· Private foundation
John and Margaret Sagan 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 FY2020–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k44 grants · $93k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $63k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| STANFORD UNIVERSITY | $28,000 |
| FRIENDS OF THE GRENADINES INITIATIVE | $15,000 |
| WORLD PEDIATRIC PROJECT | $10,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN LAW SCHOOL | $10,000 |
| LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY | $9,000 |
| MILLSAPS COLLEGE | $7,000 |
| GRAND TETON MUSIC FESTIVAL | $7,000 |
| MORAN CENTER FOR YOUTH ADVOCACY | $5,000 |
| THRESHOLDS | $5,000 |
| PLOUGHSHARES FUND | $5,000 |
| FIRST UNITED METHODIST CHURCH | $5,000 |
| BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS | $3,000 |
| CORDLEY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL | $3,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $2,000 |
| FEEDING AMERICA | $2,000 |
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 (FY20–25, $3k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, 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.
50 repeat relationships — 30 still active in FY2025, 20 since wound down; 17 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, 80% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $26k 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
- OWOHIO WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY6× · 2020–2025 · $85k · revenue +61%
- WPWORLD PEDIATRICS6× · 2020–2025 · $60k · revenue +7%
Millsaps College6× · 2020–2025 · $39k · revenue +9%
Funded once
- OIOCEANA INCone grant, 2024 · $2k · revenue 0%
- GEGARRETT EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SEMINARYone grant, 2021 · $1k
- SHSUNSHINE HOUSEone grant, 2024 · $1k
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.
Nyu is a private university with approximately 60,000 matriculating students in 20 schools and institutes. nyu's primary missions are education, research and scholarship, and patient care.
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 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.
Ci works to spotlight and secure the critical benefits that nature provides to humanity.
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
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…
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
The open markets institute works to help people relearn how to use competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
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.
The elizabeth glaser pediatric aids foundation (egpaf) is a proven leader in the fight against pediatric hiv/aids and has reached over 33 million pregnant women with services to prevent transmission of hiv to their babies. to date, egpaf…
Education and Research
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Black Ensemble Theater Corporation and the most unlike its peers is San Francisco Opera Association. 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 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% 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.
53 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. 53 of the 96 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 BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds OHIO WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds WORLD PEDIATRICS ↗
- Who funds Friends of the Grenadines Initiative ↗
- Who funds Millsaps College ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO OPERA ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds THE THRESHOLDS ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES ↗
- Who funds PLOUGHSHARES FUND INC ↗
- Who funds THE CENTER FOR REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS INC ↗
- Who funds JAMES B MORAN CENTER FOR YOUTH ADVOCACY ↗
- Who funds BLACK ENSEMBLE THEATER CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds GRAND TETON MUSIC FESTIVAL INC ↗
- Who funds THE TAFT SCHOOL CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds LITERACY WORKS ↗
- Who funds THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO TECH ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds GICHIGAMIIN INDIGENOUS NATIONS MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds EVANSTONSKOKIE DISTRICT 65 EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION (FOUNDATION 65) ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY HEALTH PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds Feeding America ↗
- Who funds The Labelle 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: The Chicago Community Trust · Evanston Community Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Northwestern University · Elizabeth Beidler Tisdahl Foundation · Field Foundation of Illinois · Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation · AbbVie Foundation · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program
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 Margaret Sagan 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.
- American Academy of Arts & Sciences — 3% 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 John and Margaret Sagan Foundation?
Find your warmest path to John and Margaret Sagan 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.