Recently, the Council on Foundations and the Foundation Center released a five-year study, The State of Global Giving by US Foundations: 2011-2015. The research showed that grantmaking by US foundations to charitable organizations outside the United States reached an all-time high in 2015.
The foundations gave $9.3 billion in grants compared with $2.1 billion in 2002 (an increase of over 300 percent). International giving represented more than 27 percent of all grants made by U.S. foundations, and the average grant size during this period tripled from just over $200,000 to more than $604,000.
Top foundation givers
More than half of all international giving by foundations during the five-year period of 2011-2015 came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($17.9 billion of $35.4 billion), and Sub-Saharan Africa benefited from the largest share of global grantmaking by US foundations, accounting for 25 percent of the total grant dollars during this five-year period.
Besides the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, other major US foundations making international grants were the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Foundation to Promote Open Society, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Top corporate foundations givers
While the report covered all US foundations giving abroad, including independent foundations, community foundations, corporate foundations and operating foundations, it did not include gifts made by companies directly (i.e., not through a corporate foundation), but the top 10 corporate foundations making international gifts were the Coca-Cola Foundation, the Citi Foundation, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the Caterpillar Foundation, the GE Foundation, the ExxonMobil Foundation, the UPS Foundation, the Walmart Foundation, the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies Contribution Fund and the Goldman Sachs Foundation.