The Ford Foundation offers a matching gift program to its employees and board members, and an analysis of these contributions provides insight into the philanthropic priorities of the foundation’s personnel—and how they might differ in some ways from those of the institution.
Ford matches annual charitable contributions of between $25 and $30,000 on a 3-1 basis. For example, a $100 gift made by a Ford staff member to an eligible charity would prompt a $300 gift from the foundation to the same organization. Ford reports these matching gifts separately on its annual Form 990-PF. In 2024 it made 848 such matching grants, though many recipients received multiple contributions and the actual number of unique grantees was approximately half this. The total amount awarded by the foundation through its matching program in 2024 was $2,613,162—an impressive total, though a tiny fraction of the more than $840 million worth of grants it made that year.
There are two main ways of ranking Ford’s matching gift grantees: 1) the total amount awarded to each recipient though the matching gift program; and 2) the number of matching grants awarded to each recipient. Selecting a clean cutoff point—one without duplicate values—simultaneously across both measures results in a somewhat arbitrary “Top 19” list. This corresponds to groups that received at least $30,000 worth of matching grants, and groups that received at least six separate matching grants—reflecting approximately 58 percent of the total amount awarded and 34 percent of the number of matching grants made.
Top Matching Grants (Total Amount)
- Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund ($330,466)
- Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program ($120,000)
- Friends of the High Line ($105,000)*
- George Jackson Academy ($90,000)
- Jewish Federation Bay Area ($90,000)
- The HistoryMakers ($90,000)*
- Empowerment Works ($75,000)
- Metropolitan Museum of Art ($75,000)*
- Okomo Otado and Leonora Odinya Foundation ($70,653)
- Bard College ($69,958)*
- Performance Zone Inc./The Field ($66,000)
- International Community Foundation ($65,280)
- Phillips Academy/Andover ($60,075)
- Girl Scouts of the United States of America ($45,000)
- The Open String ($42,000)
- Woodhull Freedom Foundation ($36,000)
- Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project ($30,495)
- Parents Group of New York ($30,000)
- Asian Health Services ($30,000)
Top Matching Grants (Total Number)
- New York Road Runners (58)
- Doctors Without Borders USA (22)
- ACLU Foundation (20)*
- Planned Parenthood Federation of America (20)*
- Brooklyn Public Library (19)*
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (19)*
- National Network of Abortion Funds (18)*
- Foundation for National Progress (18)
- ProPublica (18)
- VOCAL-NY (12)*
- Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders (11)
- Community Mindfulness Project (10)
- Southern Poverty Law Center (9)
- Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund (7)
- PS 20 Clinton Hills PTA (7)
- Proteus Fund (7)*
- Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (6)
- WNYC Radio/New York Public Radio (6)*
- Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (6)
Observations
Groups with a *star next to their names received institutional funding directly from the Ford Foundation in 2024, in addition to through the matching gifts program. These “double recipients” accounted for just four of the top nineteen recipients when ranked by total amount, and eight of the top nineteen recipients when ranked by number of matching gift grants made.
All twelve of these double recipients received at least six-figures worth of funding directly from the Ford Foundation in 2024, although for a grantmaker of its size this is unremarkable. Seven-figures is a better benchmark to use when delineating major Ford grantees in a given year, and just two of the top matching gift recipients met this threshold in 2024: the Proteus Fund (seven matching grants totaling $1,399, plus seventeen foundation grants totaling over $6.3 million) and the ACLU Foundation (twenty matching grants totaling $11,850, plus two foundation grants totaling $5.2 million).
The Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund—a donor-advised fund provider that is among the very largest charities in the country by revenue—is the only organization that appeared on both top matching gift recipients lists. The top ten largest individual grants (including three of the seven made to Fidelity) accounted for a combined $863,416—a third of the total matching gift grants made. Six matching grants were made at the maximum amount of $90,000, while just under half of the matching grants were for $300 or less.
It is interesting to note that some very large Ford Foundation institutional grantees did not receive a single matching gift in 2024. Sometimes there is an obvious reason for this: Blue Meridian Partners, which received nearly $13 million from Ford, operates explicitly as a megadonor collaborative. A similar explanation would seem to apply to many of the grants made to the New Venture Fund, which received almost $23 million from the Ford Foundation itself, but not a single matching grant.
Other activist groups, however, prominently solicit donations from the general public on their websites. Community Change, the Drug Policy Alliance, the National Women’s Law Center, UltraViolet, the Center for Popular Democracy, and the Color of Change Education Fund all received millions from the Ford Foundation itself in 2024, but nothing through the matching gift program.
The Ford Foundation has been headquartered in New York City since 1953, and this is reflected in the geographic focus its matching gift program. Approximately 38 percent of the total amount awarded through the program, and 55 percent of the total number of matching grants, were awarded to recipients located in New York state. Though the foundation itself has made a point of reemphasizing its commitment to Detroit, its personnel evidently do not feel any particular connection to the state where the wealth that seeded Ford’s endowment was originally created. Just two matching grants were made in 2024 to recipients located in Michigan, for a combined $2,625.
Finally, though many grants made through the Ford Foundation’s matching gift program were of a non-ideological nature, there was also ample support for groups engaged in the sort of left-progressive activism that is characteristic of Ford’s institutional grantmaking. In addition to the grantees mentioned above, notable activist groups that received Ford matching gift funding in 2024 included the Institute for Policy Studies (two grants for $7,500), Make the Road New York (five grants for $6,437), the Vera Institute of Justice (four grants for $4,350), and the National Domestic Workers Alliance (one grant for $1,500)—all of which also received funding directly from Ford that year.
