What Foundation Grants Support
Each year the Foundation Center indexes individual grants of $10,000 or more for over 1,000 of the largest foundations. Specifically, the grants processing staff identifies the subject of each grant, the type of recipient, types of support provided (e.g., capital or operating), the beneficiary groups served, and the geographic focus. Summary statistics on the grants database sample for the latest year include the following:
- The 2009 grants sample included 154,664 grants awarded by 1,384 foundations totaling $22.1 billion. These grants accounted for roughly half of the grant dollars awarded by over 75,000 active foundations.
- In 2009 the sample included a total of 60,088 unique recipient organizations.
- For a matched set of 502 grantmakers*, grant dollars decreased 14.2 percent between 2008 and 2009, from $15.3 billion to $13.1 billion. The number of grants awarded decreased 6.6 percent, from 84,381 to 78,815.
*The matched set analyzes year-to-year changes in giving by sampled grantmakers. Over time, the sample size has changed, which could distort year-to-year fluctuations in grant dollars and grants targeting specific activities or populations. To account for these potential distortions, changes in giving are analyzed only for a matched set of funders included in both the 2008 and 2009 samples.
 
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