· Public charity
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center
Improve the human condition through plant science/research: feed the hungry and improve human health, preserve and renew our environment and enhance our region's economy.
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 28 grants below total $6,423,011 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $8,684,217 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $2,261,206 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
- $10k–50k7 grants · $200k
- $50k–250k9 grants · $1.0M
- $250k+12 grants · $5.2M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS | $881,742 |
| LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY | $796,710 |
| UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS | $477,329 |
| MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY | $468,409 |
| UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND | $388,146 |
| WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY | $363,364 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA | $353,564 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA | $339,011 |
| ARIZONA BOARD OF REGENTS | $312,137 |
| PURDUE UNIVERSITY | $300,800 |
| CURATORS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI | $265,431 |
| CHICAGO HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY | $254,985 |
| THE LAND INSTITUTE | $223,299 |
| ST LOUIS UNIVERSITY | $178,661 |
| UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII | $147,480 |
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 11%. 72% 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 — $2.3M on the FY2024 return
Schedule F, as filed: 2 regions. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: RESEARCH
Stated purpose: RESEARCH
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.
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.
40 repeat relationships — 27 still active in FY2024, 13 since wound down.
How the two cohorts compare
Organizations
Total granted
Still filing today
New vs renewed · share of each year
In FY2024, 100% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $0 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
- UOUniversity of Kansas Center for Research Inc4× · 2021–2024 · $1.9M · revenue +34%
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE7× · 2017–2023 · $1.8M · revenue +37%- SLST LOUIS UNIVERSITY7× · 2018–2024 · $1.3M · revenue +16%
Funded once
- WSWEXFORD SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYone grant, 2018 · $175k
- WUWASHINGTON UNIVERSITYone grant, 2020 · $106k
- ISIMPOSSIBLE SENSING LLCone grant, 2023 · $39k
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.
Nyu is a private university with approximately 60,000 matriculating students in 20 schools and institutes. nyu's primary missions are education, research and scholarship, and patient care.
As a leading research university with a distinctive commitment to undergraduate education, Rice University aspires to path breaking research, unsurpassed teaching, and contributions to the betterment of our world. It seeks to fulfill this…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
Organization's mission: boston university is an international, comprehensive, private research university, committed to educating students to be reflective, resourceful individuals ready to live, adapt, and lead in an interconnected world.…
See Form 990, Part I, Line 1, Description of Organization Mission.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
Clark university's mission is to educate undergraduate and graduate students to be imaginative and contributing citizens of the world, and to advance the frontiers of knowledge and understanding through rigorous scholarship and creative…
Biu produces students who excel in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business & the arts.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is University of Delaware and the most unlike its peers is Widecast Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network Inc. 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 77 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 — 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.
17 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. 17 of the 45 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 THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON ↗
- Who funds University of Kansas Center for Research Inc ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ↗
- Who funds ST LOUIS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds The George Washington University ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds The Land Institute ↗
- Who funds Cornell University ↗
- Who funds BIOSTL ↗
- Who funds TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds BOYCE THOMPSON INSTITUTE FOR PLANT RESEARCH INC ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds JACKIE JOYNER KERSEE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE HAMLINE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA ↗
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: Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research · Cornell University · Washington University · National Fish and Wildlife Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc
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 Donald Danforth Plant Science Center 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.
- University of Delaware — 30% 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to Donald Danforth Plant Science Center?
Find your warmest path to Donald Danforth Plant Science Center through trustees and officers whose names appear on both boards. Search for your organization and Plinth traces the shortest route it can evidence.
Each link is a name appearing on two organizations’ public IRS 990 filings, matched on that name and, where the filings support it, on location. A same-state match has geographic support, which is a second matching feature rather than confirmation that the two are one person; a cross-state one is the likeliest to be two people who share a name. Every hop shows its tier, low-confidence and distant paths are held back rather than guessed, and it is worth confirming the person before you use the introduction.