GRANT GRAPH · the independent grant data index

Who funds literacy programs? Grant data from tax filings and live federal listings

Name: literacy grant funding data (Grant Graph)
Creator: Grant Graph
License: public domain sources; compilation freely citable with attribution

From 2025-2026 IRS filings: 7,564 grants totaling $259.5 million went to literacy programs-related work. The largest funders, the typical grant size, and what is open at the federal level right now, all from public records.

The largest private funders of literacy programs, from their own tax filings

Funder	Grants	Total
THE PATRICK J MCGOVERN FOUNDATION INC	19	$11.5 million
DOLLAR GENERAL LITERACY FOUNDATION	605	$9.5 million
THE STEINMAN FOUNDATION	6	$8.5 million
AMERICAN ONLINE GIVING FOUNDATION INC	206	$6.6 million
THE WILLIAM PENN FOUNDATION	33	$6.6 million
THE SHERWOOD FOUNDATION	3	$5.7 million
THE HAROLD GRINSPOON FOUNDATION	1	$4.2 million
MCCUNE FOUNDATION PNC BANK NA	1	$4.0 million
THE ESTHER A & JOSEPH KLINGENSTEIN FUND INC	20	$3.7 million
THE ROTARY FOUNDATION OF ROTARY	43	$3.5 million

Across all funders: 7,564 grants, $259.5 million total, median grant $8,000.

Where the money went

State	Grants	Total
NY	550	$31.4 million
PA	379	$25.6 million
CA	510	$24.1 million
TX	546	$20.8 million
NC	409	$12.9 million
FL	427	$10.1 million

Open federal opportunities addressing literacy programs (nonprofit-eligible)

Matched against the full synopsis text of every posted opportunity, not the listing title alone; restricted to opportunities open to nonprofit applicants. Federal programs rarely use the phrase "literacy"; this table also matches the agency vocabulary: literacy, adult education, reading.

Number	Title	Agency	Award range	Closes
PAS-JAKARTA-FY26-11	Media Literacy and Capacity Building Workshop Series	Yenny Wijaya Grantor	$200,000 to $250,000	09/02/2026
PA-FPH-27-001	Title X Family Planning Services Grants	Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health	$200,000 to $22.0 million	01/11/2027
23-520	Training-based Workforce Development for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure	U.S. National Science Foundation	unspecified to $1.0 million	01/21/2027
HHS-2026-ACL-AOD-DFLA-0025	Expanding Financial Literacy and Empowerment: Increasing Awareness and Use of AB	Administration for Community Living	$1.0 million to $1.2 million	08/03/2026
PD-SEOUL-FY26-04	Young Trilateral Leaders (YTL) Summit	Kyung Hee KANG Seoul PD Grants Team	$200,000 to $250,000	08/05/2026
LBN-PDS-2026-NOFO	Notice of Funding Opportunity 2026 – Lebanon	Riad N Yazbeck Grantor	$100,000 to $250,000	08/07/2026
PAS-JAKARTA-FY26-06	Voices for the Future	Yenny Wijaya Grantor	$50,000 to $150,000	08/07/2026
PDS-CAIRO-004-FY26	Mentor Program for English Educators	Sally Wissa Grantor	$100,000 to $150,000	08/09/2026

grants.gov's own loose keyword search returns 28 listings mentioning "literacy programs" anywhere (retrieved 2026-11-01); the table above is our stricter relevance cut.

What these numbers do not say

Private-funder figures come from 990 and 990-PF filings as released by the IRS; filings lag reality by one to two years, and organizations below the e-file thresholds are not represented.
A funder appearing here funded this cause historically. It is not a statement that they are accepting applications.
Filings include corrections: voided checks, returned grants and corpus-distribution adjustments appear as negative amounts and are counted as filed. They are a fraction of a percent of the total.
Cause matching is keyword-based against grant purpose text and recipient names; it undercounts grants described in other words.

Grant Graph is an independent, free index built from public data: IRS Form 990 series e-file releases and the grants.gov API. It is not affiliated with grants.gov or any federal agency. Every figure above is reproducible from the cited public sources.