If you’ve been meaning to write a will for years and just haven’t gotten around to it, you’re in good company.

According to Trust & Will’s 2026 Estate Planning Report, 56% of U.S. adults have no estate planning documents at all. No will, no trust, nothing. Here’s the part that surprises most people, though. Nearly three in four of those same adults, 73%, say estate planning is personally important to them. We know we should do it, many of us just haven’t gotten around to it or might not have enough information on how to set it up.

We wanted to spend a little time this August, National Make-A-Will Month, helping to close that gap. Not the whole gap, just one piece of it: the charitable bequest. If you’ve come across that term before and wondered what it actually means for you, you’re in the right place.

What is a charitable bequest, exactly?

A charitable bequest is a gift you leave to an organization through your will or another estate planning document, rather than giving it during your lifetime. That’s really it. There’s no complicated legal maneuvering required, and you don’t need a large estate to make one.

A bequest costs you nothing today. It doesn’t change your monthly budget or touch the money you need for your own life and your family’s needs right now. It’s a decision about what happens to what’s left, after you and the people you love are taken care of first. And because it lives inside your will or estate plan, you can update it any time your circumstances change.

Three common ways people do this

There isn’t just one way to leave a charitable bequest. Depending on your situation and what your advisor recommends, it usually looks like one of these three approaches.

• A gift in your will. You designate a specific dollar amount, a piece of property, or a percentage of your estate to a charity of your choice. A percentage tends to be the more common approach, since it automatically adjusts with the size of your estate over time.
• Naming a charity as a trust beneficiary. If you already have a living trust, you can name an organization as a beneficiary, so it becomes part of a plan you may have already built for your family.
• Naming a charity as a life insurance beneficiary. You can designate a charity as a full or partial beneficiary of an existing policy. It’s often one of the simplest changes to make, since it usually just requires updating a beneficiary form with your insurance provider.

Why more people are choosing this way to give

Part of it is timing. Over the next two decades, an estimated $84 trillion in wealth is projected to pass from one generation to the next in the United States, and researchers expect somewhere between $12 and $15 trillion of that to reach charities directly, according to industry projections from Cerulli Associates. Some of that is simply the scale of a very large generation reaching this stage of life. But we’d guess the bigger reason is more personal. A bequest lets you give in a way that doesn’t compete with your day-to-day life or your family’s inheritance. You provide for the people you love first, and then you decide what you want the rest of your story to say.

Why this matters especially for long-term missions

This kind of giving tends to matter most for organizations doing work that was never designed to be short-term. At Heart for Africa, that’s Project Canaan, a 2,500-acre sustainability project in Eswatini where we’re raising children, running a working farm, and building a school whose first class won’t graduate until around 2030. Work built to unfold over decades needs support that’s built to last just as long. That’s exactly what a bequest provides.

If you’re curious, we’d love to talk

This August, we’re introducing something we’re calling the Lifa Society, a way of honoring the friends who choose to include Heart for Africa in their will or estate plans. Lifa means “legacy” in Siswati, and to us, it represents exactly what a bequest is: a promise that reaches further than any one lifetime.

If you’d like to learn more about what leaving a gift in your will could look like, you can visit our Lifa Society page, or reach out directly to Jennifer Swindall, our Major & Legacy Gifts Officer, at jen@heartforafrica.org. There’s no pressure and no obligation, but we’re here if you would like to chat.