Community development funding in Philly has paled in comparison to other metros

Want to see where the largest foundations in the country are making the most grants? A new report from the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia and Atlanta follows the money — and not a lot of it has lead to Philly.

The report, based on data from the Foundation Center, includes 169,000 community and economic development grants made by the 1,000 largest foundations between 2008 and 2013. The sum of all grants comes out to nearly $15 billion.

The banks also released a nifty data visualization tool for folks to tinker with before the full report is published later this month. The tool allows users to size metros up against each other based on grant amount and population. The disparity between Philadelphia and nearby metros is stark.

Here are the grant totals for community and economic development in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and New York between 2008 and 2013:

• Philadelphia: $314,412,324
• Pittsburgh: $370,552,104
• New York: $1,940,386,378

Yeesh.

Per capita, Pittsburgh had the fifth highest grant amount over that period of time, with San Francisco coming in second and Battle Creek, Mich. coming in first.

According to the report, metro areas that received a greater level of grant support for community and economic development shared five traits:

• Home to a large foundation
• Have a dense nonprofit sector
• Have a population of at least 250,000
• Have higher levels of poverty
• Are located in the West

The majority of grants made to Philadelphia by major foundations were directed toward education (32.9 percent) with the minority of funds going into health services.

For what it’s worth, Philadelphia’s grant activity still exceeded the median for U.S. metro areas. On average, metros received a total of $3,265,623, equaling out to $12.35 per capita.

The full report will be released later this month, and research findings will be presented September 23 at Philadelphia Fed’s Reinventing Our Communities conference.