Equitable Grantmaking: A Complete Guide for US Foundations (2026)

How US foundations and community foundations can make grantmaking more equitable in 2026. Practical steps drawn from trust-based philanthropy, PEAK Grantmaking, and the latest research on the racial funding gap.

By Plinth Team

Published 18 May 2026

Equitable grantmaking is no longer a fringe conversation in US philanthropy. Foundations from the Ford Foundation to the Hewlett Foundation to community foundations across the country have adopted some version of it — driven by the racial funding gap exposed in 2020, the COVID-era pivot to emergency unrestricted funding, and a broader recognition that opaque, paperwork-heavy grantmaking actively harms the organizations philanthropy is meant to support. This guide explains what equitable grantmaking means in practice, the evidence behind it, and the concrete steps US foundations can take.

TL;DR

Equitable grantmaking is about removing barriers, sharing power, and building trust between funders and nonprofits. The biggest moves are: cut the application burden, give multi-year unrestricted general operating support, do your own due diligence rather than asking grantees to prove themselves repeatedly, give every applicant constructive feedback, collect (and act on) demographic data, and offer support beyond the check. The evidence base is strong — nonprofits led by people of color receive substantially less funding with more strings attached than their white-led peers, and the practices above measurably close that gap. Software can either entrench inequity (long forms, manual screening, generic rejection letters) or reduce it. The choice is in the workflows you build.

Why Equitable Grantmaking Matters in 2026

US institutional philanthropy distributes tens of billions of dollars in grants every year, but the distribution is uneven in ways that hard data has made undeniable over the past five years.

The most-cited study is Bridgespan and Echoing Green's 2020 Racial Equity in Philanthropy, which analyzed three years of funding data for Echoing Green's most competitive applicant pool — semifinalists and beyond in its global fellowship. The findings were stark: revenues of Black-led organizations were 24 percent smaller than their white-led counterparts, and unrestricted net assets were 76 percent smaller (Bridgespan, Racial Equity and Philanthropy). For organizations focused on improving outcomes for Black men and boys specifically, the unrestricted-asset gap widened to 91 percent (Chronicle of Philanthropy).

That gap is not principally about grant approval rates. It is about what kind of money flows once a grant is approved. White-led nonprofits are trusted with unrestricted funds at far higher rates; nonprofits led by people of color are more likely to receive project-restricted, short-duration grants with heavier reporting requirements (Bridgespan, There Is a Trust Gap in Philanthropy).

The administrative cost falls on the organizations least able to absorb it. Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) research has found that reporting requirements divert grantees from their core work. For a five-person organization with a $400,000 budget, an hour spent reformatting a financial schedule is an hour not spent with the people they serve.

The post-2020 response has been substantial but uneven. CEP also found that 40 percent of foundation leaders are actively working to improve their demographic data collection (Nonprofit Quarterly). The Greater Cleveland COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund documented their starting point — white-led organizations funded at 56 percent versus Black and Brown-led at 47 percent — and closed the gap within three months once they began measuring and acting on disaggregated data (Nonprofit Quarterly). The practices work when foundations commit to them.

What "Equitable Grantmaking" Actually Means

The phrase covers a lot of ground. Three overlapping concepts are worth distinguishing.

Trust-based philanthropy is a specific framework developed by the Whitman Institute and formalized through the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project. It defines six concrete practices that funders can adopt, covered in detail below.

Racial equity in grantmaking focuses on closing demonstrable funding gaps between white-led and BIPOC-led organizations — through demographic data collection, leadership representation on boards and review panels, and targeted funding strategies.

Participatory grantmaking goes furthest. It shifts decision-making power itself, inviting community members or grantees to allocate funds rather than only program officers and trustees.

These approaches share a starting premise: traditional grantmaking carries a built-in power asymmetry that distorts both decisions and outcomes, and removing that asymmetry produces better results for everyone involved. "Equitable grantmaking" is the umbrella term for the work of removing it.

The Six Practices of Equitable Grantmaking

The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project's six practices remain the clearest framework for foundations starting out (Trust-Based Philanthropy, Practices). They align with PEAK Grantmaking's "Drive Equity" principle and Exponent Philanthropy's Essential Practices (Exponent Philanthropy).

