Why are some grants listed separately on the IRS 990 Grantee Schedule?

Schedule I of the 990 has column H labeled as "Purpose of Grant or Assistance: required for each grant."  

The official IRS directions state:

• Describe the purpose or ultimate use of the grant funds.
• Do not use general terms such as charitable, educational, religious, or scientific.
• Use more specific descriptions such as general support, payments for nursing services, or laboratory construction.
• Enter the type of assistance, such as medical, mental, or free care for indigent hospital patients.
• In the case of disaster assistance, include a description of the disaster and the assistance provided (for example, "Food, shelter, and clothing for Organization A's assistance to Hurricane Katrina disaster victims"). Use Part IV if additional space is needed for descriptions.  

In the past Foundations were using the description from the Program Area field as the value for this. Several years ago the IRS changed their instructions to the ones listed here and the Program Name field became more appropriate. The choice was made to not combine grants, but to detail each one.

This does mean that there might be cases where you have more lines than necessary for the final Schedule I.   However, we have provided you with an export that contains all of the data in the displayed report plus some additional fields.   You can use this data to sort and combine the data any way you desire.   The resulting spreadsheet can be used as the data source for a catalog or directory style merge document if you want to present it in a similar way as Schedule I.