The 10-Year Grant: Why Cummings Foundation's $30 Million Bet Is a Template for Post-Federal Philanthropy

Most foundation grants come with a planning horizon shorter than the campaigns they fund. A one-year grant cycle is the norm. A three-year commitment is praised as patient capital. A five-year unrestricted operating award — Ford's much-discussed model — counts as bold. Against that backdrop, the Cummings Foundation has been quietly running an experiment for years that almost nobody outside Massachusetts has noticed.

In 2026, the Woburn-based foundation will distribute $30 million among 150 local nonprofits. One hundred twenty-five of those grants will be paid out as multi-year awards over three years. Twenty-five will be paid out over ten. The 10-year track — restricted to prior Cummings grantees meeting specific criteria — is, in raw duration, almost unique in U.S. private philanthropy at scale. Most national foundations would consider a 10-year grant a one-off legacy gift to an anchor institution, not a recurring annual cohort. Cummings does it every year.

The model deserves scrutiny precisely now. The federal funding environment that nonprofits have spent two generations adapting to has reset. Roughly $400 million in AmeriCorps grants was terminated in 2025. Justice Department funding rescissions hit $500 million. One-third of U.S. nonprofits experienced some form of federal funding disruption in the first half of 2025, with 21 percent reporting outright losses and 27 percent reporting delays or freezes. Foundation application volumes have surged: 82 percent of nonprofits now name private and corporate grants as their primary adaptation strategy, and two-thirds report submitting more applications than before the federal pullback began.

Foundations are responding in opposite directions. Some — 30 percent in recent surveys — have increased payouts beyond planned levels. Others have closed application cycles, moved to invite-only models, or capped review volumes. Average grant duration across the sector remains stubbornly short. Cummings is going the other way: doubling down on the longest-tail, lowest-friction grant structure that exists at meaningful scale.

What the program actually offers

The structure is more interesting than the headline figure. The $30 million is fully committed before the 2026 grant year begins, distributed across 150 nonprofits, with annual installments ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 in round numbers. The three-year cohort receives 125 awards. The 10-year cohort receives 25 awards, all of them going to prior Cummings grantees that meet additional criteria the foundation defines.

The application architecture is segmented by request size. For organizations seeking annual installments under $25,000, Cummings uses a short-form application. There is no required budget submission. The grant is automatically structured as general operating support — the most flexible and most valuable category of foundation funding, because it can be applied wherever organizational need is greatest. For requests above $25,000 annually, a comprehensive application is required with a project budget, and the funding can support any initiative type the applicant proposes.

Priority areas are human services, fairness and justice, education, healthcare, and environmental initiatives. The program explicitly excludes arts, athletics, animal welfare, and land preservation. Grants cannot support religious endeavors, endowments, medical research, political organizations, or any entity without 501(c)(3) status.

The timeline runs across an unusually long calendar. The letter of inquiry opens July 15. The LOI deadline is September 17 at 5 p.m. Invitations to submit full applications are sent the week of November 3. Full applications are due January 14 at 5 p.m. Winners are announced June 1, with a grant winner celebration on June 25. From first contact to first dollar, the process spans roughly eleven months — long by foundation standards, but not unusual for a program at this scale.

Geographic eligibility is the binding constraint. Organizations must be headquartered and provide the majority of their services in Essex, Middlesex, and Suffolk Counties or in six specific Norfolk County communities — Brookline, Dedham, Milton, Needham, Quincy, and Wellesley. Special consideration goes to nonprofits in the 11 communities where Cummings operates commercial properties, which include several of the same towns plus a handful of other Boston-area locations.

This is, by design, not a national program. It is a place-based commitment with a level of concentration that lets the foundation operate at a depth most national funders cannot match.

Why ten years matters

The 10-year cohort is small by count — 25 awards out of 150 — but it represents the most significant design choice in the program. To understand why, consider what happens inside a nonprofit when a grant horizon extends past the typical three- to five-year planning cycle.

