Grants for Toy Drives: Who Actually Paid for One
Every November somebody in a nonprofit group asks it: does anyone know a foundation that funds a Christmas toy drive?
It's a better question than it sounds. A toy drive runs on cash as much as on donated toys. Somebody buys the gifts for teenagers that nobody donates, pays for the storage unit, and covers the batteries. 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 whose purpose line mentions toys, a toy drive, Toys for Tots or Angel Tree. We left out the false matches, like enrichment toys for an animal shelter, and gift cards handed to individual families.
Here is what came back:
- 191 grants
- 171 foundations
- 37 states
- $1.6 million in total
- $2,500 for the typical (median) grant
Most of these are small. 119 of the 191 were under $5,000, and 47 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 "toy" groups
Search a grant database for "toys" and you'll mostly find organizations with the word in their name. Toys for Tots is the big one, and it's in this count: 70 of the 191 grants went to a Toys for Tots chapter or to the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation, with a typical gift of about $1,700.
But 106 of the 191 grants went to groups with no toy, gift, Christmas, Santa or holiday word anywhere in their name. The purpose line is the only place the drive appears. They were:
- Churches and ministries running a Christmas outreach next to a food pantry, like a church in Texas whose grant covered a youth camp, Angel Tree and Thanksgiving baskets in one line.
- Salvation Army units, often for Angel Tree.
- Schools, including a Virginia school that got $1,500 for its own Angel Tree.
- Police athletic leagues and service groups that collect and hand out toys every December.
- General community charities, where the toy drive is one line in a winter program.
If your toy drive lives inside a church, a school or a club, this is the part that matters. The foundations that paid for drives like yours filed them under that church, school or club, so a name search for "toys" 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. Only 13 of the 171 foundations made more than one toy grant in 2024. Most gave once.
- Whether the count is complete. A drive whose return says "holiday assistance" and never "toys" isn't in our 191, and neither is a gift to a group whose name we couldn't tell from a person's. 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 church, school or club in your area that runs a toy 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 "Christmas toy drive" next to a church's name has told you what it cares about.
- Ask now. It's November. Small foundations often decide in the fall, and a drive that asks in mid-December is asking after the money is spoken for.
There are grants for toy drives. Most of them just aren't filed under "toys."