Jennie Mackenzie spent her life helping children learn.
As a former Play School director and early childhood educator, she believed in nurturing potential.
After facing cancer herself, she became interested in the work of the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney. When she died, she left a bequest to support early‑career researchers.
One recipient said that support helped make her return to Australia possible after postdoctoral work in Canada and the United States.
It is a striking example of what a bequest can do. A person dies, but their values keep working.
Their money does not simply change hands. It strengthens an institution and creates opportunities that would not otherwise exist.
Australia should be paying more attention to that.
Over the next 2 decades, Australia is expected to see $5.4 trillion pass from one generation to the next. Yet only 1 per cent of what Australians leave behind currently goes to for‑purpose organisations.
In the United States, the share is 4.4 per cent. In the United Kingdom, it is 3.7 per cent.
Those figures tell an important story. A very large river of wealth is moving across generations. Only a narrow stream is reaching charities, community groups, research institutes and cultural institutions.
That is a missed opportunity on a very large scale.
Bequests are one of the least discussed forms of giving, but they are among the most important. Annual fundraising helps organisations keep operating.
A bequest can do more. It can fund a research stream, create an endowment, build a clinic, upgrade systems, strengthen reserves or give a board the confidence to plan beyond the next funding round.
This matters because many charities live from deadline to deadline. They support people in crisis, preserve cultural institutions, back medical research, run mentoring programs and hold communities together.
Yet too often they are forced to think in 12‑month increments while tackling problems that unfold over decades. Bequests can change that because they often come with flexibility.
Unlike many grants, they are not tightly boxed in by short timelines and narrow conditions. They can be used where they are most needed: on staff capability, digital systems, long‑term planning, capital works or building a stronger foundation.
In a sector that is too often stretched thin, that kind of flexibility is enormously valuable.
At over $1 billion annually, charitable bequest are already a substantial source of support. Boosting that would not just be good for charities. It would be good for the country.
A stronger culture of bequests would mean more support for medical research, more backing for local services, more resources for arts institutions and more resilience across the community sector.
It would mean organisations having the confidence to invest in people and systems rather than spending every year scrambling to cover immediate costs.
None of this means short‑changing family. It means recognising that this is not an all‑or‑nothing choice. A person can provide generously for children and grandchildren while also leaving a modest share to charity.
In many cases, the effect on family members is much smaller than people assume, while the effect on the recipient organisation can be transformative.
And there is something else at stake here. A bequest is not only a financial act. It is a statement about belonging. It says: I benefited from this society, and I want some part of what I leave behind to keep doing useful work.
Australia likes to think of itself as generous. In some respects, that is true. We donate after natural disasters, volunteer in large numbers and support local causes. But on legacy giving, we are underperforming.
Too few Australians include charities in their wills. Too few estate‑planning conversations ever reach the question of public purpose.
Part of the problem is practical. Many Australians still do not have a will. Others write one without ever considering a charitable gift. Estate planning remains oddly cumbersome for something so basic.
That is changing, with online will‑writing services making the process easier and campaigns such as Dying to Know Day helping Australians talk more openly about death, grief and what they want to leave behind. The first barrier to a bequest is very simple: no will, no bequest.
Professional advisers matter too. Accountants, lawyers and financial planners are often the people Australians trust most on questions of money and succession. They are well placed to ask one additional question: would you like some part of your estate to support a cause you care about?
The for‑purpose sector also has work to do. Charities have to earn this money.
People leave bequests to organisations they trust. That trust rests on sound governance, clean accounts, clear purpose and evidence that the organisation can turn resources into results.
Jennie Mackenzie understood that. So did Bruce and Jenny Pryor, whose bequest to the Australian National University is supporting research into dermatomyositis.
So did Joy Christensen, whose gift to the Lost Dogs' Home is helping build a new veterinary clinic and animal adoption centre in Melbourne.
Different lives, different causes, same underlying idea: love received, then passed on.
Australia is in the midst of a vast transfer of wealth across generations. The question is not only who will receive it. The question is what kind of country it will build.
A line in a will can fund a fellowship, save an institution, support a local service or help thousands of animals.
We should stop treating bequests as a niche topic. They belong much closer to the centre of the national conversation about giving, community and Australia's future.
