· Public charity
Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc
Draper's engineers design, develop and deploy advanced technology solutions for the world's most difficult and important problems.
Read this first · the figures below need context
55% of Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc’s FY2025 grant dollars went to Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2025 names 12 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
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.
By grant size · FY2025
- $10k–50k1 grant · $15k
- $50k–250k8 grants · $832k
- $250k+6 grants · $3.8M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY | $1,740,772 |
| REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO | $621,820 |
| BOSTON UNIVERSITY | $502,198 |
| HARVARD UNIVERSITY | $310,944 |
| TUFTS UNIVERSITY | $302,839 |
| WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE | $292,506 |
| NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY | $168,998 |
| GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY | $146,054 |
| BROWN UNIVERSITY | $121,448 |
| PURDUE UNIVERSITY | $105,803 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL | $88,109 |
| TEXAS A&M ENGINEERING EXPERIMENT STATION | $77,990 |
| PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY | $68,625 |
| GEORGIA TECH RESEARCH CORPORATION | $55,374 |
| BOSTON CHILDRENS HOSPITAL | $15,308 |
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 (FY17–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 35% of your 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 +45% since the first grant, against +41% for the ones you funded once.
17 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2025, 9 since wound down; 4 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, 72% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $572k 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
TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY8× · 2017–2025 · $2.1M · revenue +45%
Trustees of Tufts College7× · 2017–2025 · $1.3M · revenue +50%- SCSEATTLE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL4× · 2021–2024 · $927k · revenue +33%
Funded once
- MEMASSACHUSETTS EYE & EAR INFIRMARYone grant, 2017 · $232k
- MFMETIS FOUNDATIONgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $109k · revenue +41%
Southern Methodist Universitygraduatedone grant, 2017 · $9k · revenue +57%
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.
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.
See Form 990, Part I, Line 1, Description of Organization Mission.
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…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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 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…
Mission strengthened by more than a century and a half of dedication to academic excellence, boston college commits itself to the highest standards of teaching and research in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs and to the…
The University of New Haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts and professional education. Our mission is to prepare our students to lead purposeful and fulfilling lives in a…
Education, research, medical services and other public services.
Western new england university, a comprehensive private institution with a tradition of excellence in teaching and scholarship and a commitment to service, awards undergraduate, master's, and doctoral degrees in various departments from…
Bates is a college of the liberal arts and sciences, and is a coeducational, nonsectarian, residential college with special commitments to academic rigor, and to assuring in all of its efforts the dignity of each individual, and access to…
The trustees of the university of pennsylvania (the "university") sees itself as having a public service mission. in such regard, the university aims to provide a rich and diverse educational environment for its students; to pioneer…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Northeastern University and the most unlike its peers is Geneva Foundation for the Arts. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 62 years old; the field is 17. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 20% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 11% 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.
19 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. 19 of the 27 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds Trustees of Tufts College ↗
- Who funds SEATTLE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL ↗
- Who funds GENEVA FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Children's Hospital Corporation ↗
- Who funds WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds MASSACHUSETTS EYE & EAR INFIRMARY ↗
- Who funds William Marsh Rice University ↗
- Who funds METIS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL NURSES ALUMNI ASSOCIATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds GEORGIA TECH RESEARCH CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds Southern Methodist University ↗
Government reliance of your grantees
Every dot is one organization Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc 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.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% 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
- Children's Hospital Corporation — 10% of income from government
- Worcester Polytechnic Institute — 8% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Northeastern University — 7% of income from government
- Portland State University Foundation — 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.