· Private foundation
Helle Family 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
- Under $10k17 grants · $44k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $118k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $285k
- $250k+1 grant · $271k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS | $271,127 |
| THE JOSSELYN CENTER | $133,513 |
| EAGLE VALLEY COMMUNITY FUND | $101,516 |
| EVANS SCHOLARS FOUNDATION | $50,339 |
| AMERICAN RED CROSS | $35,564 |
| VAIL HEALTH FOUNDATION | $25,870 |
| STEADMAN PHILIPPON RESEARCH INSTITUTE | $20,801 |
| VAIL VETERNS FOUNDATION INC | $12,881 |
| GUARDIAN SCHOLARS FOUNDATION | $12,214 |
| LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO | $10,453 |
| WALKING MOUNTAINS SCIENCE CENTER | $5,108 |
| LIFT UP | $5,000 |
| PECS FOUNDATION | $5,000 |
| HOOKER COUNTY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $2,500 |
| ROCKY MOUNTAIN ELK FOUNDATION | $2,500 |
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 (FY17–24, $264k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 15% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 8% of Helle 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.
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 +45% since the first grant, against +30% for the ones you funded once.
44 repeat relationships — 17 still active in FY2024, 27 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, 40% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $429k 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
University of Illinois Foundation7× · 2017–2023 · $1.4M · revenue +127%- TJTHE JOSSELYN CENTER NFP8× · 2017–2024 · $1.1M · revenue ×13
- ANAmerican National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches8× · 2017–2024 · $241k · revenue +46%
Funded once
- VCVANGUARD CHARITABLE PROGRAMone grant, 2021 · $35k
- LULOYOLA UNIVERSITY FOUNDERSone grant, 2019 · $25k
- VHVAIL HEALTH SERVICES FOUNDATIONone grant, 2020 · $23k
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.
Uchicago medicine network, inc. supports and encourages health and human service by providing support, directly or indirectly to ingalls memorial hospital, the university of chicago medical center, and other related tax-exempt…
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 organization provides professional investment management services for endowed gifts and financial assets entrusted to the ucsf foundation.
See schedule ouniversity corporation for atmospheric research (ucar), on behalf of, and in cooperation with its member university members, is engaged in the management of long-term atmospheric and related research and educational…
Agu's mission is to advance and support an inclusive community of earth and space scientists and partners dedicated to discovery and solutions to societal challenges. agu seeks to catalyze discovery and solutions to scientific and societal…
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
The purpose of the water research foundation (wrf) is a definitive research organization to advance the science of all things water to better meet the evolving needs of its subscribers and the water sector. to engage exclusively in…
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…
The university of virginia investment management company (uvimco) is organized to invest funds on behalf of the rector and visitors of the university of virginia (the university or uva) and university-associated organizations (uaos).
To be the leading voice of medicine to make minnesota the healthiest state and the best place to practice.
Engage actively and continuously in medical research, education and training in the practice of medicine in conjunction with the department of family medicine of the indiana university school of medicine and indiana university…
Lake Forest Graduate School of Management's mission is to bring the real world to business education and leadership development.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Connections for the Homeless Inc and the most unlike its peers is Guardian Scholars Foundation. 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 31 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 4% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
48 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. 48 of the 97 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 University of Illinois Foundation ↗
- Who funds THE JOSSELYN CENTER NFP ↗
- Who funds EAGLE VALLEY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds EAGLE VALLEY COMMUNITY FUND ↗
- Who funds VAIL HEALTH SERVICES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds CONNECTIONS FOR THE HOMELESS INC ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds University of Michigan ↗
- Who funds GUARDIAN SCHOLARS INC ↗
- Who funds STEADMAN PHILIPPON RESEARCH INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds Lift Up of Routt County ↗
- Who funds EAGLE VALLEY MENTAL HEALTH ↗
- Who funds WALKING MOUNTAINS ↗
- Who funds EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds EAST VILLAGE YOUTH PROGRAM ↗
- Who funds OAKS CHRISTIAN SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds VAIL VETERANS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds GUARDIAN SCHOLARS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA 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: The Ronald Davis Family Foundation · The Winmax Foundation Inc · The Bolwell Foundation · Frechette Family Foundation · Frey Foundation · United Jewish Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Colorado Gives Foundation · Mile High United Way Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · The Chicago Community Trust
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 Helle 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 or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
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.