As philanthropic foundations take on increasingly prominent sociopolitical roles, the need for stronger conceptualizations of foundations as an organizational form is articulated widely across academic, policy, and practice contexts. Building on institutional research’s tradition of categorizing, classifying and typologizing organizational forms, our article critically explores the different ways in which foundations have been cast and differentiated in international academic and practice literatures. Examining and integrating these, we propose an integrative framework of foundation types. Incorporating 13 categories—three contextual, five organizational, and five strategic ones—the framework allows for clarifying distinctions and identifying commonalities between different foundation forms, offering a basis for developing more reflective and differentiated research and practice knowledge.

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Recent policy emphases in the United Kingdom (UK) show growing attention to localism interconnected with philanthropy. This appears to offer significant opportunities for community foundations -geographically embedded multi-purpose charities envisaged as combining various grant-making roles with community leadership. Using a theoretical framework derived from political geography, we explore and conceptualise how community foundations conceive and operationalise their community leadership role across the UK's localism discourses; we find their strategies and approaches to be differentiated rather than shared. This challenges the understanding of 'community foundations' as a single model in its UK expression and questions their envisaged potential as collective pan-UK lead-players within localism policy.

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