· Private foundation
John and Marilyn Wells 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
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 49% of JOHN AND MARILYN WELLS FAMILY FOUNDATION’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k27 grants · $71k
- $10k–50k8 grants · $160k
- $50k–250k6 grants · $550k
- $250k+1 grant · $500k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA-SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ART | $500,000 |
| ALEXANDRIA HOUSE | $100,000 |
| MOTION PICTURE & TELEVISION FUND | $100,000 |
| LOS ANGELES ROOM & BOARD | $100,000 |
| ENTERTAINMENT COMMUNITY FUND | $100,000 |
| SUNNYSIDE BAPTIST CHURCH | $100,000 |
| LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC ASSOCIATION | $50,000 |
| CORPORATION FOR SUPPORTIVE HOUSING | $45,000 |
| UCLA | $25,000 |
| NATIONAL FOSTER YOUTH INSTITUTE | $25,000 |
| SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GRANTMAKERS | $25,000 |
| BUTTERFLY'S HAVEN | $10,000 |
| UNITED WAY | $10,000 |
| USC CENTER ON PHILANTHROPY AND PUBLIC POLICY | $10,000 |
| MAYORS FUND FOR LOS ANGELES | $10,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $4.2M) 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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +53% since the first grant, against +15% for the ones you funded once.
53 repeat relationships — 36 still active in FY2024, 17 since wound down; 5 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, 98% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $31k 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
- MPMOTION PICTURE AND TELEVISION FUND8× · 2017–2024 · $2.6M · revenue +77%
- CMCarnegie Mellon University3× · 2017–2019 · $1.5M · revenue +15%
- AHALEXANDRIA HOUSE7× · 2018–2024 · $1.3M · revenue +12%
Funded once
- TTThe Thacher School Incgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $150k · revenue +26%
- SFSTORIES FROM THE FRONTLINEone grant, 2021 · $80k
- GFGO FOR PAS ALLIANCEone grant, 2023 · $50k · 33% of their budget
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 ucla foundation is the giving, receiving, and investing arm of the ucla campus. the foundation enables private donors to help build, sustain and advance one of the world's finest academic and research institutions. private philanthropy…
The organization is a non-partisan, membership based speakers' forum that connects business leaders, community members, and engaged individuals with shared interest in local, national, and global affairs. it provides an open and accessible…
The Television Academy is dedicated to celebrating excellence, innovation and the advancement of the telecommunications arts and sciences through recognition, education and leadership, while fostering a diverse, inclusive and accessible…
To distribute public affairs and other educational information in order to create an electronic bridge between californians and their public officials, and, in the process educate a new generation of voting citizens and civic leaders who…
Community organizing, education, advocacy, leadership development, direct services and organizational development for communities faced with immense poverty.
The los angeles conservancy is a nonprofit membership organization that works through education and advocacy to recognize, preserve, and revitalize the historic architectural and cultural resources of los angeles county.
Arts for la leads communities, artists and organizations to advocate for an equitable, healthy, and creative los angeles region through the arts.
Chamber's mission: design and advance opportunities and solutions for a thriving regional economy that are inclusive and globally competitive. 1) advocacy - be a bold advocate for business as a driver of a strong economy that enables…
To serve the public by producing world-class opera that preserves, promotes and advances the art form while embodying the diversity, spirit and artistic sensibility unique to los angeles. we envision an engaged and enlightened community in…
The san diego foundation inspires enduring philanthropy and enables community solutions to improve the quality of life in our region.
Hollywood food coalition welcomes people to dinner each night. we rescue and redistribute food daily to other organizations. we care for our immediate community through our wellness program. we build community with and through our…
Works by emerging filmmkaers from around the world, providing the losangeles community of entertainment professionals and film goers with aconstant surge of monthly screening events. nfmla provides a forumwhere filmmakers can be recognized…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Mayor's Fund for Los Angeles and the most unlike its peers is My Dog Is My Home Inc. 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 34 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 23% startups (under 5 years old) — 7% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 14% 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.
64 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. 64 of the 102 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 MOTION PICTURE AND TELEVISION FUND ↗
- Who funds Carnegie Mellon University ↗
- Who funds ALEXANDRIA HOUSE ↗
- Who funds THE ACTORS' FUND OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY INC ↗
- Who funds LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds CORPORATION FOR SUPPORTIVE HOUSING ↗
- Who funds Los Angeles Room & Board ↗
- Who funds THE RAPE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SUNNYSIDE BAPTIST CHURCH ↗
- Who funds The Thacher School Inc ↗
- Who funds UNITED FRIENDS OF THE CHILDREN ↗
- Who funds Imagine Los Angeles Inc ↗
- Who funds THE COLORADO COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GRANTMAKERS ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL FOSTER YOUTH INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds GO FOR PAS ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds ARRAY ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds THE SCHOOL OF LOS ANGELES ↗
- Who funds Big Sunday ↗
- Who funds DOWNTOWN WOMEN'S CENTER ↗
- Who funds LIBERTY HILL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITIES IN SCHOOLS OF LOS ANGELES INC ↗
- Who funds The Hanalei Initiative Inc ↗
- Who funds HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INC ↗
- Who funds BIG BROTHERS BIG SISTERS OF GREATER LOS ANGELES ↗
- Who funds Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International Inc ↗
- Who funds KAUAI FOOD BANK 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: California Community Foundation · The Ralph M Parsons Foundation · Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles · Conrad N Hilton Foundation · Liberty Hill Foundation · Weingart Foundation · The Deutsch Foundation · Rosenthal Family Foundation · United Way Inc · The Rose Hills Foundation · Greater Horizons · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management 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 John and Marilyn Wells 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.
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.