· Private foundation
James S McDonnell Foundation
Its FY2024 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k2 grants · $4k
- $10k–50k23 grants · $667k
- $50k–250k31 grants · $4.0M
- $250k+26 grants · $25M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| FOREST PARK FOREVER INC | $5,120,000 |
| CURATORS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-ST LOUIS ON BEHALF OF THE UNIVERSITY | $3,361,590 |
| FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS | $2,250,000 |
| ST LOUIS COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $1,950,000 |
| DAVIS & ELKINS COLLEGE | $1,160,000 |
| ST LOUIS COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $1,000,000 |
| SMALL BUSINESS EMPOWERMENT CENTER | $1,000,000 |
| ST LOUIS COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $966,000 |
| HABITAT FOR HUMANITY INTERNATIONAL INC | $900,000 |
| NEIGHBORHOOD SOLIDARITY FUND | $782,500 |
| WEPOWER | $637,539 |
| ST LOUIS SCIENCE CENTER FOUNDATION | $575,000 |
| BIOSTL | $565,297 |
| BIOSTL | $565,297 |
| BIOSTL | $514,985 |
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 (FY24–24, $275k) land where the poverty rate runs at 21%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 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.
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 +33% since the first grant, against +25% for the ones you funded once.
52 repeat relationships — 4 still active in FY2024, 48 since wound down; 39 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, 3% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $29M 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
- TJTHE JSM CHARITABLE TRUST3× · 2020–2022 · $20M · revenue +198% · 100% of their budget
- TUTemple University - Of The Commonwealth System of Higher Education4× · 2020–2024 · $2.5M · revenue +14%
- CMCarnegie Mellon University3× · 2020–2022 · $1.8M · revenue +35%
Funded once
- UOUNIVERSITY OF MISSOURIone grant, 2022 · $665k
- SLST LOUIS UNIVERSITYone grant, 2022 · $256k · revenue -10%
- UOUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT RIVERSIDEone grant, 2022 · $250k
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 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…
Education and Research
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
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.…
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 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…
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 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…
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.
See Form 990, Part I, Line 1, Description of Organization Mission.
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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is University of Pittsburgh and the most unlike its peers is The Michael D and Margaret Ann Latta Charitable 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 47 years old; the field is 24. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 1% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
66 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. 66 of the 130 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 JSM CHARITABLE TRUST ↗
- Who funds Forest Park Forever Inc ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds Temple University - Of The Commonwealth System of Higher Education ↗
- Who funds FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS ↗
- Who funds BIOSTL ↗
- Who funds Carnegie Mellon University ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds SANTA FE INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds NEIGHBORHOOD SOLIDARITY FUND ↗
- Who funds DAVIS & ELKINS COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds SMALL BUSINESS EMPOWERMENT CENTER ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds HABITAT FOR HUMANITY - ST LOUIS ↗
- Who funds WEPOWER ↗
- Who funds ST LOUIS SCIENCE CENTER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Goalsetter Foundation 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: St Louis Community Foundation Inc · United Way of Greater St Louis Inc · Washington University · Wells Fargo Foundation · Bjc Health System Dba Bjc Healthcare · St Louis Community Foundation · Commerce Bancshares Foundation · Enterprise Holdings Foundation · Regional Business Council · Trio Foundation of St Louis · Centene Foundation · Mac Five Foundation 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 James S McDonnell 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.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- University of Delaware — 30% of income from government
- The Broad Institute Inc — 19% of income from government
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston College — 3% of income from government
- Wellesley College — 1% of income from government
- The Trustees of Mount Holyoke College — 1% 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 James S McDonnell Foundation?
Find your warmest path to James S McDonnell 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.