· Public charity
Brightfocus Foundation
BRIGHTFOCUS FOUNDATION funds exceptional research worldwide to defeat alzheimer's disease, macular degeneration, and glaucoma and provides expert information on these heartbreaking diseases.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 57 grants below total $13,267,808 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $16,943,701 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $3,675,893 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 · FY2025
- $10k–50k2 grants · $45k
- $50k–250k31 grants · $5.5M
- $250k+24 grants · $7.7M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY | $409,500 |
| WILLIAM MARSH RICE UNIVERSITY | $409,500 |
| UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER | $409,500 |
| LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY | $409,500 |
| NATIONAL EYE INSTITUTE NIH | $408,701 |
| RESEARCH FOUNDATION OF SUNY - UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY | $300,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO | $300,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO | $300,000 |
| MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL | $300,000 |
| VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER | $300,000 |
| THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL | $300,000 |
| ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI | $300,000 |
| WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN STLOUIS | $300,000 |
| BETH ISRAEL DEACONESS MEDICAL CENTER | $300,000 |
| THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY | $300,000 |
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 (FY21–21, $100k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 0% 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
Grants abroad, by region — $3.7M on the FY2025 return
Schedule F, as filed: 4 regions. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RESEARCH BY WILLEM ANNAERT, PHD ENTITLED: A2024033S · ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RESEARCH BY FRANCES WISEMAN, PHD ENTITLED: A2024040S · ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RESEARCH BY NADER SAFFARI, PHD ENTITLED: A2025022S
Stated purpose: MACULAR DEGENERATION RESEARCH BY DAISY YAO SHU, PHD ENTITLED: M2025005N · MACULAR DEGENERATION RESEARCH BY MASAYUKI HATA, PHD ENTITLED: M2025006N
Stated purpose: ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RESEARCH BY ISABELLE AUBERT, PHD ENTITLED: A2025018S · ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RESEARCH BY MALLAR CHAKRAVARTY, PHD ENTITLED: CA2025002 · MIND AND SIGHT DISEASES RESEARCH FUNDING, ENTITLED: CA2023003
Stated purpose: ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RESEARCH BY CAROLINA OCHOA-ROSALES, PHD ENTITLED: A2025027S
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 11% of Brightfocus 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 +49% since the first grant, against +29% for the ones you funded once.
79 repeat relationships — 35 still active in FY2025, 44 since wound down; 2 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (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 FY2025, 97% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $314k 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
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY8× · 2017–2025 · $6.4M · revenue +76%
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY8× · 2017–2025 · $4.0M · revenue +64%
ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI7× · 2017–2025 · $3.0M · revenue +58%
Funded once
- CDC2N Diagnosticsone grant, 2017 · $750k
- DTDRUSOLV THERAPUTICS INCone grant, 2022 · $500k
- AIANTHROTRONIX INCone grant, 2017 · $450k
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.
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…
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.
We educate the next generation of leaders to improve the health of our society.
Fred hutch cancer center ("fred hutch") unites innovative research and compassionate care to prevent and eliminate cancer and infectious disease. continued on schedule o
The university's goal in the coming decade is to advance learning through the integration of teaching, research and service to others. the core of this goal is to prepare graduates to engage with the world and lead lives of meaning. to do…
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…
Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.
The principal objects of the University are the advancement of learning by teaching and research, and its dissemination by every means. We work as one Oxford bringing together our staff, students and alumni, our colleges, faculties,…
The mission of the george washington university (gw) is to educate individuals in liberal arts, languages, sciences, learned professions, and other courses and subjects of study, and to conduct scholarly research and publish the findings…
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
The graduate school of the stowers institute for medical research ("gssimr") exempt purpose is to provide graduate education that will prepare scholars for scientific research in the biological sciences.
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Georgetown University and the most unlike its peers is Foundation for the National Institutes of Health Inc. 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 53 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) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% 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.
79 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. 79 of the 147 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 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Emory University ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds Baylor College of Medicine ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE JACKSON LABORATORY ↗
- Who funds DUKE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds The Research Foundation for The State University of New York ↗
- Who funds University of Miami ↗
- Who funds BETH ISRAEL DEACONESS MEDICAL CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds University of Kentucky Research Foundation ↗
- Who funds Children's Hospital Corporation ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds GEORGIA TECH RESEARCH CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds Schepens Eye Research Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds MASSACHUSETTS EYE & EAR INFIRMARY ↗
- Who funds Trustees of Tufts College ↗
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: Alzheimer's Disease & Related Disorders Association Inc · The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York · American Heart Association Inc · Vanderbilt University Medical Center · Washington University · University of Pittsburgh · Knights Templar Eye Foundation · Cystic Fibrosis Foundation · University of Southern California · The Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research · Trustees of Boston University · Mayo Clinic
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 Brightfocus 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.
- Hebrew Rehabilitation Center — 53% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Boston Medical Center Corporation — 23% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 13% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Yale University — 12% of income from government
- Children's Hospital Corporation — 10% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Inc — 6% of income from government
- University of Miami — 5% of income from government
- Dean Mcgee Eye Institute — 1% of income from government
- Legacy Emanuel Hospital & Health Center — 0% of income from government
- Shriners Hospitals for Children — 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.