HIV/AIDS funding from private foundations

A mid-1990’s decline
As FCAA research and other data indicated, by the mid-1990’s, HIV/AIDS funding from
private foundations and corporate foundations and giving programs began to decline
somewhat, though the parameters of the actual decline are sketchy.34 As an example of
this decline, the Foundation Center reported decreases in HIV/AIDS grantmaking for
several years after 1994.35 36 Though FCAA data for the same period differs from these
figures, due to many of the research methodology limitations noted in the introduction
to this report, it too supports the fact that HIV/AIDS grantmaking was, at best, volatile in
the mid-1990’s and suffered some declines.37
The reasons for this decline were varied and hard to assess. Many AIDS grantmaking
initiatives begun in 1987-1988, were substantially funded for five years, but were not
renewed at the same levels38. During the 1990s, some large foundations that had
previously shown support for HIV/AIDS initiatives also started to curtail HIV/AIDS
funding to shift resources toward other emerging social issues. In some cases, the
decline in philanthropic AIDS funding could be attributed to the growing government
role in funding health care and support services for people with AIDS. In other cases, it
appears that traditional “donor fatigue” on an issue set in. It is also safe to say that
several early HIV/AIDS funders had not considered the disease a long-term issue, but
rather only a short-term, emergency funding priority.
Other grantmakers subsumed and integrated HIV/AIDS grantmaking under "special
needs populations" or other broader funding categories, which either led to a real
decline in grant dollars for AIDS or made the AIDS dollars harder to identify and track.
Finally, in some cases, the drop in explicit foundation support came as foundations
shifted HIV/AIDS funding into funding of related issues of health care access, broader
health promotion, social and economic inequality, and other aspects of health policy,
education, and services.
Attention to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic
As noted earlier, funding for global AIDS issues was very slow in developing.
International AIDS funding has recently gained new attention in the United States.
Globally, HIV infection rates are rising substantially, particularly in resource poor
developing nations. More than 98% of people with HIV live outside the United States,