1. Give multi-year, unrestricted funding. Project-restricted, single-year grants are the easiest kind for a foundation to award and the hardest kind for a nonprofit to use well. Multi-year general operating support gives grantees room to plan, hire, retain staff, and respond to what their communities actually need. The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project recommends commitments of three to five years where possible. MacKenzie Scott's giving model — large, unrestricted, multi-year, with minimal reporting — has now demonstrated this approach at scale across hundreds of recipient organizations.

2. Do the homework yourself. Conventional grantmaking asks nonprofits to repeatedly prove their worth: board lists, audited financials, theory-of-change diagrams, logic models, evaluation plans. Most of this information is already public or available through the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, state charity registries, and Charity Navigator. Equitable grantmaking flips the burden — funders do their own due diligence from public records, and only ask the grantee for what is genuinely additional or specific to the proposal.

3. Simplify and streamline paperwork. Short application forms. Plain English. A single application considered for multiple funds. Reporting requirements proportional to grant size. Common applications shared across funders, such as those promoted by regional grantmaker associations and PEAK Grantmaking. The principle is straightforward: a foundation should know why every question is on its form, and what it will do with the answer.

4. Be transparent and responsive. Publish guidelines, eligibility, decision timelines, typical grant sizes, and historical pay-out data. Tell applicants where they are in your pipeline. Respond to inquiries within reasonable timeframes. Acknowledge declined applications with specific, constructive feedback — not a form letter that says "we received many strong applications." Transparency includes acknowledging what the foundation can and cannot do, and being honest about the criteria a review panel actually used.

5. Solicit and act on feedback. Use anonymous grantee perception surveys (CEP offers a standardized version that lets foundations benchmark against peers). Hold listening sessions. Publish what you heard and what you changed. The trust-based principle is that program officers do not have all the answers — grantees and the communities they serve are essential sources of strategic intelligence (Trust-Based Philanthropy).

6. Offer support beyond the check. Connect grantees with one another. Open access to legal, financial, or technology resources. Make introductions. Provide capacity-building grants alongside program funding. The most generative funder-grantee relationships look more like long-term partnerships than transactional contracts.

A seventh practice has become standard in 2026: collect, analyze, and use disaggregated demographic data on who is leading the organizations you fund, who is being served, and crucially who is not being funded among applicants. Standardized demographic data is increasingly available through sector data services and integrated grants management platforms — reducing the burden on nonprofits to fill out the same demographic form for every funder (PEAK Grantmaking).

How Plinth Supports Equitable Grantmaking

Plinth is an AI-powered grants management platform built for foundations and grantmakers. Several of its core features map directly to the practices above.

AI-powered due diligence. Plinth performs automated checks against public records — financial accounts, governance information, and regulator data — and surfaces what assessors actually need to see. For US grantmakers, Plinth integrates with US data sources including the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search to verify 501(c)(3) status and good standing. This removes the burden of asking applicants to upload documents that are already public, and standardizes due diligence so smaller organizations are not penalized for inconsistent paperwork. Learn more about AI Grant Management.

Applicant-side AI assistance. Plinth's application forms include AI that helps applicants as they write — checking eligibility in real time and helping them provide the information funders actually need. Smaller, less-resourced organizations benefit most from this support because they lack the dedicated development teams that larger nonprofits use to navigate complex applications. This narrows the access gap that has historically penalized first-time applicants and grassroots groups.

AI-drafted constructive feedback. Every applicant deserves useful feedback, but most foundations cannot afford the staff time to write it. Plinth's AI drafts specific, evidence-based feedback drawn from the actual application — not a generic template. Assessors review and send within minutes rather than hours. This makes the "constructive feedback to every applicant" practice operationally feasible at scale, even for lean foundation teams.

Anonymized demographic reporting. Plinth aggregates anonymized beneficiary data — location, age, gender, ethnicity, and any other characteristics a program tracks — so foundations can analyze funding patterns at portfolio level without breaching grantee or beneficiary privacy. This supports the seventh practice without adding to grantee reporting burden.

Multi-fund applications. A single application can be considered across multiple funds within Plinth, reducing the duplication that drives nonprofit application fatigue.

Form import and program templates. Plinth imports existing application forms from PDF or Word and converts them into structured digital applications. This lowers the switching cost for foundations moving away from legacy paper-and-email processes, which is often the practical barrier to adopting any of the equitable practices above. See community grants use case.

