The SAFSF Network Update call held on August 17, 2022 allowed us to share data points from across our member network.
We compared data from new and renewing members across a 6-year period, which shows that our members’ funding has grown by 69% since 2017. In 2022, our 102 members collectively project making grants and investments of more than $221,317,000 to food systems and sustainable agriculture-related work. We were pleased to learn that 40% of members anticipate giving $1 million or more in 2022, compared to only 28% in 2017. Members represent many types of funding organizations. Private foundations make up 2/3 of our membership and are responsible for getting 3/4 of the money out the door.
Today, our members fund in all 50 states; when we first started collecting this data there were many states not receiving any funding from our members. Nevada and Utah are the states with the fewest funders with 7 each. Additionally, 29 members fund at the Tribal level, and 23 members fund internationally.
The data we include in the Network Update looks at the percentage of members across the board that are funding the 6 top levels of our areas of impact taxonomy – agricultural products, environmental sustainability, farms and farming systems, health, justice, and markets. Funding across these categories has been increasing, and our full slide deck dives deeper to examine the trends within each category.
For the first time this year we reported on the voluntary demographic data we asked about our members’ organizations and their grantees. This year was only our second year collecting this data and we are pleased that 86% of members did submit this data. Going forward, our goal is to have 100% of members provide this data to help us better report on demographic and equity trends in the future.
In the Network Update conversation, we also touched on our collaboration and work with Network Impact to improve our data collection and evaluation, and our hopes to collaborate with Candid to share and pull additional data about our network.
We appreciate our members’ participation and data sharing. What we can extract and report out on is only as good as the data members submit. We encourage every SAFSF member to view the recording of the August 17, 2022 Network Update call and to check out the slide deck with the full data set. These resources are available by logging into the SAFSF website and clicking on Member Portal at the top of the page, to the left of the Login/Logout button. We welcome feedback from our members!