August 27, 1998 | Read Time: 2 minutes
For the second year in a row, the growth rate for foundation assets hit double digits, according to the Foundation Center’s latest yearbook on grant making. The 18-per-cent increase reported for 1996 — which brought foundation assets to a total $267.6-billion — followed a 16-per-cent gain the year before.
The primary force behind the increases: robust stock returns that catapulted the value of foundations’ investments.
But new gifts worth $16-billion from donors contributed as well, including $4.7-billion from the estate of David Packard, the Hewlett-Packard Company’s co-founder, to the foundation he established with his wife.
In addition, several huge foundations were created with money from the coffers of non-profit health-care entities that converted to for-profit companies. The largest, the California Endowment, was established after Blue Cross of California converted to a for-profit entity. Its assets totaled nearly $1.3-billion at the end of its first fiscal year.
The asset gains translated into more grant dollars for charities in 1996 from the country’s approximately 42,000 private, corporate, and community foundations. The amount distributed in grants rose by about 13 per cent, to a total of $13.8-billion. Although the Foundation Center has not yet come up with final numbers for how much was given last year, the yearbook predicted that grants had increased by 12 per cent in 1997.
Among other findings:
* 1996 was a year of multiple big grants, with six topping $20-million each. The two largest that were reported: $203-million from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation to support health-sciences research at Emory University, in Atlanta; and $140-million from the Moody Foundation to Moody Gardens, in Galveston, Texas.
* Changes in demographics and economic patterns continued to chip away at the geographic dominance of foundations in the Northeast. Three Mid-Atlantic states — New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania — still hold about 29 per cent of all U.S. foundation assets — but that figure has declined over the years from 43 per cent in 1975.
* Education continued to receive about a quarter of all grant money in 1996. But for the first time this decade, pre-collegiate education failed to increase as a share of total education-grant dollars.
Copies of Foundation Giving: Yearbook of Facts and Figures on Private, Corporate and Community Foundations are available prepaid from the Foundation Center, Department NW21, 79 Fifth Avenue, New York 10003-3076. The cost is $24.95, plus a shipping and handling fee of $4.50. Credit-card orders can be placed by calling (800) 424-9836 or (212) 807-3677, or by using the on-line order form at http://fdncenter.org.