The Plinth Foundation: Practicing What We Preach

Plinth runs its own mini-foundation — a small charitable initiative that puts trust-based principles into operation in our own giving.

The Plinth Foundation makes small unrestricted grants alongside free access to Plinth's premium AI tools and pro bono consulting. Awards are made across five categories: Core & Operational Support, Capacity Building & Innovation, Advocacy & Movement Building, Community & Creativity, and Inclusion & Access. The application process is intentionally light-touch with no strict eligibility criteria. Standard due diligence documents are not compulsory — because we recognize many small organizations do not have them, and the burden of preparing them displaces program work.

Two principles from the Plinth Foundation translate directly to US foundations of any size:

• Funding is unrestricted by default. The grants are small, but they are flexible. They cover the operational expenses that most restricted grants exclude — staff costs, systems, training, advocacy — going to where they are needed most rather than where they are easiest to account for.
• Every applicant receives constructive feedback, regardless of whether they were funded. This is the practice US foundations most often skip because it is staff-intensive — and the practice that has the largest morale and trust effect on the broader applicant pool.

The Plinth Foundation is a UK-based initiative, but its operating principles are jurisdiction-neutral. US community foundations and family foundations have applied similar small-grant, light-touch, capacity-building models with comparable results.

Traditional vs. Equitable Grantmaking: At a Glance

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't unrestricted funding risky for foundations?

The evidence does not support that concern. More than five years of trust-based practice across hundreds of US foundations has produced no significant pattern of misuse of unrestricted funds. The risk runs the other way — restricted, short-cycle grants destabilize the nonprofits foundations rely on to deliver impact. Foundations that have shifted to unrestricted funding consistently report stronger grantee relationships and better outcomes (Trust-Based Philanthropy Project).

Is equitable grantmaking the same as participatory grantmaking?

No. Participatory grantmaking is a subset of equitable practice. It specifically shifts decision-making power to community members or grantees — a foundation might appoint a community panel to make funding decisions. Equitable grantmaking is broader and includes many practices that retain traditional decision structures while removing barriers to access.

How do we start collecting demographic data without adding to grantee burden?

The most effective approach is to draw demographic data from sector-wide data services rather than asking each applicant to re-enter it on every form. Many nonprofits already maintain a single demographic profile that funders can reference, and modern grants management platforms — including Plinth — are increasingly built to integrate this data directly into the assessment workflow. Where automated sources are not yet available, ask only for data you will actually analyze, and feed it back to the sector so the burden lifts over time.

What about legal requirements like IRS 501(c)(3) verification?

These are non-negotiable for tax-deductible grants, but they do not need to be onerous for applicants. The IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search lets foundations verify 501(c)(3) status, public charity classification, and good standing without asking the applicant for documentation. Plinth integrates this check directly into the application workflow so verification happens automatically rather than as a separate manual step. Equitable grantmaking is not less rigorous — it relocates the rigor to the funder.

Where does AI fit into all this?

AI is a force multiplier in either direction. Used badly — to auto-screen applications, flag applicants on opaque criteria, or send boilerplate rejections at scale — it can entrench inequity. Used well, it makes labor-intensive equitable practices affordable for foundations of all sizes: drafting constructive feedback for every applicant, summarizing applications so assessors focus on substance, and surfacing patterns in funding decisions that would otherwise go unnoticed. The question is whether the AI sits in service of the human assessor or replaces them.

What is the first practice a foundation should adopt?

Most peer funders recommend starting with whichever practice you have internal alignment to adopt — the one your board and program staff are most ready for. Common starting points are: streamlining the application form, publishing decision timelines, or piloting multi-year unrestricted funding for a single program. Practitioners emphasize that piecemeal adoption is fine; trust-based philanthropy is a direction of travel, not an all-or-nothing commitment (Workforce Matters).

Recommended Next Pages

• Grant Management for Community Foundations — A detailed look at multi-fund grantmaking software.
• AI Grant Management — How Plinth automates due diligence and supports equitable assessment.
• Plinth for Foundations — Plinth's grants management product overview.
• The Plinth Foundation — Our own approach to trust-based, light-touch grantmaking.

Last updated: May 2026. Running a US foundation and exploring equitable grantmaking software? Book a demo.