Asset Size

One often reports on the importance of the foundation sector in terms of its assets. It is rather a good element to better understand the specificity of the foundation community within the wider third sector, and to get a better idea of their scope.

In the 15 EU countries surveyed, a sample of 55.552 foundations were found to have combined assets totalling some €174bn - an average of €4m per foundation. This data can conceal a different picture in countries which have a high concentration of assets. The survey has compiled assets on the basis of their book-value and not their market-value. The latter would of course be significantly higher. 

Top 50 by assets

The top 50 foundations across 13 countries (Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, and The UK) represent a pool of assets of €88bn, which accounts for 37% of the total assets of foundations in these countries.

The foundations' assets of the top 50 are concentrated in 7 countries, the largest share of which is found in Italy and The United Kingdom. 

Expenditure Size

Foundations use their resources to give grants, in some cases to offer loans or guaranties and to operate their own programmes.

In 14 EU countries, some 58.600 foundations surveyed reported total expenditure of €46bn, an average of €1m per foundation. German public-benefit foundations show the highest total expenditure, but British average expenditure per foundation is the highest. Foundations from 8 of the 14 EU Member States surveyed spend an average sum higher than the average
in the 14 countries.

 Employment and volunteering

The foundation sector plays an important role in the labour market for both salaried and voluntary workers. Not only do they act directly as employers themselves, but by funding organisations and individuals in the non-profit sector they indirectly support employment and voluntary engagement in their areas of interest.

In ten EU countries (Belgium, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain), some 34,400 foundations employ a total of 311,600 staff, which makes an average of nine employees per foundation. Although Italian foundations employ the highest absolute number of workers, 106,137 staff in 4,053 foundations (an average of 26 employees per body), in both France and Spain the average number of employees per foundation is considerably higher (45 and 41 employees per foundation).

Volunteering remains an important feature of the foundation sector. The 31,800 foundations sampled in seven EU countries (Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Spain), have 231,600 volunteers, an average of seven volunteers each. Spain has the highest average number of volunteers, closely followed by Belgium, with respectively 46 and 45 volunteers per foundation. By contrast, Hungary and Germany have an average of four volunteers per foundation, and the Finnish average is seven. The Netherlands is a special case as 400 fund-raising foundations in 2002 used 917,391 volunteers, two-thirds of whom carried out door-to-door collections.

Foundations in Belgium, Hungary and Spain have a higher number of volunteers than employees. Though the average number of employees per foundation in the seven ‘old’ Member States is 28, the new EU countries have a strong statistical impact. Hungary, for instance, has an average of one employee and four volunteers per foundation.