· Public charity
Aats Foundation
Support cardiothoracic surgeons in research and education.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 23 grants below total $807,709 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $1,909,266 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $1,101,557 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k4 grants · $34k
- $10k–50k8 grants · $179k
- $50k–250k11 grants · $595k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| STANFORD UNIVERSITY | $80,000 |
| AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THORACIC SURGERY | $65,000 |
| CITY OF HOPE | $50,000 |
| JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY | $50,000 |
| WEILL MEDICAL COLLEGE OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY | $50,000 |
| TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | $50,000 |
| WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY | $50,000 |
| CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL OF WISCONSIN | $50,000 |
| MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL - RESEARCH | $50,000 |
| BOSTON CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL | $50,000 |
| JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY | $50,000 |
| ALBERT EINSTEIN COLLEGE OF MEDICINE | $40,000 |
| DUKE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL | $40,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA | $40,000 |
| BOSTON CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL | $18,500 |
Do your dollars go where the need is?
Each grant placed by the hardship in its grantee’s ZIP, then read against the area’s typical level.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–24) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 62% of your dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Most of your grants land in higher-need ZIPs.
Matched: human-services grants are those whose grantee’s IRS cause code is Human Services. Placed by people below the poverty linein the grantee’s ZIP, averaged from the tracts in that ZIP; grantee ZIP can differ from where services are delivered.
Which US states your grants reach
Grants abroad, by region — $641k on the FY2024 return
Schedule F, as filed: 7 regions, $59k to organizations and $582k to individuals. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: ATRICURE FELLOWSHIP · SIR MAGDI YACOUB PROGRAM · EDWARDS PROGRAM
Stated purpose: MEETINGS AND EDUCATION · GRAHAM TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP · ATRICURE FELLOWSHIP
Stated purpose: TETROLOGY OF FALLOT REGISTRY · 2025 SYMPOSIUM IN HONOR OF DR. TIRONE DAVID · HOM-CLEVELAND CLINIC
Stated purpose: ALDO R. CASTANEDA PROGRAM · VALERIE W. RUSCH PROGRAM · EDWARDS PROGRAM
Stated purpose: ATRICURE FELLOWSHIP · GRAHAM TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP · JACK A. ROTH PROGRAM
Stated purpose: EDWARDS PROGRAM · MARC. R. DE LEVAL FELLOWSHIP
Stated purpose: EDWARDS PROGRAM · VALERIE W. RUSCH PROGRAM
US grants placed by each grantee’s ZIP, which can differ from where services are actually delivered. Need from public data — U.S. Census/ACS, CDC PLACES, Eviction Lab, USDA — shown as context about the area, never attributed to your giving. Grants abroad on Schedule F are filed by region, purpose and amount with no recipient name, so they are shown by region and cannot be placed on the country map or matched to a grantee.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 6% of Aats Foundation’s grant dollars are earmarked, by their stated purpose, for a different county than the recipient’s own address — money that lands at a nonprofit in one place but is meant to do its work in another.
Recipient view: each grant at its grantee’s ZIP, mapped to a county. Directed view: each grant at the county its stated purpose names, falling back to the recipient’s county when the purpose names no place; US grants only. A county shows only if it carries the top 95% of that view’s dollars. Purposes are read from the foundation’s own 990 grant descriptions.
Who you back again
Which organizations you funded more than once, and which you funded a single time. Each grantee is matched to its own filings.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +22% since the first grant, against +21% for the ones you funded once.
14 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2024, 6 since wound down; 10 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (too recent to call).
How the two cohorts compare
Organizations
Total granted
Median revenue growth · since first grant
Still filing today
New vs renewed · share of each year
In FY2024, 59% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $276k went to new ones.
Where new relationships form · theme of each grantee’s first grant
First-time = a grantee’s first year in your filing window; renewed = funded in an earlier year too. As a portfolio matures the renewed share naturally climbs — once funded, an org stays “renewable” — so the signal is the years that buck it (a new-grantee intake wave). The earliest year is left-censored: relationships that predate the data read as “new.” Theme is the grantee’s IRS cause.
Backed again, and grew
- AAAMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THORACIC SURGERY6× · 2017–2024 · $479k · revenue +10%
- CHChildren's Hospital Corporation3× · 2022–2024 · $219k · revenue +27%
Northwestern University2× · 2021–2023 · $150k · revenue +14%
Funded once
- PCPHI CHI MEDICAL FRATERNITY INCone grant, 2022 · $214k
- ROREGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGANone grant, 2021 · $100k
MEMORIAL SLOAN-KETTERING CANCER CENTERone grant, 2023 · $100k · revenue +9%
Repeat = funded in two or more distinct years; growth and survival are read from each grantee’s own subsequent IRS filings.
The map has a center of gravity: the average direction from the rest of the sector toward the organizations the foundation funds — the shape of its giving. Scoring every nonprofit along that direction surfaces the ones that look most like the portfolio. These are the closest matchesthat aren’t grantees — a resemblance in what they say they do, not a recommendation.
The mission of Rush is to improve the health of the individuals and diverse communities we serve through the integration of outstanding patient care, education, research and community partnerships.
