64% of Foundations Made Emergency Grants and Grantees Still Felt Abandoned

The Center for Effective Philanthropy released its State of Nonprofits 2026 report this month, and the headline finding has a structure the sector is not used to seeing. Sixty-four percent of foundations issued emergency or rapid-response grants in the reporting period, and roughly a third lifted their annual payouts above the legal minimum, with a median increase of two percent of endowment. Foundation behavior moved. The nonprofit sector still reports that the response was uneven and insufficient.

That is the gap the field has been talking around for two years, and CEP has now quantified it. The foundations that moved are not wrong about having moved. The nonprofits that still feel abandoned are not wrong about feeling abandoned. The two observations describe the same period without contradicting each other, because they describe different things. One is a response statistic. The other is a stewardship statistic. The gap between them is the work.

The stewardship statistic measures how the response felt at the receiving end. Two-thirds of foundations moving is unevenly distributed by definition. Some grantees received emergency grants on time and with operating flexibility. Others received them late or with restrictions, and still others did not receive them at all. The aggregate number is high. The grantee experience is not described by the aggregate.

For Nonprofit and Foundation Professionals

The report reframes the post-2024 funding conversation. The question is no longer whether foundations responded. The question is which foundations responded to which grantees, on what timeline, with what flexibility, and whether the grantee was given the room to use the funding the way the moment required. That set of questions cannot be answered with aggregate payout data, because aggregate payout data was never designed to answer them.

For Corporate Giving and CSR Leaders

The same structural gap shows up inside employee assistance and community response programs. A company can write the check, hit the deadline, and still produce a beneficiary experience that does not feel responsive, because the speed of the response is one variable and the way the response was delivered is another. The numbers will record the speed. The community will remember the delivery.

For Donors and Family-Office Advisors

Evaluating which foundations to support or partner with, the CEP report introduces a new diagnostic dimension. Foundation transparency on payout numbers has been improving. Foundation transparency on grantee experience has not. The donor and family-office advisor who wants to support foundations that actually steward, rather than foundations that merely move, will have to read for the second number, and the second number is mostly available only in qualitative form.

For Digital and Crypto-Native Giving Leaders

The CEP finding is a stewardship-data problem before it is a foundation problem, which means the on-chain giving infrastructure that produces a verifiable, timestamped record of every transfer is the tool most capable of closing the gap between what a funder reports and what a grantee experiences. A digital and crypto-native giving leader building a DAO-governed grantmaking pool can publish the complete distribution record, the timing of each release, and the receiving address of each grantee in a form the grantee can verify independently. That is the documentation the CEP report is implicitly asking for, and it is documentation that traditional foundation reporting was never designed to produce.

For NGOs and International Organizations

The gap between foundation response statistics and grantee experience is worse across borders than inside them, because the timeline for a wire to clear an international grantee often adds days or weeks to a response that was already late at the source. An NGO or international organization operating in a rapid-response environment does not experience a foundation's emergency grant on the date it was approved. It experiences it on the date it clears. The sector's aggregate response data does not capture that delay, which is part of why the numbers can look responsive while the grantee still feels abandoned.

"Two-thirds of foundations moved and the grantees still felt abandoned, which means the response was a funding event and the abandonment was a stewardship one."

EILEEN HERNANDEZ, THE STRATEGIC STEWARD

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This sits inside DIA Protocol Pillar 1, Algorithmic Trust, even though the CEP report has nothing to do with algorithms. Trust between funder and grantee runs on signals that are felt rather than measured, and the funder that cannot read the felt signal will continue to mistake a delivered grant for a completed relationship.