Philanthropy provides $30B annually for science and health research

The foundations making charitable donations to support scientific and health research mostly give to institutions in their home states.

That’s what I found in a study I conducted with two fellow data scientists, Albert Laszlo Barabasi and Alexander J. Gates. In analyzing foundation grants that supported scientific research from 2010-2019, we determined that nearly 40% of those grants and 60% of the total number of dollars given backed scientific and health research initiatives based in the donor’s or the foundation’s own state.

We also found that these donors and foundations tend to support the same institutions year after year. Roughly 70% of the scientific and health research grants that foundations made one year were provided again the next year. What’s more, there’s a 90% chance that foundations that have supported an institution for seven years straight will support the same institution again the following year.

We analyzed Internal Revenue Service data drawn from 990 forms – paperwork that foundations are required by law to file annually.

We identified 69,675 nonprofits that either performed scientific research or supported that kind of research. Those nonprofits received nearly 1 million unique grants from foundations over the previous decade. Those donations totaled more than US$30 billion in 2019 alone.

Here are three examples.

While on average only 2% of foundation funding for science and health research went to support work in the state of Washington, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, located in Seattle, gave over 20% of its research funds to projects in that state from 2010 to 2019.

The Lilly Endowment gave 62% of all of its research funding to institutions located in Indiana, where it’s based.

The Dennis Washington Foundation, which is located in Missoula, Montana, funded health and science research exclusively at universities in Montana – providing more than $20 million for those endeavors.

The headquarters of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is located in downtown Seattle. Ron Buskirk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Why it matters

While the highly local nature of private funding for this research surprised us, it is relatively common in philanthropy.

At the same time, the local focus of many private funders is at odds with how most health researchers and scientists view and perform their work, which typically involves national or even global teams of experts.

The $30 billion in annual funding from foundations is also significant simply because of its scale. This sum may equal as much as half of what the U.S. government distributes annually to support scientific and health research.

The National Institutes of Health, a U.S. government agency responsible for medical research, has a roughly $47 billion annual budget.

And the National Science Foundation, another federal agency that supports scientific research, has an approximately $10 billion annual budget.

The federal government funds science and health research through other agencies, too, including the Department of Defense, but the precise total of that support is hard to determine.

What still isn’t known

The available data makes it possible to identify only the foundation that provides a grant and its recipient. Details regarding the goals or purpose of this funding are scarce. That makes it hard to assess the impact foundations have for scientific and health research.

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a funder of The Conversation Africa. The Lilly Endowment is a funder of The Conversation U.S.

Louis Shekhtman, Senior Lecturer of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.