The major vehicle of support by private foundations is a cash grant or award. The majority of foundations do not make grants to individuals except in the form of scholarships, and even those may be made through institutions.

Most private foundations prefer that the third-party tax exempt organization affiliated with the grantee handle and disburse the award.

Who And What Foundations Fund?

Combined, 60,000 foundations granted $26 Billion to many of the 900,000 eligible non profit organizations, including 3,500 colleges and universities.

It is Clear that higher education receives almost twice the support that its nearest competition, elementary and secondary education, receives. In formation such as this could be used in many ways. For instance, it could be used to help you select the lead organization in a consortia project based on granter preference. If you are interested in pursuing foundation funding for a subject area other than education, you should research subcategory-giving patterns within that specific area.

Most foundations award the majority of their funding in the states where they are located and, unfortunately, there is great disparity in the number of foundations from state to state. In fact 621 of 1009 largest foundations in the Unite States are located in just 9 of the 50 states (California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New york, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas), as well as the District of Columbia and of the 125000 grants of $10000 or more, there 621 foundations made 62 percent of them.

If you are located in one of the other 41 states, remember that even nonprofit organizations in states with none of 1009 largest foundations still attract some with none of the largest foundations in other states. In addition, you may be able to select a consortia partner located in a state with more foundations, and win a foundation grant that you could share through a subcontract agreement.

Not only is the private foundation grants marketplace misunderstood by individual grant seekers, but also entire institutions have added to the confusion by arbitrarily deciding that government grant applications and contracts should go handled by an institution's development office. One reason in support of this decision is that the development office in most universities is tied to a university foundation.

However, the problem lies in the fact that many development offices limit the access that faculty have to private foundations so that they can use the foundation marketplace to attempt to fund administrative priorities, such as capital campaigns and endowments. this problem is compounded by the fact that only a small percentage of foundations dollars are actually awarded to fund these types of capital support projects.

Facts About Grants:

$360 billion dollars in grant money is available every year.

Many business grants designed for women go unclaimed.

Fewer than 15% of all U.S. women consider applying for grants.

More grants than ever before are now available only to women.