Education, research, medical services and other public services.
The central mission of the university of southern california is the development of human beings and society as a whole through the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit. the principal means by which our mission is…
Thomas jefferson university ("tju") is a comprehensive university with preeminence in transdisciplinary, experiential professional education, research and discovery, delivering exceptional value for the 21st century students with…
University of minnesota physicians serves as the integrated group practice for the university of minnesota medical school full-time faculty to provide the highest quality healthcare to patients and their families.university of minnesota…
See Form 990, Part I, Line 1, Description of Organization Mission.
For more than 125 years, the mission of the johns hopkins hospital has been to lead the world in the diagnosis and treatment of disease and to train tomorrow's great physicians, nurses and scientists. above all, we aim to provide the…
The mission of mit is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
Our mission at the university of chicago medicine is to provide superior health care through rigorous research, innovative education, and comprehensive care and healing. in partnership with our colleagues, we pursue life-changing…
Case Western Reserve University is an independent, research-oriented university with broadly based strengths in health, including medicine, nursing and dentistry; in engineering; in the arts and sciences; and in law, management and social…
THE MASSACHUSETTS EYE AND EAR INFIRMARY ("THE INFIRMARY") IS A NOT-FOR-PROFIT TEACHING HOSPITAL CONDUCTING PATIENT CARE AND RESEARCH. THE INFIRMARY IS A TEACHING HOSPITAL OF HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL AND AN INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR RESEARCH.…
Drexel university fulfills its founder's vision of preparing each new generation of students for productive professional and civic lives while also focusing its collective expertise on solving society's greatest problems. drexel is an…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Montefiore Medical Center and the most unlike its peers is Inova Health Care Services. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
For each theme you fund, this compares how the sector’s money is shifting with how your own giving is shifting.
Sector change and giving change are each shown relative to their own range, growing (right) or shrinking (left); both normalized, so inflation isn’t mistaken for growth.
Your grantees are a median of 61 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% lost their exemption, against 13% of the field you don’t fund.
Age = years since IRS exemption (a founding proxy). “Closed” = auto-revocation for 3 years of non-filing — a floor on closure, not proof, and bigger established orgs lapse least. Association, not causation.
25 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2025.
Each one resolved to its own IRS returns and tracked year by year — your grant beside their revenue from every source. Association, dated; never a causal claim.
Counted here: distinct organizations you funded across 2017–2025, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 25 of the 42 grantees resolved in that span have returns of their own we could reconcile; the rest are funded organizations whose filings we could not track year by year.
Where your money sits — by cause, then by grantee
Each org by its size and your share of it — top-left is where you’re load-bearing
Go grantee by grantee — a decade per org, and how each moved after you funded them
A decade per grantee — revenue shaded, your grants as bars, all rows on one timeline.
- Who funds AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THORACIC SURGERY ↗
- Who funds Children's Hospital Corporation ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds Albert Einstein College of Medicine ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI ↗
- Who funds New York University ↗
- Who funds MEMORIAL SLOAN-KETTERING CANCER CENTER ↗
- Who funds CITY OF HOPE ↗
- Who funds THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL OF PHILADELPHIA ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL OF WISCONSIN INC ↗
- Who funds INOVA HEALTH CARE SERVICES ↗
- Who funds Baylor College of Medicine ↗
- Who funds Emory University ↗
- Who funds MONTEFIORE MEDICAL CENTER ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds DUKE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE CLEVELAND CLINIC FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Temple University - Of The Commonwealth System of Higher Education ↗
- Who funds THE WYNDCROFT SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds Children's Hospital Los Angeles ↗
The grantmakers whose grantees overlap with yours far more than size alone predicts. Each orbits closer the stronger the alignment; the arcs between them show where they also fund each other. Here it reads as a tightly interlocked camp — most of these funders back each other's grantees too.
Open a dossier: American Heart Association Inc · Yale University · American Cancer Society Inc · Johns Hopkins University · Cystic Fibrosis Foundation · Vanderbilt University Medical Center · National Philanthropic Trust · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund
Affinity is a Gamma-Poisson posterior co-funding rate, re-centered on the typical rate, so thin evidence shrinks toward no signal. A research starting point: overlap is association, not proof of shared intent.
Government reliance of your grantees
Every dot is one organization Aats Foundation funds. Left–right is the share of its income from government; up–down is the share from you. Bigger dots raise more. Filter to federal or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Children's Hospital Corporation — 10% of income from government
Government income is each org’s traced federal awards (USASpending — grants and contracts) plus state payments (open checkbooks) as a share of its total revenue (IRS Form 990); the self-reported government-grant line (990 line 1e) is carried for cross-check: a grantee that reports government grants we could not trace to a source is left off the chart rather than shown as receiving none. An association, not a claim that your grant caused the public funding. Coverage is precision-first — a floor, not a census; state records exist for 9 states, so a grantee outside them shows no state figure (dimmed) rather than a false zero. Federal award amounts are obligations, which can span years, so a single-year share is indicative. 990 filings lag 12–24 months.