The Ground Has Shifted. The Question Is What You Do Next.
Research and health funding is being reshaped in real time. In the US, roughly 2,600 NIH and NSF grants that were cancelled or suspended in 2025 have yet to be reinstated, representing $1.4 billion in lost funding. As public funding grows less predictable, researchers and health organizations are increasingly turning to philanthropy for stability. At Wellcome, the UK’s largest independent health research foundation, grant applications jumped from 2,700 to 4,300 in 2025.
This is evidence of a sector at an inflection point and health and research funders are uniquely positioned to meet it. They are responding by protecting critical work, thinking strategically, and building the partnerships that help grantees succeed.
Three practices gaining traction in health and research grantmaking
1. Getting ahead of the curve with anticipatory grantmaking
Traditional grant cycles are built for stable conditions: a defined application window, a review process, an award. That makes sense when the landscape is predictable, but it’s poorly suited to moments when needs are moving faster than funding cycles can track.
Anticipatory grantmaking starts from a different premise. Instead of waiting for needs to emerge through a formal application, funders invest in understanding where health and research are heading and position themselves accordingly.
- Building relationships before the application. The best anticipatory funders know their grantee landscape before anyone submits an application: which researchers are doing important early-stage work, which health organizations are building capacity that will matter in five years. Mat-Su Health Foundation in Alaska built that kind of relationship infrastructure deliberately, using their grants management system to track ongoing interactions with both prospective and existing grantees.
- Philanthropies that weave career programming and relationship-building into their funding strategies are better placed to support the next generation of health and research professionals before they’re at risk of leaving the field. The Osteo Science Foundation asks grantees to continue sharing updates when they secure follow-on funding linked to their original grant. According to Dr. Myron Tucker, Science and Education Liaison at the Osteo Science Foundation, researchers typically stay in touch well past the end of the grant period, providing the foundation with a window into the downstream impact of early-stage investments that would otherwise be invisible. This ongoing relationship is also how the foundation captures the career advancement outcomes that are central to its impact story.
- Investing in people, not just projects. Early-career researcher grants, public health workforce fellowships, and professional development funding help to build institutional depth that short-cycle project grants can’t. SickKids Foundation’s New Investigator Research Grants co-funded with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health provides a great example of this. These grants are designed specifically for early-career researchers, so they can establish a track record that opens doors to further opportunities.
2. Build the conditions for grantees to do their best work
Ask most grantees what gets in the way of their work and reporting burden is near the top of the list. There are overlapping deadlines, varying templates from each funder, restricted grants that don’t reflect how the work gets done, and these small strains add up.
The Center for Effective Philanthropy found that 42% of foundations gave more unrestricted grants in 2025 than in prior years and 28% issued more multi-year grants, a result of funders responding to what they’re hearing from the organizations they fund.
Health and research funders have a particular reason to lead on this. Longitudinal studies, community health programs, and research pipelines don’t fit neatly into annual grant cycles. Flexible, sustained funding is often what the work structurally requires.
- Longer grant horizons. GEO reports that 38% of philanthropic funding went to general operating support in 2025, up from around 20% for nearly two decades. Multi-year grants give grantees the runway to do the work that actually matters: longitudinal research, community health infrastructure, building teams that last.
- More general operating support. Moving away from restricted program grants toward unrestricted funding gives grantees the flexibility to put resources where they are most needed: staffing, organizational capacity, adapting to what’s actually happening on the ground. REACH Healthcare Foundation’s Rapid Equity Fund does exactly this: flexible, unrestricted support with eligibility updated based directly on what partners say they’re navigating.
- Lighter reporting paired with longer commitments. Some funders are trading detailed reporting requirements for multi-year grants, trusting grantees with the work while staying in relationship mode rather than in compliance mode. Geelong Community Foundation in Australia built this into their 2025–28 Strategic Plan, inviting long-term grant partners into two- or three-year grants and describing it simply: “when we invest in long-term relationships and provide flexible, multi-year support, we empower our partners to plan with confidence.”
3. Know who else is in the room
Health and research grantmaking is complex enough that no single funder has the full picture. The ones who invest in knowing what peers are doing, and where the gaps are, consistently make more impactful funding decisions.
Collective models allow donors to achieve scale and impact that would be difficult individually. The infrastructure for this already exists and is growing.
- Collaborative funds. Co-investing with peer funders lets health and research grantmakers pool due diligence, reach grantees they wouldn’t have found alone, and multiply their impact. A Philanthropy Together study found that grantees rank collaborative funds in the top 15% of all funders for impact on their fields, advancement of field knowledge, and contributions to public policy agendas. The Wallace Foundation’s approach is worth recognizing: multi-year grants averaging 2.8 years, built around interdisciplinary teams across program, research, and communications, explicitly designed to generate knowledge the whole field can use.
- Shared learning networks. Formal co-investment isn’t the only way to align. Convenings, peer exchanges, and joint landscape analyses help funders understand where their portfolios fit relative to everyone else’s. GIH and the APHA Public Health Funder Network do this for health grantmakers. The 2025 GIH Annual Conference was themed “Forging Partnerships for a Better Tomorrow” for a reason. In the UK, the Funders Collaborative Hub brings together hundreds of funders across issue areas. Similar networks are emerging for research funders too.
- Portfolio transparency. A surprising amount of misalignment in philanthropy is informational. Funders don’t know what their peers are funding, so they duplicate, they miss gaps, and they can’t find natural partners even when they’re working on the same problems. Making your portfolio legible to others is often where real coordination starts.
The opportunity is real
The expertise, relationships, and long-horizon perspectives that define health and research grantmaking are exactly what the moment calls for. Funders who lean into anticipatory practice, trust-based grantee relationships, and cross-sector alignment are not just keeping pace with change. They are shaping what comes next.
