About

Earhart Foundation is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based charitable foundation with nearly $33.5 million in assets at the end of 2010. That year, the most recent for which financial information has been made available, it dispersed $4,800,219 in grants, largely to fund fellowships and research at universities and conservative think tanks. 

Since 1995, the earliest year for which grant information is available in our database, the foundation has given to (or supported fellowships at) prominent conservative groups, include the American Enterprise Institute ($968,800), the Atlas Economic Research Foundation ($3,730,988), Critical Review Foundation  ($761,500 ), Ethics and Public Policy Center ($1,024,500), Mackinac Center for Public Policy ($1,320,800), the Cato Institute ($610,625), the Institute for World Politics ($2,386,315) and the Property and Environment Research Center ($1,336,271). Since 2000, it’s also given $467,500 to DonorsTrust, a conservative donor-advised fund. 

The foundation has given tens of millions through its fellowship research grants (awards of up to $30,000) for students and faculty at colleges and universities around the country, including Boston University, Claremont Graduate University, Duke University, George Mason University, Georgetown University, Louisiana State University, Michigan State University, Princeton, and the University of Chicago. According to a 2004 profile of the foundation in Philanthropy, a publication of the Philanthropy Roundtable (which is funded by Earhart), the “foundation depends upon its network of academics and intellectuals, who serve as ‘talent scouts,’ to identify the most promising students” for its fellowships. Those fellowships generally go to “young scholars, usually graduate students or junior faculty, who are committed to the principles of a free society….” The foundation boasts that it has funded nine winners of the Noble prize in economics, including Friedrich Hayek, Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and George Stigler. 

The foundation was established in 1929 (making it one of the oldest conservative foundations) by industrialist Harry Boyd Earhart, president of White Star Refining Company. (The company was acquired in 1930 by Vacuum Oil Company, which is now part of ExxonMobil.)