· Public charity
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
The mission of the institute has remained constant since its founding in 1953.
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 31 grants below total $8,823,841 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $63,319,232 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $54,495,391 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–50k24 grants · $415k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $74k
- $250k+6 grants · $8.3M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO | $3,062,953 |
| HARVARD UNIVERSITY | $2,113,215 |
| YALE UNIVERSITY | $1,286,366 |
| LOUDOUN COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS | $1,000,000 |
| STANFORD UNIVERSITY | $502,742 |
| NORTH CAROLINA CENTRAL UNIVERSITY | $370,465 |
| HELEN HAY WHITNEY FOUNDATION | $73,500 |
| UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA | $39,600 |
| NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY | $25,000 |
| THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR CELL BIOLOGY | $25,000 |
| NORTH CAROLINA A & T STATE UNIVERSITY | $25,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MERCED | $25,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| ELIZABETH CITY STATE UNIVERSITY | $20,000 |
| FAYETTEVILLE STATE UNIVERSITY | $20,000 |
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, $150k) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 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
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 +27% since the first grant, against +27% for the ones you funded once.
213 repeat relationships — 17 still active in FY2025, 196 since wound down; 8 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; $145k 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 PITTSBURGH2× · 2020–2024 · $6.3M · revenue +26%- LELOUDOUN EDUCATION FOUNDATION INC4× · 2018–2025 · $6.0M · revenue +227% · 92% of their budget
Vanderbilt University5× · 2018–2024 · $5.6M · revenue +65%
Funded once
- SCSCIENCE COMMUNICATION LAB INCgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $3.3M · revenue +110%
- LCLOUDOUN COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLSone grant, 2017 · $2.0M
- UOUNIVERSITY OF VERMONT AND STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE FOUNDATION INCgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $1.6M · revenue +42%
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
As the national university of the catholic church in the united states, founded and sponsored by the bishops of the country with the approval of the holy see, the catholic university of america is committed to being a comprehensive…
As a diverse community of learners, we cultivate integrity, curiosity, connection and resilience.
At Roger Williams University, students are prepared to be thinkers and doers ready to solve challenging problems with innovative solutions. RWU offers robust offerings of undergraduate, graduate and professional programs across eight…
Seton hall university is a catholic institution of higher education
Biu produces students who excel in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business & the arts.
Dickinson college provides a useful, innovative and interdisciplinary education in the liberal arts and sciences to prepare students to lead rich and fulfilling lives of engaged global citizenship
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Fordham University and the most unlike its peers is Helen Hay Whitney 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 65 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) — 1% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.7% 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.
183 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. 183 of the 302 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds Yale University ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ↗
- Who funds LOUDOUN EDUCATION FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Vanderbilt University ↗
- Who funds The Trustees of Princeton University ↗
- Who funds The Research Foundation for The State University of New York ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds The Salk Institute for Biological Studies ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds FRED HUTCHINSON CANCER RESEARCH CENTER ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds Montgomery County Public Schools Educational Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY ↗
- Who funds SCIENCE COMMUNICATION LAB INC ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ↗
- Who funds ALLEN INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds William Marsh Rice University ↗
- Who funds LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY ↗
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: American Chemical Society · National Collegiate Athletic Association · Folds of Honor Foundation · The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York · American Council of Learned Societies · Tulsa Community Foundation · American Heart Association Inc · Yale University · Cornell University · National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance Inc · Johns Hopkins University · Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities
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 Howard Hughes Medical Institute 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
- Nature Forward — 32% of income from government
- The Broad Institute Inc — 19% of income from government
- Delaware State University — 18% 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
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- Children's Hospital Corporation — 10% of income from government
- Brandeis University — 9% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Northeastern University — 7% of income from government
- Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research — 7% of income from government
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc — 7% of income from government
- The American Society for Cell Biology — 4% of income from government
- Chesapeake Bay Foundation Inc — 2% of income from government
- Willamette University — 1% of income from government
- University of Portland — 1% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Middlebury College — 1% of income from government
- Simmons University — 1% of income from government
- Wellesley College — 1% of income from government
- The Trustees of Mount Holyoke College — 1% of income from government
- Fairfield University — 1% of income from government
- Oregon Health & Science University Foundation — 1% of income from government
- Rollins College — 0% of income from government
- Emmanuel College — 0% of income from government
- Wheaton College — 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.