Between the early 1980s and 2001, the Foundation Center, an information provider to the philanthropic community that maintains a comprehensive database on U.S. grant makers, analyzed foundation support of humanities activities using a definition of the humanities that is more narrow in scope than that employed by the Humanities Indicators. (See Statement of the Scope of the “Humanities” for Purposes of the Humanities Indicators.) In order to more fully capture the extent of foundation commitment to the humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences convened an advisory committee in 2002 to review the Center’s humanities coding practices and to identify additional disciplines for inclusion. The Academy then commissioned the Foundation Center to examine funding trends over the preceding decade using this broadened definition. (See pages 13-14 of the Foundation Center report, Foundation Funding for the Humanities, for the original definition employed by the Center and a description of how it was expanded for this analysis.) The Center analyzed all grants of over $10,000 awarded by approximately 1,000 of the largest U.S. foundations. These grants represented more than half of total grant dollars awarded by independent, corporate, and community foundations in the United States. (See page 3 of Foundation Funding for the Humanities for details of the Center’s sampling base; for an overview of the kinds of foundations studied by the Center and included in this indicator, see also the Note on the Types of Foundation Grants Analyzed.)

The Foundation Center report estimates that private foundation funding for the humanities totaled approximately $335 million in 2002 (Figure IV-8a; this amount includes grants for humanities-related activities in the social sciences). Almost half of this funding went for “historical” and “humanities-related museum” activities (24% each). Historical activities, as defined by the Foundation Center, included historical societies, preservation activities, memorials, and commemorations. Museum activities excluded those performed by or within arts museums, unless the museum specialized in ethnic or folk art or the funding went specifically to fund an activity related to a humanities discipline. (In contrast, the Humanities Indicators Project treats art museums, and thus all activities that occur within them, as humanities-oriented—for the types of entities treated as humanities organizations for the purposes of the Indicators, see Indicator IV-9, Revenues of Not-For-Profit Humanities Organizations, and the accompanying inventory of humanities organization types.)

Figure IV-8a, Full Size Supporting Data

Grants for scholarship and programs in history (including archeology) represented the greatest share of funding (15%) going to a particular discipline. By contrast, grants for languages and art history activities constituted just 1% per discipline of the total funding, and about 3% of grant monies went to literature and philosophy each (the latter included a number of programs in applied and medical ethics). What the Foundation Center classified as “humanities-related arts, culture, and media” activities absorbed approximately 10% of funding, while support for “humanities-related social science” activities (among which the Foundation Center included ethnic and gender studies activities) represented 7% of all humanities grant dollars.

Although foundation funding for humanities activities and projects grew substantially between 1992 and 2002, this growth lagged behind total foundation giving (Figure IV-8b). While such overall giving increased approximately 50% between 1992 and 1997, humanities giving grew by 37%, and, while overall giving during the 1997 to 2002 period doubled, the figure for the humanities, 83%, was again smaller. The persistent disparity resulted in a decline over the ten-year period, from 2.5% to 2.1%, in the share of all foundation funding going to the humanities (Figure IV-8c).

Figure IV-8b, Full Size Supporting Data

Figure IV-8c, Full Size Supporting Data