Foundation Center

A philanthropic watchdog group is hoping to light a fire under charitable foundations that support education by releasing a report Wednesday that points out how few of them focus enough attention on helping the most needy students.

The study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy said that only 11 percent of American foundations devoted at least half their grants to programs that benefit vulnerable students. It looked at 672 foundations that gave at least $1 million to educational causes from 2006 to 2008.

Foundation leaders are starting to use social media but not yet making it a regular part of their work, a new report says.

While many foundation executives regularly use more traditional social media like e-newsletters and Listerves, much fewer leaders are using so-called "Web 2.0" applications such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Podcasts on a regular basis, says the report by the Foundation Center.

This October, the Foundation Center will hold its annual Funding for Arts Month with special events, classes, and resources aimed at helping artists and nonprofit arts organizations become better grantseekers and increase their funding.

At free programs in the Center's Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, locations, participants can discover fundraising strategies, network with fellow artists and colleagues, and gain insight into their local arts funding community.

New York, NY — June 2, 2010. The nation's foundation community has provided critical financial and technical support to states applying for the first round of the U.S. Department of Education's "Race to the Top" education reform competition. Yet according to Race to the Top: What Grantmakers Can Learn from the First Round, released today by the Foundation Center, the success of future collaborations will depend on government including grantmakers in the development of new policies and grantmakers being engaged, long-term partners in the process.

Under the auspices of the Foundations for Education Excellence initiative, the Foundation Center conducted interviews in March and April 2010 with foundation staff, education consultants, and government leaders who had guided the first-round application process in nine states. Key findings from these interviews include:

The thrill of the hunt is over. All the self-help guides that helped accomplish the feat are tossed aside. Now what? Is it time to slovenly settle into the relationship, with partners taking each other for granted?

Foundations appear to have responded quickly and intelligently to the economic crisis, directing more of their money for recession relief to the hardest-hit parts of the country, according to a study released today.

The study was conducted by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, and paid for by the Philanthropic Collaborative, a group of foundations, nonprofit organizations, and lawmakers.

The study analyzed a sample of grants collected by the Foundation Center that numbered 2,672 and totaled $472-million. The grants were made from 2008 to 2010.

April 19, 2010, Philanthropy News Digest — Challenged by a prolonged economic downturn, the nation's grantmaking foundations cut their giving by an estimated 8.4 percent in 2009, a new report from the Foundation Center finds. The decline is the steepest since the center began tracking the data in 1975.

Based on a survey of more than 1,200 large and midsize foundations, the 2010 edition of Foundation Growth and Giving Estimates (16 pages, PDF) found that grant dollars awarded fell from $46.8 billion in 2008 to $42.9 billion in 2009, and that the decline in giving totaled less than half the 17 percent loss in foundation assets recorded in 2008. The report also found that independent and family foundations, which represent nearly 90 percent of foundations, reduced their giving by 8.9 percent to $30.8 billion in 2009, corporate foundation giving decreased by 3.3 percent to $4.4 billion, and community foundation giving declined by 9.6 percent to $4.1 billion.

NEW YORK, November 11, 2009 — Today, the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy released the 2009 edition of Giving in Numbers, an annual report on corporate giving trends available for free download. Giving in Numbers offers a comprehensive analysis of 2008 corporate contributions drawn from 137 prominent companies, including 55 of the Fortune 100.

October 14, 2009 — New York City foundations and the nonprofit organizations they support have racially diverse staffs — but this diversity decreases at higher levels of seniority, according to a new report released by Philanthropy New York and the Foundation Center.

New York, September 16, 2009 — The Foundation Center today announced the launch of "Foundations for Education Excellence," a national initiative it is supporting to engage philanthropic institutions and education leaders across the country in a unified, strategic drive to improve public education. The cornerstone of this initiative is a new online resource center that will help education funders align their grantmaking — and maximize their overall impact — with funds available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).