January 14, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
As the assets of the nation’s biggest foundations have increased significantly, so too have the number and size of grants awarded by those foundations, a new study has found.
ALSO SEE:
Grants From Large Foundations, 1997
Foundation Grants of $8-Million and Over
State-by-State Distribution of Grants
The Foundation Center reports that grant makers increased the number of awards to charitable projects by more than 10 per cent from 1996 to 1997. The grant makers made 86,203 awards in 1997, including 226 grants of at least $2.5-million. In 1996, foundations made 193 grants of that size out of a total of 78,296 awards.
The two biggest grants in 1997 went to help establish educational institutions: The Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation, in Atlanta, awarded $70-million to the Woodruff Health Sciences Center, and the W. M. Keck Foundation, in Los Angeles, made a $50-million grant to start the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences.
The center’s findings were based on data from 1,016 grant makers and were published in the latest edition of the center’s Foundation Grants Index, an annual report that examines foundation giving nationwide.
The report says that a “buoyant stock market and record new gifts to endowments” contributed to the growth in the number and size of grants in 1997.
The foundations included in the report represent only 2.4 per cent of all grant makers, but their giving accounted for more than 57 per cent of all the grants awarded in 1997 by private, corporate, and community foundations. Together, they gave a total of $7.9-billion.
The study found that while the biggest chunk of foundation money continued to go to support education, education’s share of the money dropped in 1997 to its lowest point since 1993 — 24 per cent. The report points out that the amount of money that goes to education has varied from year to year as a result of a few large gifts.
Health programs once again attracted the second-largest share of foundation dollars in 1997, after dipping to third place the previous year. Projects dealing with health care and research accounted for nearly 17 per cent of the grant dollars.
The share of foundation money supporting human-services programs dropped from a high in 1996 of more than 17 per cent to about 15 per cent in 1997. The spike in 1996 was largely the result of one big gift: $140-million from the Moody Foundation, in Galveston, Tex., to a recreation center.
Copies of The Foundation Grants Index 1999 can be obtained from the Foundation Center, 79 Fifth Avenue, New York 10003-3076; (212) 807-3690 or (800) 424-9836; fax (212) 807-3677. The cost, which must be paid in advance, is $165, plus $4.50 for shipping. The book can also be ordered from the center’s World-Wide Web site at http://fdncenter.org.
