From the Almosenamt to the foundation location: continuities

The long life of the offices

The institutions created in and after 1525 proved remarkably durable. The Almosenamt continued to supply bread, money and clothing to rural communities until 1839, while the Hinteramt in the former Franciscan friary served the poor until 1833. The Amt Rüti disappeared as an administrative authority with the liberal constitution of 1831, although some of its revenues were collected until 1832, the year in which the Grossmünster chapter was dissolved.¹ The hospital that had absorbed the Dominican friary remained on the site until the opening of the new cantonal hospital in 1842. The former convent then housed a care institution for the chronically ill and elderly until 1870, was bought by the city in 1873 to house destitute citizens and burned down on 25 June 1887. The Zentralbibliothek Zürich, completed in 1917, now stands on the site of the Mushafen.²

The liberal state of the 1830s dissolved these offices and assigned the Grossmünster’s assets to education and created new structures for poor relief. The city’s historical survey in the HLS records that until 1835 assistance was a matter for the Church and that a central municipal poor authority and a general relief fund were then created.³ The rural parishes, for their part, kept their Kirchengut and Armengut into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Höngg, poor relief was separated from church administration only in 1910.⁴

Historical titles and the churches’ state contributions

One of the most concrete legacies of the Reformation-era transfer lies in the financial relationship between the canton of Zurich and its recognised churches. Because the canton had taken over the property of the pre-Reformation Church, it had long been regarded as bound to meet certain obligations that the property had formerly financed, notably the remuneration of the clergy. In many cantons the secularisation of church property gave rise to such “historical legal claims” of the churches. Zurich reformed the system with its constitution of 2005 and its Church Act of 2007, which replaced the historical titles with contributions to activities of social relevance. A transitional provision of the constitution guaranteed that the state’s services to the church bodies founded on historical legal titles would continue until a new statutory regulation. For the period 2014–2019 the contributions totalled CHF 300 million, or CHF 50 million a year.⁵ In February 2025 the cantonal parliament approved, by 104 votes to 56, a further CHF 300 million over the six years 2026 to 2031, distributed according to the membership of the recognised communities.⁶ The link between these figures and the events of 1524 and 1525 is indirect and legally attenuated, but it is real. The modern debate over whether the churches deserve public money because of what they do for society is the direct successor of the old argument that the state holds former church property subject to a continuing purpose.

Foundation supervision in Zurich today

The most important institutional continuity for the financial centre lies in the supervision of foundations. Under the Swiss Civil Code, a foundation is an endowment of assets dedicated to a particular purpose. Foundations are subject to the supervision of the public authority to which they belong by virtue of their purpose—the Confederation, the canton or the commune—which must ensure that the foundation’s assets are used in accordance with its purposes.⁷ This is Bullinger’s argument turned into law: assets given for a purpose are placed under a public authority that stands over those who manage them to see that the purpose is respected.

In the canton of Zurich, this supervision was until the end of 2025 exercised by the BVG- und Stiftungsaufsicht des Kantons Zürich (BVS). Since 1 January 2026 it has been exercised by a new intercantonal authority, ATIOZ (BVG- und Stiftungsaufsicht Tessin, Ostschweiz und Zürich), created by an intercantonal agreement negotiated under the leadership of the Zurich Directorate of Justice and Home Affairs. Nine cantons—Zurich, Glarus, Schaffhausen, both Appenzells, St Gallen, Graubünden, Thurgau and Ticino—participate. The authority supervises some 900 pension funds across all nine cantons and about 2,000 classical foundations in four of them, with combined assets of more than CHF 600 billion.⁸ ATIOZ supervises classical foundations in the cantons of Zurich, St Gallen, Ticino and Thurgau as the supervisory authority within the meaning of the Civil Code. Charged with ensuring that foundations use their assets in accordance with their purpose, it can draw on instruments that range from the review of annual reports and the approval of amendments to foundation deeds to recommendations, warnings, fines and directives.⁹

The parallel with 1525 is structural. The four councillors placed over the almoner, the Obmann who received the surpluses of the Klosterämter and the modern supervisor who reviews a foundation’s annual accounts all perform, at their different historical levels, the same function: they stand between the managers of an endowed fund and the purpose to which it is bound. The Zurich version of this function has always been bureaucratic, document-based and focused on accounts. Seen from legal practice, this bureaucratic style is one of the reasons why Swiss foundations enjoy credibility with international founders: the supervisor is predictable and reads the accounts.

