Giving stays home

A few weeks ago, the figure in this column showed nine funders of one small Mobile dance nonprofit — and every one of them was an Alabama funder. That looked like a nice coincidence. It isn't. It's the shape of the whole field.

We looked at where foundation dollars actually land, relative to each funder's home state — sixty-seven thousand foundations' filings, from 2023 through the fiscal-2025 filings arriving now. The typical funder gives just over half of its dollars inside its home state. Half of all funders give a majority at home. And one funder in five gives essentially everything at home — those funders will never appear on a national prospect list, because they don't fund nationally. Add it up and about half of America's foundation dollars never cross a state line.

One honest footnote before you trust any single state's number: a foundation's "home state" is its legal address. Delaware looks like the least generous home state in the country — barely a dime of each dollar stays — but that's not stinginess; it's paperwork. Funders incorporate there and live elsewhere. Everywhere else, though, the pattern holds, and it holds steady in every year we've read. Money is loyal to its neighborhood.

Which turns out to be good news if you're raising it: the funders most likely to write your organization a check aren't in some national database of famous names — they're the foundations within driving distance, a fifth of whom will only ever fund close to home. That finding was strong enough that we changed the Workbench this week: you can now filter funders by where they're based — not just where their giving goes — and the funders who give mostly close to home carry a badge saying so. The one in five who never leave home just stopped being invisible. The map below shows every state's number — find yours. Does your own funding map match — mostly local, a few far-flung exceptions?