Foundation Funding Reaches a Record €630 Million
In 2025, Finnish grant-making foundations provided a record €630 million in funding for research, the arts, and other activities benefiting society. Foundation funding is becoming an increasingly significant part of the funding landscape for research, culture, and civil society in Finland.
In 2025, Finnish grant-making foundations provided a record €630 million in funding for research, the arts, and other activities benefiting society. Foundation funding is becoming an increasingly significant part of the funding landscape for research, culture, and civil society in Finland.
The largest share of the funding, €341 million, went to research. Foundations play a particularly important role in medicine and health sciences, which received €106 million in funding. Research funding provided by foundations to universities in the field of medicine nearly tripled between 2010 and 2024.
The significance of foundation funding, however, cannot be measured in euros alone. It also gives researchers the opportunity to explore emerging phenomena and questions whose importance may only become apparent in the future.
The Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation is one of Finland’s largest private grant-making foundations. In 2025, it awarded a total of €38.4 million in grants. Of this amount, €32.5 million, or nearly 85 percent, went to research. Medical research projects received €15.5 million, while engineering and technology projects received €14.4 million.
Arts Funding Varies Significantly from Year to Year
In 2025, foundations awarded a total of €83 million to the arts, €16 million less than the previous year.
“A decline in a single year is not enough to conclude that this represents a lasting shift. Large-scale arts projects do not seek or receive funding every year,” says Hanna-Mari Peltomäki, Managing Director of the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation.
The Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation awarded more than €4 million to arts and culture last year.
Foundations provided a total of €206 million for other activities benefiting society. The Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation accounted for €1.8 million of this amount.[
Larger Projects with Longer Time Horizons
Foundations are continually exploring new ways to fulfill their missions and increase the impact of their funding. Alongside traditional grants, there is a growing emphasis on larger, longer-term projects, collaboration between foundations, and new forms of financing such as impact investing.
The Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation supports high-quality research and the arts by funding ambitious, innovative projects of significance to their respective fields over a sufficiently long time horizon. This is also reflected in the size of the grants awarded. In 2025, nearly one-third of the projects funded by the Foundation received multiyear funding of at least €1 million.
The record level of overall funding demonstrates the strong role foundations play in Finnish society. Foundations complement other sources of funding, but their particular value lies in their ability to support long-term initiatives and new openings whose results and impact may not become visible until years later.
Sources: Figures on total foundation funding: Association of Finnish Foundations, Foundation Support in Figures 2025. Figures concerning the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation: Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation Annual Report 2025.