GEOList Summary: Increasing Grants to Cover Cost of Living Expenses

The Gap Foundation is interested in learning whether any of your organizations cover cost of living increases through the grants that you make. While our grant term is typically one year, our strategy is to develop deep, long term partnerships with select organizations. As a result, most of our partners have been in our portfolio for many years, and unless they have performance issues (or we decide to make a strategic shift in our funding focus), we expect them to remain in our portfolio for the indefinite future. The grant increases we historically provide are based on performance and cover intentional programmatic growth or specific infrastructural enhancements, and always aligning with our strategy. For those of you who fund organizations over a period of multiple years, do you provide grant increases to account for inflation and increased cost of living? For programs that we wholly fund, we recognize the need to cover increased operational costs (e.g. public transportation fares increasing), but are curious as to how (or if) you might be factoring in other increases – like annual staff raises – into grant budgets.