NBA Foundation Reports $165 Million in Grants Over Six Years

The NBA Foundation says it has awarded $165 million to more than 300 nonprofit partners and served more than 1 million young people since 2020. Those figures are reported by the foundation; assessing long-term outcomes also requires independent measures such as program completion, job placement and earnings over time.

The Foundation's core focus has stayed consistent since its founding: workforce development and economic opportunity for under-resourced youth, with particular attention to organizations that are Black-controlled or deeply embedded in the communities they serve. Rather than simply writing checks, the Foundation asks applicant organizations to demonstrate measurable results, education outcomes, employment placement, or entrepreneurship growth among the young people they work with, before committing to what are often multi-year grant relationships.

Community programs during All-Star weekend

That grassroots emphasis was on full display when the league brought All-Star weekend to Los Angeles in February 2026. Beyond the on-court festivities, the NBA and its partners built five days of community-facing programming designed to reach more than 100,000 Los Angeles residents directly, an unusually large-scale commitment for a single event weekend.

The centerpiece was the Homecourt Hoops initiative, through which the LA Clippers distributed more than 5,600 free outdoor basketball hoops directly to families across the city. The Clippers have now refurbished more than 500 basketball courts across Southern California through their broader community efforts, addressing a genuine access gap: in the region, fewer than 35% of young kids play sports regularly, a decline of nearly 10 percentage points over the past decade, with almost 40% of families reporting they don't have a safe, walkable place nearby for their child to play at all.

Investment in facilities and programs

The All-Star programming went beyond distributing equipment. On February 12, the NBA, the National Basketball Players Association, the LA Clippers, State Farm, and the nonprofit Heart of America unveiled a full renovation of the Weingart YMCA Wellness & Aquatic Center, updating its STEAM lab, teen center, and basketball court as part of a broader legacy project timed to coincide with the YMCA's 175th anniversary in the United States. More than 1,000 local youth also participated in Jr. NBA and Jr. WNBA clinics that weekend, including sessions built around a curriculum developed through the Luka Dončić Foundation.

The league paired its youth programming with an economic development angle as well. The NBA Foundation hosted a pitch competition featuring seven Los Angeles-based entrepreneurs competing for $200,000 in total prize money, judged by celebrity panelists and backed by corporate partners including Comcast NBCUniversal, KKR, and American Express, an attempt to extend the Foundation's economic mobility mission beyond youth sports and into small business development in the same communities.

Programs beyond All-Star weekend

This kind of investment isn't confined to marquee events. Individual players have built their own grassroots efforts alongside league-wide programming; Miami Heat center Bam Adebayo, a finalist for this year's NBA Social Justice Champion award, invested more than $563,000 through his own foundation into 18 separate initiatives this season, funding school supplies, transportation for thousands of students, and youth development programs including his own basketball camp across South Florida and North Carolina.

Nationally, the USA Basketball Foundation has been running its own parallel push, expanding youth development clinics with an explicit focus on reaching kids in diverse and underserved communities across the country, part of a broader landscape of NBA-affiliated and independent organizations, including the Jr. NBA Program and various team foundations, all working the same basic thesis: that widening access to coaching, facilities, and mentorship at the grassroots level is what ultimately builds a deeper, more diverse talent pipeline feeding the sport for the next generation.