· Private foundation
John and Amy Phelan 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
- $10k–50k1 grant · $25k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $183k
- $250k+6 grants · $3.8M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| LSE FOUNDATION | $1,475,000 |
| SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY | $1,000,000 |
| HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL FORWARD FELLOWSHIP | $550,000 |
| PRESERVATION FOUNDATION OF PALM BEACH | $250,000 |
| NATIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR MUSEUM FOUNDATION | $250,000 |
| THIRD OPTION FOUNDATION | $250,000 |
| PROSTATE CANCER FOUNDATION | $100,000 |
| WHITNEY MUSEUM OF ART | $83,333 |
| FEDERAL ENFORCEMENT HOMELAND SECURITY FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
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 (FY24–24, $250k) land where the poverty rate runs at 6%, 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 22% of John and Amy Phelan 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 +84% since the first grant, against +59% for the ones you funded once.
14 repeat relationships — 2 still active in FY2024, 12 since wound down; 7 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, 16% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $3.3M 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
- WMWHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART3× · 2017–2019 · $1.1M · revenue +161%
- SOSpirit of America Worldwide4× · 2017–2022 · $1.1M · revenue +472%
- TATHE AMERICAN FUND FOR LSE4× · 2018–2021 · $477k · revenue +84%
Funded once
- BGBOYS & GIRLS CLUB OF PBCgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $100k · revenue +67%
- TLTHE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCEone grant, 2017 · $100k
- NWNAVAL WAR COLLEGE FOUNDATION INCone grant, 2021 · $25k · 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.
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
Finance impacts everyone. as a socially relevant organization, the museum of american finance seeks to improve understanding of the influence of financial institutions and capital markets on the u.s. and global economies, and on…
Help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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…
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 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.
American foreign service association (afsa) is both the principal advocate for the long-term institutional wellbeing of the professional career foreign service and responsible for safeguarding the interest of afsa members. (continued on…
The npr foundation ("foundation") is organized and operated exclusively for the benefit of its sole supported organization, national public radio, inc. ("npr inc."). the foundation supports npr inc. through various activities such as…
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.
New york school of interior design provides the most innovative, immersive, and transformative interior design education in the world, demonstrating the impact of professionally designed interiors on the health, happiness, and well-being…
The foreign policy research institute (frpi) is dedicated to producing the highest quality scholarship and nonpartisan policy analysis focused on crucial foreign policy and national security challenges facing the united states. we educate…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is National Philanthropic Trust and the most unlike its peers is Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 46 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) — 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 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.
21 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. 21 of the 29 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 ASPEN ART MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART ↗
- Who funds Spirit of America Worldwide ↗
- Who funds Southern Methodist University ↗
- Who funds THE AMERICAN FUND FOR LSE ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL PHILANTHROPIC TRUST ↗
- Who funds CHILD MIND INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds THE AMERICAN IRELAND FUND (DBA THE IRELAND FUNDS AMERICA/THE IRELAND FUNDS) ↗
- Who funds COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY ↗
- Who funds The Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach Inc ↗
- Who funds THIRD OPTION FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR MUSEUM FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PROSTATE CANCER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Museum of Modern Art ↗
- Who funds YEAR UP INC ↗
- Who funds BOYS & GIRLS CLUB OF PBC ↗
- Who funds TATE AMERICAS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation ↗
- Who funds NAVAL WAR COLLEGE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds MOVING PICTURE INSTITUTE ↗
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: National Philanthropic Trust · American Endowment Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund
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 John and Amy Phelan 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.
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Year Up 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 John and Amy Phelan 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.