Grants for Coat Drives: Who Actually Paid for One
Every October somebody in a nonprofit group asks the same question: does anyone have a list of donors for children's coats?
It's a fair question. A coat drive runs on cash as much as on donated coats. Somebody has to buy sizes nobody donates, pay for storage, and replace the boots that never come in. So we went looking for the foundations that actually paid for one.
What we counted
Private foundations file a tax return every year, Form 990-PF, and it lists every grant they made: who got it, how much, and often a one-line purpose. We took every 2024 return in our data and kept the grants where either the recipient's name or the purpose line mentions coats. We left out the false matches, like medical-school "white coat" ceremonies.
Here is what came back:
- 157 grants
- 133 foundations
- 34 states
- $1.23 million in total
- $2,000 for the typical (median) grant
Most of these are small. 99 of the 157 were under $5,000, and 43 were under $1,000. That's good news for a volunteer-run drive: these are the checks a local family foundation writes to people it knows, not national competitions with 40-page applications.
Most of the money didn't go to "coat" groups
If you search a grant database for "coats," you'll mostly find organizations with the word in their name: Coats for Kids, One Warm Coat, and similar. They're real, and they're in this count. 60 of the 157 grants went to them.
But 97 of the 157 grants went to groups with no "coat" anywhere in their name. The purpose line is the only place the word appears. They were:
- Schools and school foundations, buying coats for students who arrived without one.
- Churches and faith groups running a winter drive alongside a food pantry.
- Service clubs, like a Knights of Columbus chapter in Michigan that got $7,500 for its coat drive.
- General community charities, where coats were one line in a winter program.
Operation Warm, the national program that buys new coats for schoolchildren, got 18 of the grants, and its gifts ran larger: a median of $9,650.
If your coat drive lives inside a church, a school, or a club, this is the important part. The foundations that paid for drives like yours filed them under that church, school or club, so a name search for "coat" will never show them to you.
What this record cannot tell you
A tax return says who got money. It does not say:
- Whether the funder takes applications. Many small family foundations give only to groups they already know.
- Whether they'll give again. A one-year gift might be a one-time favor. Only 4 of the 133 foundations made more than one coat grant in 2024.
- Whether the count is complete. A drive whose return says "winter clothing" and never "coat" isn't in our 157. Treat it as a floor.
That research is still your job. The record just gives you the right names to research.
How to do this for your own drive
- Start from a group like yours, ideally a school, church or club in your area that runs a coat drive. Not from a keyword.
- Pull its funders from the filings. On GrantSnag that's a peer search; you can try it on the homepage without an account.
- Look close to home first. Your community foundation and the family foundations in your county are the likeliest to know your work.
- Read the purpose lines. A funder that wrote "coats for kids" next to a school's name has told you what it cares about.
- Ask early. Small foundations often decide in the fall. A drive that asks in December is asking after the money is spoken for.
There are grants for coat drives. Most of them just aren't filed under "coat."