Morgan Stanley Foundation
/OVERVIEW: The Morgan Stanley Foundation focuses its grantmaking on children’s health and nutrition. Currently, its support for education prioritizes scholarships at HBCUs.
IP TAKE: The foundation is not an approachable or transparent funder. It does not accept unsolicited proposals and tends to fund the same organizations each year. Health funders unaffiliated with the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital or the Boston Grow Clinics will want to look elsewhere. Grantseekers’ best bet may be to consult their rolodex to network with Morgan Stanley employees.
PROFILE: Founded in 1994, the Morgan Stanley Foundation (MSF) is the philanthropic arm of the Morgan Stanley’s offices based in the US. It is also the philanthropic sister of the Morgan Stanley International Foundation. The foundation employs different grantmaking guidelines for both its national and international grantmaking, although focus areas for both organizations overlap. It predominantly invests in children’s health and nutrition, and education programs.
Morgan Stanley also has a robust employee volunteer program, and, according to its website, “employees have helped Morgan Stanley deliver more than 2.4 million hours of service through the Firm’s dedicated Global Volunteer Month.” Additionally, Morgan Stanley encourages its employees to “make a lasting impact with local nonprofit partners through pro bono and skills-based volunteering” via its pro bono program, the Morgan Stanley Strategy Challenge. Morgan Stanley employees also build playgrounds in partnership with KaBOOM!, to ensure that “children around the country have access to a childhood filled with the balance and active play needed to thrive.” Finally, Morgan Stanley’s employee matching program will match up to $4,000 in matched corporate funds to eligible U.S. charities.
Grants for Public Health
Morgan Stanley’s health grantmaking seeks to provide “children with the building blocks for a healthy future through innovations in pediatric care.” It does this through its ongoing support for The New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, which was created in 2003 with a $60 million donation from Morgan Stanley. It is one of the leading children’s hospitals in the United States according to U.S. News and World Report.
The foundation also backs Grow Clinics in Boston, which provide “medical, nutritional, and social services to children diagnosed with Failure To Thrive (FTT), a term used in pediatric medicine to indicate insufficient weight gain or too much weight loss.” Nutritional issues early in life can lead to long term emotional problems and interfere with the development of learning, language, and motor skills.
The Morgan Stanley Global Alliance for Children’s Health program supports innovative childhood wellness programs, and the Morgan Stanley Healthy Cities program works to “bring together the fundamentals – wellness, nutritious foods and safe play – for children in need.” The former only funds projects that are national in size and serve multiple locations across the country, and the latter is global in scope and runs programs in the US, London, and Mumbai.
Finally, in 2020, Morgan Stanley created the Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children’s Mental Health and gave $20 million to seven nonprofits to address children’s mental health issues during the COVID-19 pandemic “to prevent youth suicide and fight depression and other children’s mental health problems.”
Additional previous health grantees include Children's Health Fund, Williamson Medical Center Foundation Inc, and Sutter Pacific Medical Foundation. The children’s hospital in New York and the Boston grow clinics receive the vast majority of Morgan Stanley’s health funding.
Grants for Food Systems
The Morgan Stanley Foundation’s nutrition and hunger focus area supports food banks across the United States through a partnership with Feeding America. The foundation’s efforts in this area seek “to help develop, launch and sustain critical child nutrition programs through child hunger grants while expanding access to fresh produce through produce grants.”
Past grantees include North Texas Food Bank, Gleaners Community Food Bank, Food Bank for Westchester, Utah Food Bank, and Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank. A more complete list of food banks that have received Morgan Stanley nutrition grants is available here.
Grants for K-12 and Higher Education
Morgan Stanley’s approach to education grantmaking is multifaceted. The foundation primarily supports higher education, although it does occasionally fund K-12 education programs. Until recently, its higher education support took the form of grants to big name universities like Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, Dartmouth, and MIT that support “career development through scholarships, fellowships and internships at both the undergraduate and graduate level.” However, in 2020. The foundation created the Morgan Stanley HBCU Scholars program, which was created to engage with and support Historically Black Colleges and Universities, specifically 60 scholarships for students at Howard University, Morehouse College, and Spelman College.
The foundation’s K-12 education support is less robust and makes grants to local and community education initiatives. Rarely does it fund schools directly, and instead supports grantees such as Living Classrooms Foundation, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that “disrupts the cycle of poverty […] through hands-on education, workforce development, health and wellness, and violence prevention programming,” and Working In the Schools, a nonprofit that promotes literacy and positive self-identity among K-12 students in Chicago.
Important Grant Details:
Morgan Stanley makes more than $25 million in grants per year, and typically range between $5,000 and $150,000, although occasionally some grants may reach into the millions.
The foundation does not accept applications or unsolicited proposals. It generally only funds programs that are national in scope. Its “support of local initiatives (serving only one metropolitan area or state) is restricted to those organizations for which […] employees are active and ongoing volunteers.” See more domestic grant guidelines, including a list of the types of organizations the foundation will not fund, here.
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