A three-year grant funds a project. A 10-year grant funds an organizational position. With ten years of predictable annual revenue at a meaningful scale, a nonprofit can hire a senior program staff member with full confidence in salary stability through the decade. It can sign a real estate lease. It can structure debt against the revenue stream. It can commit to multi-year partnerships with school districts, hospitals, and municipalities that themselves operate on long planning horizons. In short: a 10-year grant changes the kind of work a nonprofit is capable of doing, not just the volume.

This is what most foundation discussions miss when they debate grant duration. A foundation that wants its grantees to do work the federal government once did — long-term, infrastructure-scale, deeply embedded in community systems — has to fund those grantees on horizons that match. Ford's 5-year unrestricted shift was a step in that direction. Cummings has been operating two doors further down the hallway for years.

The constraint is that prior grantees only qualify. The foundation has been running multi-year cycles long enough to have built up a base of trusted relationships, with operating data spanning multiple grant periods. The 10-year track effectively functions as a graduation: organizations that have demonstrated execution discipline across an initial three-year cycle become eligible for renewal at a much longer tail. This is rare patience, and it is bought with rare relationship continuity.

What other funders can learn from this model

The Cummings model is not directly replicable for most foundations. Its enabling conditions are specific: a single-funder origin — real estate developer Bill Cummings, who signed the Giving Pledge in 2011 — combined with a dense geographic footprint of commercial property holdings that gives the foundation institutional ties to the same communities it grants in. National funders without that anchor cannot copy the place-based intensity that makes the 10-year track sustainable.

But several design choices generalize. The first is the general operating support default for sub-$25K requests. Most foundations require budgets and project narratives regardless of request size, then complain that the resulting grants are too restricted to support grantee health. Cummings has reversed the burden: small requests get flexible funding without paperwork, and only larger requests trigger the diligence cycle. That single design choice would, applied across the sector, transfer billions of dollars of operating capacity to grassroots organizations annually.

The second generalizable choice is the segmentation between three-year cohorts and 10-year graduation cohorts. Foundations can adopt this structure regardless of geographic scope: most grantees on standard multi-year cycles, with a smaller renewal track for proven partners at substantially longer tails. The bookkeeping is more complex than a single annual grant cycle, but the relational discipline is what creates the value.

The third is the calendar. By running LOIs in mid-summer, invitations in early fall, and full applications in mid-January, Cummings deliberately avoids the year-end rush that dominates most foundation calendars. Grantees are not assembling proposals during the same weeks they are running holiday fundraising appeals or closing fiscal years. This is an underappreciated form of grantee respect, and it costs the foundation nothing.

For applicants and aspiring applicants

If you run a nonprofit headquartered in eastern Massachusetts and you are not already on the Cummings list, the practical question is whether the July 15 LOI opening makes sense for your organization in 2026. The honest answer for most newcomers is to plan for a 3-year cohort entry, not the 10-year track. Building toward 10-year eligibility requires a clean track record across an initial three-year cycle — financial reporting discipline, programmatic outcomes documentation, and relationship continuity with the foundation's program officers.

The leverage point for most applicants is the short-form pathway under $25,000 annual installments. A request structured at $24,000 per year — $72,000 across three years — produces general operating support, requires no budget submission, and competes in a different pool than the larger comprehensive applications. For an early-stage nonprofit, that is a higher-yield strategy than stretching for a $50,000 annual request that triggers full project documentation.

If you are outside the geographic eligibility, the more durable question is whether your regional funder community has anyone running a model like this. The answer is almost always no. Pushing your local community foundation, family foundation network, or regional grantmaker association to study the Cummings program — and to consider analogues — is one of the more concrete advocacy actions a nonprofit executive director can take in 2026. The federal vacuum is not closing on its own. Place-based philanthropy with patient horizons is one of the few credible answers, and the design playbook exists. It is just not yet widely copied.

The Cummings calendar is the first signal of the year. Watch what happens when other regional foundations look at the survey data — federal funding lost, application volume up, grantee burnout rising — and decide whether to compress their cycles further or to commit to longer tails. The next generation of patient capital in U.S. philanthropy will likely come from the second group.