Zurich as a foundation location

The figures of the Swiss foundation sector show the scale of what has grown on this institutional base. At the end of 2025 Switzerland counted 13,984 registered charitable foundations, of which 13,782 were active, after 325 new foundations had been established and 253 liquidated in that year. Total foundation assets reached CHF 159.6 billion, an increase of 14.4 per cent over the CHF 139.5 billion of 2020. Average assets per foundation rose to CHF 12.2 million, which indicates that growth was driven disproportionately by large foundations. The canton of Zurich leads all cantons with 2,218 foundations.¹⁰ Basel-Stadt has the highest density, with 42.9 foundations per 10,000 inhabitants, against a national average of 15.1.¹¹

The detailed data of the 2026 report show a sector with a strongly local orientation: 75.3 per cent of foundations work exclusively in Switzerland and more than half only at cantonal, regional or local level. Only 10.4 per cent employ a professional management, while 63,672 individuals hold 70,434 board seats, 92.4 per cent of them a single mandate.¹² This profile—many small, locally anchored, volunteer-governed funds alongside a small number of large ones—would not have surprised a sixteenth-century Zurich councillor. The foundation landscape still reproduces something of the dispersed pattern of late medieval endowments, now organised under the uniform supervision that the Reformation state first imposed.

The canton has turned this heritage into a policy of location. In February 2024 the cantonal tax office, together with the Directorates of Economic Affairs, Finance and Justice, announced a revised practice on the tax exemption of charitable foundations. Under it, reasonable remuneration of board members no longer endangers exemption, charitable activities abroad are treated equally with domestic ones, and foundations may pursue impact investments alongside grants and loans, subject to conditions. The changes built on the revision of the Civil Code’s foundation provisions in force since 1 January 2023 and on a legal opinion by Andrea Opel.¹³ In March 2025 the cantonal government reported that more than 2,200 charitable foundations with combined assets of over CHF 18 billion operated in the canton and that Zurich had led all cantons with 44 new foundations in the preceding report year. It further reported that an association Stiftungsstandort Zürich was being formed with SwissFoundations, proFonds, the Center for Foundation Law of the University of Zurich and a philanthropy foundation of the Zürcher Kantonalbank, and that a first Zurich Foundation Forum was scheduled for 1 October 2025.¹⁴

For the financial centre, foundations matter in three ways. They are clients, because CHF 160 billion of foundation assets must be invested and a substantial part of them is managed by banks and asset managers in Zurich. They are instruments of private wealth planning: founders, many of them entrepreneurs and families advised by Zurich private banks, lawyers and trust companies, use the foundation to settle part of their wealth on a philanthropic purpose, often alongside family holding structures. And they are a reputational asset: the existence of a large, well-supervised charitable sector contributes to the image of Switzerland as a place where wealth is managed with a sense of obligation. Umbrella foundations, which pool smaller philanthropic funds under a single supervised foundation, are a modern answer to the old problem that the Almosenamt solved by consolidation. In the latest reported year, thirty-one such umbrella foundations managed CHF 905 million and distributed CHF 80.3 million.¹⁵

Administered capital as a Zurich habit

It would be too simple to draw a straight line from the porridge pot in the Predigerkloster to the portfolio of a modern grant-making foundation. The legal forms are different, the beneficiaries are different, and five centuries of constitutional change lie between them. The line that can be drawn is a line of habits. The Almosenordnung taught the Zurich authorities, and through them the Zurich elite, a way of thinking about wealth that has remained characteristic of the city. Wealth given for a purpose should be kept together as a fund. The fund should be managed by persons who swear to serve the purpose and who render accounts. A public authority should stand above the managers and examine the accounts. The beneficiaries should be defined by rules, with their entitlement administered case by case by persons with local knowledge. And the capital should be preserved, so that the purpose can be served from its yield, year after year.

Each of these habits has a financial correlate in the Zurich of today. The preservation of capital and the spending of yield are the basic discipline of endowment management and correspond to the conservative investment culture for which Swiss private banks have long been known. The oath of loyalty to a purpose finds its successor in the fiduciary duties of foundation boards, trustees and asset managers. The supervision of accounts by a public authority corresponds to the Swiss reliance on audited financial statements and supervisory review, in the foundation sector as in banking. The definition of beneficiaries by rules corresponds to the legal precision of Swiss foundation deeds and regulations. None of these features is unique to Zurich or was created by the Almosenordnung alone. The ordinance nevertheless belongs among the earliest documents in which they appear together, applied to a large pool of assets under the authority of a Zurich public body.

