May 30, 2011 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s eighth annual special report on nonprofit endowments includes data from 213 large nonprofits and foundations.
The total value of the endowments for the group was $340.2-billion in 2010.
For organizations that provided data for both 2009 and 2010, the median increase in endowment value from year to year was 9.4 percent, meaning that half grew by more and half did less well.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation continues to be the richest endowment in the survey, valued at an estimated $36.7-billion as of December 2010.
The total value of the endowments surveyed by The Chronicle encompasses a little more 2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.
Inside the Survey Pool
Data in this report include information from nonprofit endowments valued at $5-million or more.
More than 450 nonprofit organizations from across the United States were asked to provide data about their endowments.
The survey pool was drawn from organizations in the Philanthropy 400 (The Chronicle’s annual ranking of the 400 charities that raise the most from private sources), colleges and universities that had the 50 biggest endowments according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, and a sampling of the nation’s largest private foundations.
The Chronicle’s survey of nonprofit endowments was conducted by Peter Bolton and Marisa López-Rivera.
