation is also bringing community expertise to the board. David Daniels stepped into the role of CEO and president in 2019, taking over from Barbara. He calls himself the foundation’s first “long, long-term, non-family leader.” Daniels has a strong background as a school administrator in the same types of boarding schools that Bainum has been working with for decades. That’s how Daniels first connected with the Bainum family — he worked at Mount Vernon Academy, the school Stewart Bainum attended decades earlier and strongly supported. Later, Barbara recruited Daniels to run the foundation’s now phased-out boarding and day school program.
Daniels has had the opportunity to work with all three generations of the family, including Stewart and Jane, Barbara and her siblings. He’s now seeing the third generation make waves. “I think what has been unique coming into this role is that I’m coming into a situation where I have a relationship with the family because of all of those years,” Daniels said. “So I understood the legacy we were trying to honor with Mr. and Mrs. Bainum… but I also had the opportunity of recognizing Barbara’s desire to take a more well-rounded approach to wraparound services for the success of their child and their families.”
Daniels has also been able to bring his own voice to the fore, helping the foundation lean into systems change work and do it, as he put it, with an “antiracist edge.” Daniels says the foundation has also set up policies and procedures to honor the legacy of Stewart and Jane and their family, and make those lanes clear to any future CEO and other non-family member who steps in. “It’s created some stability in the way we think about our way and the way we can be impactful long term,” Daniels added.
Governing structure and the next generation
Family foundations often face the question of how younger generation family members might engage with the organization and its board. Daniels says that one of his jobs, through the creation of subcommittees and other efforts, has been to make sure that multiple branches of the family can engage in governance.
Barbara Bainum notes that the Bainum Foundation has a slightly different structure compared to a lot of other family foundations, mirroring, she says, the Packard Foundation. The foundation is anchored by a members’ committee, made up only of family members who oversee the board; they select the board and can also get rid of the board. This members’ committeecreates the bylaws of the organization. They also make decisions on spending, Barbara said, noting that the foundation just bumped up its annual 501(c)(3) spending from 5% to 7%. “They make very major decisions, but they’re not in the operations of the organization. That’s the board and the staff’s responsibility,” she said. The board meets quarterly and the member’s committee meets at most biannually.
Barbara says that almost all of the third generation are interested in philanthropy, compared to only a handful who are more focused on the family business. Many in generation three are interested in climate change. Stewart Bainum, keen on getting the younger generation involved, established the G3 Fund so that third-generation family members could collectively work on grantmaking. This fund currently focuses on climate change and environmental justice.
Stewart also established the Family Fund, which brings all family members together and prioritizes support for educational programs that assist children and youth, from birth to age 18, and their families.
Barbara’s niece, social worker Brooke Bainum, a Barnard graduate, recalls her grandfather advocating for younger family members to get involved. Barbara reached out to her during the throes of the pandemic, and now Brooke is on the board, representing the third generation. She’s focused on the Community Engagement Center, part of University of Maryland Baltimore. “I think they’re doing good work in terms of connecting people with resources, reaching out actively to people who aren’t being reached out to by anyone else. It’s in my backyard, so to speak,” she said.
Brooke is most passionate about making an impact on a systemic level. She notes that her generation’s immediate interest in climate change is a break from the past, but says that there’s plenty of overlap because climate change disproportionately impacts poor communities of color. “I think what excites me most about this new strategic direction with the foundation is the widening of a lens or framework where you’re trying to address problems that the communities are facing at a much broader level,” she said.
Looking ahead
Jane Bainum passed away in 2021 at almost 102 years old. She donated money to start a separate but affiliated 501(c)(4) called the Children’s Equity Fund. It has the same interests as the 501(c)(3), but focuses on policy and research and electing people who will implement early childhood policies and programs. “It takes more patience. It’s all long term but that’s really long term,” Barbara said, adding that the 501(c)(4) arm is just getting off the ground.
As we’ve written, the foundation has also been making its voice heard in D.C.-area debates around public support for early childhood educators. It’s also doubling down on its early childhood commitment with an additional $100 million over the next five years — more on that to come.
Meanwhile, Barbara Bainum, who long worked on the ground with early childhood organizations, recently announced her retirement as chair of the Bainum Family Foundation. We’ll get word on a new chair in the coming weeks. Reflecting back on it all, she had a few takeaways for funders who want to make a serious impact in this space. “Listening is the key and not coming across like a rich, white family that knows what you should be doing.” She also emphasized the importance of flexibility with staff as well as with grantee partners, and recognizing that they do not have all the answers.
“Working with family is not always easy, but we’ve done pretty well with it,” she said.
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series on how donors are implementing the most effective principles of family philanthropy, in partnership with the National Center for Family Philanthropy (NCFP) and produced by Inside Philanthropy’s editorial team. NCFP is a network of philanthropic families committed to a world that is vibrant, equitable, and resilient. NCFP equips family philanthropies with community, support, and resources they need to move forward with long-term planning and day-to-day decision-making with confidence. It believes that effective family philanthropy is rooted in a cultural evolution and advances meaningful outcomes by embodying four core principles: accountability, equity, reflection and learning, and relationships. Learn more about the principles here.