The same habits also carry the risks visible in the sixteenth century. A fund under public control can be diverted by the authority that controls it, as the Zurich council diverted former church revenues to debt service, fortifications and territorial purchases. A supervisory system that reads accounts may miss the substance behind them. And a system of entitlement based on residence has, as its reverse side, the exclusion of those who do not belong. The history of the Almosenordnung is therefore also a history of the limits of administered capital: of the distance between the purpose proclaimed in the ordinance and the uses to which the council actually put the money, and of the lines that a well-ordered welfare system drew around those it would help.

Notes

1. On the Almosenamt, Höngger, https://hoengger.ch/geschichte-armut-in-hoengg/; on the Hinteramt and the Grossmünster, Wikipedia (German), “Kirchen und Klöster in der Stadt Zürich im Mittelalter”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchen_und_Kl%C3%B6ster_in_der_Stadt_Z%C3%BCrich_im_Mittelalter; on Rüti, Wikipedia (German), “Amt Rüti”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amt_R%C3%BCti. ↩
2. Wikipedia (English), “Predigerkloster”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predigerkloster; Medizinhistorisches Zürich, “Das erste Zürcher Spital”, https://dlf.uzh.ch/sites/medizingeschichte/das-erste-zuercher-spital/. ↩
3. HLS, “Zurich (commune)”, French version, section “Affaires sociales” (Nicola Behrens), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/000171/2015-01-25/. ↩
4. Höngger, “«… und schon zweimal unehelich geboren …»”, https://hoengger.ch/geschichte-armut-in-hoengg/. ↩
5. Lorenz Engi, “Die staatliche Finanzierung von Religionsgemeinschaften”, sui generis 2018, pp. 271–309, https://sui-generis.ch/article/view/sg.73/720. ↩
6. “Staatsbeiträge für Zürcher Landeskirchen: «Entscheid von historischer Dimension»”, ref.ch, https://www.ref.ch/news/staatsbeitrage-zurich-kantonsrat-kirchen-muslime-million-svp-fdp-tatigkeitsprogramm-politik/. ↩
7. Articles 80 and 84 of the Swiss Civil Code (ZGB), SR 210, German/French text at droit-bilingue.ch, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/rs/lex/1907/00/19070042-a80-de-fr.html and https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/rs/lex/1907/00/19070042-a84-de-fr.html. Art. 80: “Zur Errichtung einer Stiftung bedarf es der Widmung eines Vermögens für einen besondern Zweck.” Art. 84(1) places foundations under the supervision of the public authority (Bund, Kanton, Gemeinde) to which they belong by virtue of their purpose, and Art. 84(2) requires the supervisory authority to ensure that the foundation’s assets are used in accordance with its purposes. ↩
8. Kanton Zürich, press release “Neue interkantonale BVG- und Stiftungsaufsicht”, November 2025, https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2025/11/neue-interkantonale-bvg-und-stiftungsaufsicht.html. ↩
9. ATIOZ, “Klassische Stiftungen”, https://www.atioz.ch/de/klassische-stiftungen/. ↩
10. Die Stiftung, “Schweizer Stiftungsvermögen steigt auf 159,6 Milliarden Franken”, reporting the Schweizer Stiftungsreport 2026, https://www.die-stiftung.de/news/stiftungsszene/schweizer-stiftungsvermoegen-steigt-auf-1596-milliarden-franken-161735. ↩
11. “Es sind fast 14’000 – Stiftungsboom in der Schweiz hält an”, Plattform J, https://www.plattformj.ch/artikel/240554/. ↩
12. socialdesign.ch, “Schweizer Stiftungsreport 2026: Was die Detaildaten über die Stiftungslandschaft zeigen”, https://www.socialdesign.ch/schweizer-stiftungsreport-2026-was-die-detaildaten-ueber-die-stiftungslandschaft-zeigen/. ↩
13. Kanton Zürich, press release “Zukunftsgerichtete Stärkung des Stiftungsstandorts Zürich”, 9 February 2024, https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2024/02/zukunftsgerichtete-staerkung-des-stiftungsstandorts-zuerich.html. ↩
14. Kanton Zürich, press release “Regierungsrat führt erfolgreiche Offensive für den Stiftungsstandort Kanton Zürich weiter”, March 2025, https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2025/03/regierungsrat-fuehrt-erfolgreiche-offensive-fuer-den-stiftungsstandort-kanton-zuerich-weiter.html. ↩
15. socialdesign.ch, “Schweizer Stiftungsreport 2026: Was die Detaildaten über die Stiftungslandschaft zeigen”, https://www.socialdesign.ch/schweizer-stiftungsreport-2026-was-die-detaildaten-ueber-die-stiftungslandschaft-zeigen/. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.