Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A Wellcome Investigator Award is a multi-year foundation grant in the UK biomedical sector.
- Is an instance
A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant supports a US health-policy research project at 10 percent indirect cap.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
An NIH R01 is a federal grant, not a foundation grant.
- Not an instance
A pharmaceutical company-sponsored research agreement is industry, not foundation, funded.
Editorial commentary
Foundations are a significant funding source for biomedical, social, and educational research, with major examples including Wellcome (UK), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Volkswagen Foundation. Foundation grants often have idiosyncratic terms: lower or capped indirect cost recovery, mission-aligned reporting expectations, named-PI structures rather than competitive open calls, and longer or shorter terms than government norms. Some foundations operate near-fixed annual grant cycles.
Where the money comes from
Most foundation grant-making is itself financed from the foundation’s own endowment income — the foundation invests a permanent corpus and distributes a share of the investment return as grants, the same structural mechanism universities use to fund their own discretionary pools. This is one reason foundation giving can fluctuate year to year with investment performance in a way federal appropriations do not.
Indirect cost recovery differs sharply from federal norms
Unlike US federal awards, which are governed by a regulatory floor under 2 CFR 200 (a de minimis rate of 15 percent for entities without a negotiated rate, as of the April 2024 Uniform Guidance revision), foundations set indirect cost policy entirely at their own discretion, and many cap recovery well below that floor — commonly in the 10-15 percent range or lower, and sometimes at zero for programme-related grants. There is no regulatory minimum a foundation must honour, which is why institutions frequently flag foundation awards for closer budget review before acceptance: the gap between actual overhead and recoverable overhead is a real institutional cost, not a compliance question.
References
- Foundation Center (Candid) annual giving reports; Association of Charitable Foundations (UK).
Also known as
Charitable foundation grant · Private foundation grant
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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