How Many Foundations Make Impact Investments?

Impact investing tells a story of momentum: billion-dollar pledges, more foundations committing capital, a discipline going mainstream.

By impact investing, I mean deploying capital with the intention of generating social or environmental benefits alongside financial returns.

To assess growth, I reviewed 990-PF filings from 2020 through 2024.

What I found requires its own full report. But one result stood out immediately.

Between 265 and 282 foundations reported a program-related investment each year for the past five years. Out of roughly 13,000 filing foundations.

The annual count has not meaningfully grown.

PRIs are investments made primarily to advance a foundation's charitable purposes. They are the clearest place to look because foundations must disclose them separately, since they count toward the annual payout requirement.

Dollar totals tell a somewhat different story. Disclosed PRI dollars rose to $1.84 billion in 2024, the highest level in the five-year period. But only 274 foundations reported one, still within the same narrow participation range.

And the flat line does not represent a fixed group.

Across five years, 489 foundations reported at least one PRI. About one-third appeared only once, while just 116 reported a PRI every year. Roughly one-quarter of the annual pool turns over from year to year, with entrants and exits largely offsetting one another.

The clearest available sign of whether participation is broadening is the number of foundations appearing for the first time in this five-year window. That count fell from 71 in 2021 to 56 in 2022, 55 in 2023, and 41 in 2024.

More dollars may be moving through PRIs. But the annual base of foundations using them is not expanding. It is a small, persistent core surrounded by a rotating group of occasional users, with the inflow of new participants slowing.

The obvious objection is that the activity may have moved elsewhere: mission-related investments, DAFs, LLCs, or other structures.

Maybe. But those channels do not provide consistent, comparable disclosure, which is exactly why it is so difficult to know how many foundations use them or how much capital they represent.

The field may be growing. But without consistent disclosure, it has lacked a reliable denominator.

The State of Foundation Impact Capital, our full report, starts to build one.

Source: SciRise Mission-Driven Capital Intelligence Dataset; analysis of IRS Form 990-PF filings, 2020-2024, covering the population of ~13,000 active U.S. foundations granting at least $1 million annually. "First-time" means first observed in this five-year window; some may have made PRIs before 2020.

Disclosure: SciRise is an independent venture and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Duke University.