BACKGROUND: The main goal of this master thesis is to explore Danish municipalities' practice for granting statutory financial support for voluntary social work. Financial support commonly referred to as §18-funds. This thesis is inspired by literature on financial support for NGOs that shows that demands from grantees shape the work of NGOs. In addition, this master thesis is inspired by a few smaller Danish studies that specifically focus on §18-funds. However, Danish knowledge of §18-funds is limited. This master thesis therefore contributes with new and much-needed knowledge on §18-funds. THEORY: In this thesis I use DiMaggio & Powell’s (1983) concepts of isomorphism, to understand a possible shaping of voluntary social work. A shaping that may arise due to the munic-ipalities' allocation practices. METHOD: In this thesis I have used two different data sources, and my method is therefore also divided into two. First data source is municipal documents describing allo-cation practices for §18-funds for 94 Danish municipalities. Which is almost all Danish municipalities since Denmark have 98 municipalities. In working with this data source, I have generated a dataset by doing a thematic coding of these municipal documents. Based on this dataset, I have conducted three cluster analyses that describe patterns in municipalities' allocation practices. Data source number two is overviews of municipalities' allocation of §18-funds. This data source has been diffi-cult to work with because the information is not available in all municipalities. Therefore, I have selected nine municipalities where this information is available. These nine municipalities have been selected to represent different geographical parts of Denmark and municipalities with low, medium, and high population sizes. Based on these nine municipalities, I have generated a dataset that make it possible to carry out analyses focusing on the amounts allocated. For this dataset, I have chosen to do linear regression, and have used allocated proportion of the applied amount for as dependent variable. RESULTS/ANALYSIS: In this thesis I find that the municipalities based on their written allo-cation practices can be categorized into three groups. These three groups are: restrictive, lenient, and standard. In addition, I find that the target group of the voluntary social work has a significant significance on the allocated proportion of the applied amount. I also find that the geographical location and population size of the municipality have a significant significance on the allocated pro-portion of the applied amount. Finally, I find that when municipalities allocate §18-funds and do not provide useful justification for the amount allocated, these applications receive a significantly higher proportion of their applied amount than those applications where the municipalities do provide a useful justification. DISCUSSION: This thesis has various limitations that I have discussed in the the-sis. However, a significant strength is that the first dataset is a close to 1:1 representation of Danish municipalities' written allocation practices. Since I have included almost all Danish municipalities. CONCLUSION/IMPLICATIONS: I have concluded that there are several different patterns in both municipalities' written and actual allocation practices. Based on this, I have made several recom-mendations to the municipalities, since they are the ones who manage §18-funds