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 2005 grants sample included 130,961 grants awarded by 1,154 foundations totaling $16.4 billion. These grants accounted for roughly half of the grant dollars awarded by over 71000 active foundations.
• Between 2004 and 2005, grant dollars increased 6 percent (from $15.5 billion), while the number of grants increased 3.5 percent (from 126,497).
• In 2005 the sample included a total of 53,361 unique recipient organizations.