Wu, Paik Win NSF Grant to Study Philanthropy’s Response to Social Movements

Viviana Wu, assistant professor of public policy, and Anthony Paik, professor of sociology, have been awarded a nearly $300,000 U.S. National Science Foundation grant to build a first-of-its-kind database tracking how foundations respond to social movements through their giving to nonprofit organizations.

The project, funded by the NSF's EAGER award under the Human Networks and Data Science - Core Research (HNDS-R) program, will create a "longitudinal foundation grants database" focused on five metropolitan areas: Boston, New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles, where more than 19,000 foundations collectively hold an estimated $1.3 trillion in assets.

"We really don't know who is funding what, and where," says Wu, the project's principal investigator. "The database will be useful to track the longitudinal trend of foundations' grantmaking efforts and to understand how philanthropic resources are distributed."

Wu, Paik and Heather MacIndoe, associate professor of public policy and public affairs at UMass Boston, hope to shed light on how foundations-often described as hidden policy patrons-decide who and what to fund in response to social movements.

The project will use large language models (LLMs) to compile detailed, grant-level information, including descriptions, issue areas and recipient organizations based on Internal Revenue Service tax filings from 2020 to 2023.

Using computational text analysis and social network analysis, the team will examine how foundations cluster into networks, how their grantmaking strategies converge or diverge, and how institutional pressures shape giving.

The project is among the few longitudinal studies of philanthropic grant networks in the U.S., and the first to employ LLMs for this purpose.

"One of the outputs of this project is going to be this database that other people can use, so I think it squarely fits where higher education research should be going," Paik notes.

Wu says the findings will have practical benefits for nonprofits, policymakers, scholars, journalists and donors by making data on philanthropy more accessible and by identifying trends in grantmaking. Results will also be integrated into courses to train future nonprofit leaders.

The project has also received support from the Institute for Social Science Research Scholars Program, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Remedying Inequity through Student Engagement program (SBS RISE) and the SBS Conference and Visitor Grant.