· Private foundation
Aphorism Foundation
Its FY2024 filing reports that it funds preselected organizations and did not take unsolicited requests; check the foundation's own site before ruling it out.
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.
By grant size · FY2024
- $50k–250k7 grants · $703k
- $250k+20 grants · $43M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| EARTH SPECIES PROJECT | $10,005,300 |
| PROBABILISTIC COMPUTING FOUNDATION INC | $10,000,000 |
| SCIENCE FOR AMERICA INC | $3,000,000 |
| NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION | $2,200,000 |
| SECOND HARVEST FOOD BANK | $2,000,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $2,000,000 |
| CONNECTED LEARNING ALLIANCE | $1,865,000 |
| MATHESAR FOUNDATION INC | $1,498,500 |
| ASSOCIATION OF MARSHALL SCHOLARS INC | $1,461,858 |
| LEADERSHIP NETWORK | $1,200,000 |
| CORTICO CORPORATION | $1,000,000 |
| LEADERS IN TECH INC | $1,000,000 |
| US JAPAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE | $1,000,000 |
| MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY | $1,000,000 |
| COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | $1,000,000 |
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.
Your human-services grants (FY22–24, $1.5M) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 20% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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
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.
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 +24% since the first grant, against +5% for the ones you funded once.
25 repeat relationships — 16 still active in FY2024, 9 since wound down; 9 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, 68% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $13M 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
- CZCHAN ZUCKERBERG BIOHUB INC5× · 2017–2022 · $10M · revenue +949%
- OIOPPORTUNITYWORK INC2× · 2017–2020 · $7.5M · revenue +240% · 56% of their budget
- CCCORTICO CORPORATION3× · 2017–2024 · $3.0M · revenue +175% · 76% of their budget
Funded once
THE BARACK OBAMA FOUNDATIONgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $8.3M · revenue +48%- HLHARVARD LAW SCHOOLone grant, 2017 · $8.0M
- OFOpenAI Foundation fka OpenAI Incone grant, 2017 · $5.0M · revenue -98%
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 organization provides professional investment management services for endowed gifts and financial assets entrusted to the ucsf foundation.
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Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
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See schedule onorc at the university of chicago conducts research and data science on critical societal issues to guide decision-making and the development of programs and public policy. our experts identify relationships and trends, and…
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
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For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Science and Technology Futures Inc and the most unlike its peers is Us-Japan Research Institute Suite 801. 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 17 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) — 8% of your grantees by number, and just 7% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
70 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. 70 of the 85 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 Probalistic Computing Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds DONOR ADVISED CHARITABLE GIVING INC ↗
- Who funds NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds CHAN ZUCKERBERG BIOHUB INC ↗
- Who funds SCIENCE FOR AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds THE BARACK OBAMA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds OPPORTUNITYWORK INC ↗
- Who funds Mathesar Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds OpenAI Foundation fka OpenAI Inc ↗
- Who funds THE MIAMI FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds DO SOMETHING INC ↗
- Who funds CORTICO CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds CONNECTED LEARNING ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds PAHARA INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds CENTER ON RURAL INNOVATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE ASSOCIATION OF MARSHALL SCHOLARS INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF LIBI INC ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds PECAN STREET INC ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds DREAMORG ↗
- Who funds FFWD ↗
- Who funds LEADERS IN TECH INC ↗
- Who funds Leadership Network ↗
- Who funds SECUREBIO INC ↗
- Who funds US-JAPAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE SUITE 801 ↗
- Who funds B LAB COMPANY ↗
- Who funds UBI Charitable Inc ↗
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: Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Impactassetsinc · The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation · Gates Foundation · Tides Foundation · Skoll Fund · The Ford Foundation · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Walton Family Foundation Inc · Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
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 Aphorism 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Center On Rural Innovation Inc — 37% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Woodwell Climate Research Center Inc — 11% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- American Academy of Arts & Sciences — 3% of income from government
- Cortico Corporation — 0% 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.