Lilly Endowment's line: the largest foundation grants in the record

2013–2025 — the Notre Dame grants; 2001 and 2020 — the Community Foundation grants

To Notre Dame: Lilly Endowment Inc., the Indianapolis foundation the Lilly family created in 1937, is the largest institutional giver in this record after the Walsh family. On 19 December 2025 the university announced a grant of 50.8 million dollars from the Endowment for the DELTA Network, a faith-based framework for the ethics of artificial intelligence — the largest grant the Endowment has ever awarded to Notre Dame, and the largest any private foundation has made to the university, on the university's account of it. Before it came a grant of 42,431,066 dollars, announced 26 April 2019, to form the Labs for Industry Futures and Transformation (LIFT) Network — a five-year regional grant, the university as grantee, working with the South Bend–Elkhart Regional Partnership across the region, and printed in the table with that regional scope stated. In June 2022 the Endowment granted 35 million dollars toward the university's interdisciplinary research building for environmental and public health work in north-central Indiana. At the other end of the scale, in December 2013 it gave 3 million dollars to the university in support of the Alliance for Catholic Education's work with Catholic schools — the gift the Nonprofits leg credits with converting an experiment into an institution.

To the Community Foundation: The Endowment's giving to the city's own institutions runs through the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County. The foundation's own account records that in 2001 it received 5 million dollars from Lilly Endowment to improve education in the county — the grant that seeded the Early Years Count early-childhood initiative. A 2004 Tribune account of the same program dates the 5 million to 1999; the discrepancy stands in the record, and the table carries the foundation's own 2001. In December 2020 the foundation announced a further Endowment grant of 4,066,025 dollars — a Large-Scale Community Leadership Grant under the seventh phase of the Endowment's Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow (GIFT VII) initiative — for its 21st Century Scholar Success Initiative, on top of a 200,000 dollar GIFT VII leadership grant received that September. The Endowment's role in this county is structural: it capitalized the community foundation's two largest programs, and its grants are the largest documented gifts to the foundation in this record.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame news releases (19 December 2025; 26 April 2019; 7 June 2022) — the DELTA, LIFT and research-building grants; Lilly Endowment Annual Report 2019 — the LIFT grant at 42,431,066 dollars, grantee the University of Notre Dame.
2. Community Foundation of St. Joseph County — its Early Years Count account (the 5 million dollar grant, dated 2001) and its GIFT VII announcement (4 December 2020); South Bend Tribune (2004) — the same 5 million dated to 1999.
3. The Nonprofits leg of this history — the December 2013 Alliance for Catholic Education grant of 3 million dollars.