The F. M. Kirby Foundation Board of Directors approved 106 grants totaling $8,364,850 in the first half of 2026 to support nonprofit organizations dedicated to strengthening and enriching our communities. This total reflects grants awarded in 2026 and multi-year commitments.
In all, 62 grants included general operating support and 71 grants were made to organizations that have been partners of the Foundation for over 25 years, a result of the Foundation’s strategy of forming long-term, trusting relationships with grantees. Grants approved from January through June included a combined $4.1 million to organizations working in New Jersey and North Carolina, the Foundation’s primary geographic areas of interest. Additional grants, totaling over $4.3 million, supported organizations in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and other regions dear to Kirby family members, as well as national nonprofits largely based in Washington, D.C., and New York City.
With the nation celebrating its 250th anniversary this year, the F. M. Kirby Foundation has deepened its commitment to civic life by supporting organizations bringing the semiquincentennial home to their communities. In 2026, through programmatic and general operating support, the Foundation has backed a range of local America250 initiatives, rooted in the belief that history is best understood close to where it was made. The Morris County Historical Society received support for its African American History Survey, a project to document and illuminate local stories that have too often been left out of the American narrative. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey received support for “Revolutionary Voices,” a four-part play reading series at the F. M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre that traces American ideals from the founding era to the present. Through a general operating support grant to PBS North Carolina, the Foundation is also helping fuel Homegrown History, a multiyear public history initiative that trains the lens of the semiquincentennial on North Carolina’s own rich and complicated past. These grants supplement $430,000 the foundation approved in 2024 and 2025 to fund semiquincentennial programmatic initiatives, including grants to the American Friends of Lafayette, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and others. Alongside this grantmaking, the Foundation is hosting We the People: Reflections at 250, a free five-part webinar series running from April through September 2026 that brings together distinguished scholars and civic leaders to examine the ideals of 1776 and their resonance today.
In the first half of 2026, the Foundation approved approximately $530,000 in grants to 12 public affairs organizations spanning public media, academic freedom, civil discourse, and civic thought leadership. The F. M. Kirby Foundation has long held that an informed citizenry is the foundation of civic life, and that access to trusted, local information is what makes self-governance possible. In that spirit, the Foundation’s Public Affairs & Society Benefit portfolio has recently expanded its commitment to local news through three new grants. Morristown Green, a digital news outlet providing in-depth reporting to the greater Morristown community, received $10,000 from the Foundation through the Tiny News Collective. In New Jersey, the Foundation provided $25,000 in general operating support to the Corporation for New Jersey Local Media in support of the New Jersey Hills Media Group, which serves 52 municipalities across Morris, Somerset, Essex, and Hunterdon counties with 14 digital publications and five print editions. North Country Public Radio, which serves listeners across the North Country of New York and Vermont, received $10,000 in general operating support to sustain the kind of regional public journalism that keeps rural communities connected to the issues that shape their lives. Together, these grants reflect the Foundation’s conviction that local news is a civic necessity.
Additionally, as the Foundation deepens its support for local civic infrastructure, it is also advancing solutions with global reach through its annual Kirby Prize. The 2026 F. M. Kirby Prize for Scaling Social Impact was awarded to Chancen International, a nonprofit organization expanding access to tertiary education and employment pathways for underserved youth across Africa through income share agreements (ISAs). By enabling students to finance their education without collateral, guarantors, or fixed debt — and repay only once they’re earning above a living wage — Chancen is helping remove one of the region’s most persistent barriers to economic opportunity. The prize, which includes $150,000 in unrestricted funds, is administered by the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in partnership with the F. M. Kirby Foundation. It recognizes enterprises that demonstrate significant impact and potential for scaling their solutions to social or environmental problems globally. Now in its sixth year, the Kirby Prize is designed to help amplify and accelerate an enterprise’s impact on some of the world’s most pressing challenges.
More broadly, 2026 grantmaking spanned across all our programmatic funding areas, which include arts and culture, education, environment, health, human services, and public affairs. Read more about the Foundation’s values within each of these funding areas here.
