· Private foundation
Joanne and John Carter 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.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k13 grants · $37k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $13k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| YMCA OF METRO DETROIT | $13,000 |
| BREAKTHROUGH FOUNDATION | $5,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN | $5,000 |
| THE CHADTOUGH FOUNDATION | $5,000 |
| DETROIT REGIONAL DOLLARS FOR SCHOLARS FOUNDATION | $5,000 |
| SENIOR MENS CLUB OF BIRMINGHAM FOUNDATION | $2,500 |
| DETROIT ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY | $2,500 |
| FORGOTTEN HARVEST | $2,500 |
| DETROIT CHILDREN'S CENTER | $2,500 |
| CAPUCHIN SOUP KITCHEN | $2,000 |
| DETROIT RIVERFRONT CONSERVANCY | $2,000 |
| BEYOND BASICS | $1,000 |
| UNITED WAY | $1,000 |
| LAFAYETTE COLLEGE | $1,000 |
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 (FY17–25, $106k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 55% 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 8% of Joanne and John Carter 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, 63% of the giving stays in MI; read by stated purpose it is 61% — 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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +70% since the first grant, against +48% for the ones you funded once.
48 repeat relationships — 9 still active in FY2025, 39 since wound down; 5 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, 68% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $16k 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
- JCJUDSON CENTER INC6× · 2017–2023 · $44k · revenue +20%
FORGOTTEN HARVEST INC8× · 2017–2025 · $40k · revenue +12%- CDCHADTOUGH DEFEAT DIPG FOUNDATION6× · 2018–2025 · $40k · revenue +195%
Funded once
- TKTHE KENAN-FLAGLER BUSINESS SCHOOL FOUNDATIONone grant, 2019 · $15k · revenue +8%
- LSLANDON SCHOOLgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $6k · revenue +48%
- ARA R T I Sone grant, 2019 · $3k
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 bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The nmu foundation will establish and foster relationships to generate resources that benefit the strategic goals of northern michigan university.
Business leaders for michigan is a nonprofit, nonpartisan statewide organization driven by ceos from the state's leading employers, all working toward a shared goal: making michigan a top 10 state for jobs, talent and a thriving economy.…
Dunwoody college changes lives by building opportunities for graduates to have successful careers, to develop into leaders and entrepreneurs, and to engage in "the better performance of life's duties." quote is from the last will and…
Delta dental fund's mission is to improve the oral health of the public and to advance dental science and the dental profession through research and education.
The Detroit Historical Society tells Detroit's stories and why they matter through its exhibits, programs, outreach, and the preservation and dissemination of its artifacts and collections.
Business leaders for michigan is a nonprofit, nonpartisan statewide organization driven by ceos from the state's leading employers, all working toward a shared goal: making michigan a top 10 state for jobs, talent and a thriving economy.…
Bridging the gap between early-stage innovation and commercial application. partnering to de-risk, develop and scale-up discoveries into commercially-viable technology packages.
The common application is a not-for-profit membership organization of over 1,100 colleges and universities across the globe committed to access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process. every year, over 1.5 million students…
The organization's primary exempt purpose is to provide access to and conduct activities in furtherance of higher education.
The mission of kalamazoo college is to prepare its graduates to better understand, live sucessfully within, and provide enlightened leadership to a richly diverse and increasingly complex world. as a highly selective, nationally renowened…
To hold title and perform related functions in connection with a research park and innovation center in support of michigan state university research foundation.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Detroit Children's Fund and the most unlike its peers is Keb 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 36 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) — 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 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.
39 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. 39 of the 70 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 JUDSON CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds FORGOTTEN HARVEST INC ↗
- Who funds CHADTOUGH DEFEAT DIPG FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds DETROIT ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds THE KENAN-FLAGLER BUSINESS SCHOOL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds DOWNTOWN BOXING GYM YOUTH PROGRAM ↗
- Who funds DETROIT RIVERFRONT CONSERVANCY INC ↗
- Who funds COMMON GROUND ↗
- Who funds THE RAINBOW CONNECTION ↗
- Who funds WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds HAVEN INC ↗
- Who funds University of Michigan ↗
- Who funds BLOOD CANCER UNITED INC ↗
- Who funds MOORINGS PARK FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ALMA COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds OUR RESCUE ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds LANDON SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds GREAT LAKES CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL ↗
- Who funds BRILLIANT DETROIT ↗
- Who funds THE BALDWIN CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds BEYOND BASICS ↗
- Who funds OAKLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION ↗
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: Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan · Dte Energy Foundation · Phillip and Elizabeth Filmer Memorial · The Carls Foundation · Ford Philanthropy · United Way for Southeastern Michigan · Consumers Energy Foundation · The Mihalich Charitable Foundation · Deroy Testamentary Foundation · Eagles for Children · Fca Foundation · Ethel and James Flinn Foundation
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 Joanne and John Carter 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.
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc — 7% of income from government
- Wounded Warrior Project 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.
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Find your warmest path to Joanne and John Carter 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.