Urban Institute — History of Philanthropy Project

[History of Philanthropy] Grant investigators: Luke Muehlhauser and Alexander Berger. This page was reviewed but not written by the grant investigators. Urban Institute staff also reviewed this page prior to publication. The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $365,833 to the Urban Institute to support a series of literature reviews and case studies on the history of philanthropy. The work will be led primarily by Benjamin Soskis, a research associate at the Urban Institute, who has previously produced case studies for our history of philanthropy project. The Urban Institute plans to publish approximately 6-8 literature reviews and case studies, and we may summarize some of these on our blog. We're hoping that the Urban Institute is eventually able to scalably produce informative historical case studies about the impact of philanthropy with limited input from us. This is a discretionary grant. The grant amount was updated in April 2025.