· Private foundation
Doran Family Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ALEXANDER TWILIGHT ACADEMY | $50,000 |
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 (FY18–24, $66k) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 100% of those 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
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.
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 Doran Family 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. Read by recipient address, 85% of the giving stays in MA; read by stated purpose it is 75% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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.
21 repeat relationships — 1 still active in FY2025, 20 since wound down.
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, 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
- BSBOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC5× · 2018–2022 · $225k · revenue +6%
- ATALEXANDER TWILIGHT ACADEMY INC5× · 2021–2025 · $220k · revenue +122%
- WMWELLINGTON MANAGEMENT FOUNDATION3× · 2017–2022 · $110k · revenue +23%
Funded once
- VHVINEYARD HAVEN PUBLIC LIBRARYone grant, 2019 · $50k
- NCNSCDA-MA CAPITAL CAMPAIGNone grant, 2020 · $50k
- SJSAN JUAN ISLANDS ARGRICULTURAL GUILDgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $25k · revenue +167%
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.
Organization's mission statement true to the ambitious vision of its founder and her spirit of creative risk-taking, the mission of the isabella stewart gardner museum is: - to bring to life and preserve the rich historic collection; - to…
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.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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…
The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is a world-renowned center for biological discovery and training that is notably affiliated with more than 60 Nobel Prize winners. Research is conducted by full-time faculty as well as hundreds of the…
The Morgan Library & Museum celebrates and shares the history and process of human creativity from antiquity to the present day through the preservation, study, and interpretation of a dynamic and growing collection.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
Bard college seeks to provide a challenging academic program and a supportive environment that fosters a collaborative interchange of ideas in the classroom as well as ambition to achieve excellence.
The museum's mission statement is: "to discover, interpret, and disseminate - through scientific research and education - knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe."
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.…
Smith college educates women of promise for lives of distinction and purpose. a college of and for the world, smith college links the power of the liberal arts to excellence in research and scholarship, developing leaders for society's…
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 The American Exchange Project Inc and the most unlike its peers is The Somerset Club Charitable Trust. 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 38 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) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 4% 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.
46 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. 46 of the 67 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 BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC ↗
- Who funds ALEXANDER TWILIGHT ACADEMY INC ↗
- Who funds Yale University ↗
- Who funds WELLINGTON MANAGEMENT FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MARTHA'S VINEYARD MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds THE AMERICAN EXCHANGE PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds SHELTERING ARMS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RESEARCH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Social Finance Inc ↗
- Who funds NEW PROFIT INC ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF PHILLIPS ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF FAIRSTED ↗
- Who funds SAN JUAN ISLANDS ARGRICULTURAL GUILD ↗
- Who funds ST GEORGE'S SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THE CONSERVANCY OF SOUTHWEST FLORIDA ↗
- Who funds THE WINSOR SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds VINEYARD CONSERVATION SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds VOICES OF NAPLES INC ↗
- Who funds MARTHA'S VINEYARD FILM SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds MAHLER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds 152 COMMONWEALTH FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE ED NEF FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds LISTEN FIRST PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds MARTHA'S VINEYARD CEREBRAL PALSY CAMP INC ↗
- Who funds ISLAND HOUSING TRUST CORPORATION ↗
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: Boston Foundation Inc · The Albright Foundation · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · San Juan Island Community Foundation · Justin & Genevieve Wyner Trust · Martha's Vineyard Bank Charitable Foundation Inc · Impactassetsinc · Greater Washington Community Foundation · The Bessemer Giving Fund · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Seattle Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program
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 Doran Family 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.
- Brookline Greenspace Alliance Inc — 19% of income from government
- Yale University — 12% of income from government
- Social Finance Inc — 12% of income from government
- Steps to Success Inc — 5% of income from government
- Martha's Vineyard Preservation Trust Inc — 4% of income from government
- Martha's Vineyard Film Society Inc — 2% of income from government
- Island Housing Trust Corporation — 1% of income from government
- New England Conservatory of Music — 1% of income from government
- The Institute of Contemporary Art Inc — 1% of income from government
- Edith Wharton Restoration Inc — 1% of income from government
- Boston Symphony Orchestra Inc — 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to Doran Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Doran Family Foundation 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.