Health Care and Medical Research Top Issues for European Foundations

Europe’s leading grant makers provide more support for health care and medical research than for any other field, according to a new report.

The European Grants Index, based on a broadly representative sample of grants awarded primarily in 1996 by members of the European Foundation Centre, shows that medical-related grants made up 31 per cent of the sample. Other grants for the natural sciences formed 19 per cent of that sum, according to the report, which is the first in what is expected to be a continuing series.

Large capital grants for research facilities accounted for much of the money spent in those areas. Britain’s Wellcome Trust, for example, which is Europe’s largest private grant maker, made many such grants, including the largest one listed: $7.8-million to the University of Edinburgh for cell-biology research.

Grants for education and training and for arts and culture were the next highest grant categories, amounting to just over and just under 10 per cent of the total, respectively. Grants for social sciences and those for housing and community development both constituted around 6 per cent of the total. The remaining categories — which included social services, civil rights, international relations, and the environment — all attracted less than 5 per cent.

The report gives the first statistical profile of foundation giving in Europe. It lists more than 1,750 grants and programs by 78 foundations and corporations in two dozen European countries, as well as a few grant makers in Japan and the United States that make grants in that region. The grants and programs total about $170-million.

As a pilot effort, the report is far from exhaustive: It lists just 20 to 30 grants for each foundation, chosen as representative of each grant maker’s interests. The grant makers, in turn, represent only about half of the center’s membership of 160 foundations and corporations. Those institutions, although they include many of Europe’s largest foundations and those with the broadest geographic interests, constitute just a small fraction of the estimated tens of thousands of grant makers on that continent.

The report’s compilers faced the challenge of pulling together data drawn from countries with widely varying philanthropic systems and published, originally, in more than 20 languages. What’s more, all figures had to be converted from dozens of national currencies to the common European currency, the ECU.

One-quarter of the money was awarded by grant makers in the United Kingdom, and 23 per cent by those in Sweden. Some 13 per cent came from U.S. foundations (including the American Express, Ford, Charles Stewart Mott, and Rockefeller Foundations, the German Marshall Fund, and the J. Paul Getty Trust), 11 per cent came from German grant makers, and 6 per cent from ones in Portugal. The rest were scattered among 22 other countries, none of which contributed as much as 4 per cent of the total.

About two-thirds of the grants remained in the same country in which they were awarded, but the balance crossed international borders. Not all of the grant and program money stayed in Europe. The report says it was distributed in nearly 80 countries around the world. Britain received nearly one quarter of the money, followed by Sweden (24 per cent) and Germany (15 per cent). No other country got as much as 4 per cent of the total.

Of the money awarded, 34 per cent went for capital projects, including construction or renovation, equipment, or information systems. About a quarter went to support conferences, publications, and the development of staff, faculty or curriculums. Only 3 per cent went for general operating support.

Miles Heggadon, who coordinates the European Foundation Centre’s public-information program and helped compile the index, says he hopes to update it every two years. In time, he said, the reports may be used to help in discerning grant-making trends in the region.

Copies of the European Grants Index are available from the European Foundation Centre, 51 rue de la Concorde, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium; the phone number is (011) 32-2-512-8938; the fax number is (011) 32-2-512-3265. The cost is $55 (or 45 ECU), postpaid.

A complete list of the center’s publications and information about ordering them are also available by sending a blank e-mail message to info-pubs@efc.be. The center’s World-Wide Web site is http://www.efc.be.