Scottish foundations: who are they and what do they do?

Accurate identification and classification of foundations - charities whose primary economic activity is grantmaking - is essential for understanding and evaluating their philanthropic activities, contributions, and impact. In the absence of a legal foundation form, however, and with diverse national legal contexts, trying to do so in relation to UK foundations presents major conceptual and practical challenges (Jung, 2018). While various attempts have been made to map the grantmaking activities of UK foundations, these tend to focus on the English context, are London-centric, (Walker, 2022). , and sidestep calls for more meaningful, and critically reflective, differentiation of foundation types (Jung et al. 2018). This study addresses this gap.

Using regulatory data from the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR, n.d.) and charity annual accounts from Scotland the study first of all identifies and maps the characteristics of grantmaking charities in Scotland, including the value of their underlying asset base, the share of income derived from investments and from fundraising, and the value of their disbursements. Comparing and interrogating these findings against Jung et al.’s (2018) foundation typology and insights on its application (Bader et al. 2025), the paper tests their proposed categories for meaningfulness. By describing granting patterns in a jurisdiction without differentiated regulation and without disbursement quotas or minimum payout requirements, these results also contribute to academic and policy debates about whether disbursement quotas induce foundations to spend more or are treated as a maximum or target level of granting by foundations (Calabrese & Ely, 2022).