By Dave Cucchiara
Communications & Program Associate
The F. M. Kirby Foundation Board of Directors approved 116 grants totaling $8,937,600 in the first half of 2025 to support nonprofit organizations dedicated to strengthening and enriching our communities. This total reflects grants awarded in 2025 and multi-year commitments.
In all, 67 grants included general operating support and 59 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 $4.2 million to organizations working in New Jersey and North Carolina, the Foundation’s primary geographic areas of interest. Additional grants, totaling over $4.7 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.
The 2025 F. M. Kirby Prize for Scaling Social Impact was awarded to Solar Freeze, a Kenya-based social enterprise addressing food insecurity and climate resilience through mobile, solar-powered cold storage units for smallholder farmers. By reducing post-harvest loss and enabling affordable, off-grid refrigeration, Solar Freeze is helping farmers — particularly women and youth — increase incomes and reduce food waste. 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 fifth year, the Kirby Prize is designed to help amplify and accelerate an enterprise’s impact on some of the world’s most pressing challenges.
In May, the Foundation approved a three-year, $900,000 grant to Breakthrough T1D, along with designating an additional $100,000 from the organization’s Future Decision Fund, to support cutting-edge type 1 diabetes research at the New England Center of Excellence. In aggregate, this $1,000,000 commitment will help scientists at the Center focus on advancing beta cell replacement therapies, a promising approach that could one day eliminate the need for insulin therapy for people with T1D. These efforts build on a transformative discovery that stem cells from living donors can be converted into insulin-producing islets, potentially offering a scalable alternative to traditional donor transplants and bringing us closer than ever to a cure. The Foundation is honored to partner with Breakthrough T1D in support of this pioneering work at such a critical moment in the search for a cure.
In the first half of 2025, the Foundation approved approximately $2 million in grant funding to support 36 human service organizations, ranging from those empowering children with disabilities to others addressing food insecurity in local communities. Notable among these are the American Red Cross, a longtime grantee the Foundation has supported for more than 30 years; Market Street Mission, which provides free, faith-based shelter and meals for individuals facing hunger, homelessness, and addiction; and the National Alliance on Mental Illness, in support of raising awareness for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. These partnerships exemplify the Foundation’s mission to foster self-reliance and build strong, healthy communities.
More broadly, 2025 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.
