What Six Foundations' Filings Show About Gun-Policy Funding

Most writing about who funds gun research is assertion. Somebody names a foundation, somebody else denies the implication, and neither side shows a number. This article is narrower: it reports a six-funder sample selected for this review, not a complete census of gun-policy funding.

The numbers are public. Private foundations file Form 990-PF, and Part XV of that return lists every grant paid — recipient, address, stated purpose, amount. So we read them: 17,570 individual grants worth $5.69 billion, from six selected foundations, for tax years 2021 through 2023, taken from the filings themselves rather than from anyone’s summary. The six-funder boundary is a limitation, not a claim that these are the only important funders.

Here is what is actually in them.

One foundation does most of it

Foundation	FY2021	FY2022	FY2023
Joyce Foundation	$8.02M (49)	$7.88M (55)	$7.50M (64)
California Wellness	$3.10M (13)	$2.91M (15)	$3.60M (17)
Robert Wood Johnson	$32K (3)	$7.00M (13)	$1.24M (4)
Kendeda Fund	$940K (8)	$855K (8)	$570K (4)
Heising-Simons	$261K (3)	—	$75K (1)
Bloomberg Family Foundation	—	—	—

The Joyce counts above are every grant whose filed purpose field is exactly the program label Gun Violence Prevention & Justice Reform — reproduced here character for character, because the IRS extract stores the ampersand as the unescaped HTML entity & rather than as &. Matching the label as it reads on the page returns nothing at all, which is the sort of detail that makes a published figure impossible to check unless the rule is stated precisely.

That rule yields 49 grants/$8,016,783 in FY2021, 55/$7,880,126 in FY2022, and 64/$7,500,000 in FY2023 — 168 grants totalling $23,396,909. Filings are matched by tax period (202112, 202212, 202312), not by the year the return was filed; Joyce’s FY2022 grants appear in a return filed in 2023. The rule is deliberately mechanical: it includes some criminal-justice grants and should not be read as a perfect gun-research classifier.

Every figure in that paragraph is checkable. scripts/verify-990-figures.mjs in our repository applies the rule to the filings and fails loudly if any published number stops matching, so a reader does not have to take the arithmetic on trust — which is the standard we hold other people’s funding claims to.

The Joyce Foundation granted about $23.4 million in grants matching the gun-program label across the three years, more than the other five combined in this sample. It is the constant: roughly $8 million every year, through a foundation holding $1.24 billion in assets.

The shape of that money is changing. In FY2021 Joyce made 49 gun-program grants averaging about $164,000. By FY2023 it made 64 averaging about $117,000 — more recipients, smaller checks.

The same money reaches the study, the advocate, and the ad

The interesting part is not the total. It is what a single year’s grants touch.

From Joyce’s FY2023 return, all figures exact:

Universities — $2.43 million across 19 grants. Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions received $275,000. Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences, $271,535. Northwestern University, $253,386. The University of Illinois, $215,640. The University of Michigan, $195,075.

Legal advocacy — $305,000. The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence received $200,000, $75,000 and $30,000 across three FY2023 grants matching the same program label. Giffords litigates, lobbies, and publishes legal analysis that cites academic research.

Messaging — $200,000 to the Advertising Council, plus $350,000 to Project Unloaded through the New Venture Fund, a campaign aimed at changing how young people think about guns.

Advocacy and community programs — $4.47 million across 40 grants, including the Violence Policy Center ($200,000), CeaseFire Pennsylvania ($200,000) and WAVE Educational Fund ($250,000).

Read those together and an overlapping portfolio is plain. One funder paid researchers, a legal-advocacy organization, and a public-messaging campaign in the same filing year. That is a documented grantmaking pattern, not proof that the recipients coordinated their work or that one grant directed another.

It is worth being exact about what that does and does not show. It shows funding overlap across research, advocacy, and messaging. It does not show that any researcher changed a result, and we are not suggesting one did. Anyone who wants to argue a particular study is wrong has to argue it on the study’s own data.

The finding that cuts the other way

If you went looking for Michael Bloomberg in these filings, you would not find him.

The Bloomberg Family Foundation reported no gun-related grants in any of the three years — zero, against $3.05 billion of total grantmaking over the period.

That is not evidence he does not fund gun policy. He plainly does. It is evidence about the limits of this method: his money moves through Everytown for Gun Safety and through personal giving, and neither shows up in a private foundation’s return.

We are publishing that because it is what the filings say. A survey of funding that only ever confirms what its authors expected is not a survey, and anyone who checks our work will find this result sitting in it.

What these filings cannot tell you

Three limits, stated plainly, because each of them is a fair objection.

Programme labels are broader than they look. Joyce files its gun grants under a combined “Gun Violence Prevention & Justice Reform” programme, which also covers criminal-justice work — Prison Fellowship Ministries received $225,000 inside that $7.5 million. The programme total is a programme total. It is not $7.5 million of gun-policy money, and we will not present it as such.

Only private foundations file this form. Everytown, Giffords and the Brady Center file ordinary 990s, which disclose what an organisation spends but not who gave it the money. A great deal of funding is therefore invisible to this method by design.

Federal money is a separate and larger stream. CDC and NIH research funding does not appear in any foundation return and is not counted here.

The sample must be reproducible. Before this draft is published, the site should expose a row-level snapshot of the included grants, filing identifiers, source URLs, and the programme-label rule used above. Without that companion data, the totals are reported findings but not independently auditable.

One more thread worth pulling

The California Wellness Foundation granted $300,000 to Trace Media Inc in FY2023 — The Trace, a newsroom that covers guns — for “core operating support to sustain local reporting and better public understanding of gun violence reduction efforts in California,” in the filing’s own words.

Philanthropically funded journalism is now ordinary, and the grant is disclosed exactly as it should be. But a reader deciding how much weight to give a Trace story is entitled to know that a foundation with a stated position on gun violence pays for the reporting. That is a fact about provenance, not a claim about any particular article.

Check us

Every figure here comes from a filing you can read. The IRS publishes 990s as machine-readable XML; ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer wraps them in a search box. Look up an EIN, open Part XV, and the grant list is right there.

We would rather you verified it than believed us. That is the whole difference between reporting the money and insinuating about it.