· Private foundation
John R Eckel Jr 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–50k18 grants · $395k
- $50k–250k11 grants · $810k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Orange Show Foundation | $100,000 |
| Menil Foundation Inc | $100,000 |
| Whitney Museum of American Art | $100,000 |
| Whitney Museum of American Art | $100,000 |
| Menil Foundation Inc | $75,000 |
| Menil Foundation Inc | $75,000 |
| Genesys Works | $60,000 |
| Buffalo Bayou Partnership | $50,000 |
| Lawndale Art and Performance Center | $50,000 |
| The Museum of Fine Arts Houston | $50,000 |
| The Museum of Fine Arts Houston | $50,000 |
| Project Row Houses | $40,000 |
| Contemporary Arts Museum Houston | $40,000 |
| University of Houston | $30,000 |
| New Group Inc | $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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–24) land where the poverty rate runs at 17%, against an area that typically sits at 13%. 100% of your 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.
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 7% of John R Eckel Jr 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 +34% since the first grant, against -5% for the ones you funded once.
23 repeat relationships — 19 still active in FY2024, 4 since wound down; 1 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, 99% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $10k 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
- TMTHE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS HOUSTON8× · 2017–2024 · $4.9M · revenue +96%
- WMWHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART8× · 2017–2024 · $1.2M · revenue +161%
- LALawndale Art & Performance Center8× · 2017–2024 · $410k · revenue +75%
Funded once
- AHARMAND HAMMER MUSEUM OF ART AND CULTURAL CENTER INCone grant, 2022 · $20k · revenue -6%
- MMMISSISSIPPI MUSEUM OF ART INCone grant, 2022 · $15k · revenue -5%
- AHArmand Hammer Museumone grant, 2018 · $10k
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 museum's mission statement is: "to discover, interpret, and disseminate - through scientific research and education - knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe."
The Morgan Library & Museum celebrates and shares the history and process of human creativity from antiquity to the present day through the preservation, study, and interpretation of a dynamic and growing collection.
The metropolitan museum of art collects, studies, conserves, and presents significant works of art across all times and cultures in order to connect people to creativity, knowledge, and ideas.
The Museum of Modern Art is a private, non-profit institution chartered by the State of New York Department of Education in 1929 to foster public awareness of modern and contemporary art. (Continued in Schedule O)
Apex Art Curatorial Program is a resolutely noncommercial visual art exhibition space which provides curators and artists with a venue dedicated to ideas that are often too provocative or too small in scope for display elsewhere. Apex Art…
See schedule osfmoma believes the art of our time is vital and shares it with passion and purpose, and that art and the creative process can open minds and help build a better world. for that reason, we assemble unparalleled collections,…
To inspire, educate and cultivate curiosity through great works of art.
The mission of the Houston Museum of Natural Science shall be to preserve and advance the general knowledge of natural science; to enhance in individuals the knowledge of and delight in natural science and related subjects; and to maintain…
The phillips collection is the oldest museum of modern and contemporary art in the u.s. in addition to presentation of works from the permanent collection and special exhibitions, the museum maintains active educational, academic,…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Menil Foundation Inc and the most unlike its peers is Galveston Island Nature Tourism Council. 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 42 years old; the field is 13. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% 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 15% 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.
25 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. 25 of the 30 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 MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS HOUSTON ↗
- Who funds Menil Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds Lawndale Art & Performance Center ↗
- Who funds Project Row Houses ↗
- Who funds The Orange Show Foundation ↗
- Who funds THE NEW GROUP INC ↗
- Who funds ELTON JOHN AIDS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Contemporary Arts Museum Houston ↗
- Who funds Buffalo Bayou Partnership Inc ↗
- Who funds Rothko Chapel ↗
- Who funds Fotofest Inc ↗
- Who funds Houston Botanic Garden ↗
- Who funds ARTCOUNCIL INC DBA ARTADIA ↗
- Who funds William Marsh Rice University ↗
- Who funds Hermann Park Conservancy ↗
- Who funds GALVESTON ISLAND NATURE TOURISM COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds Gulf Coast - A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts ↗
- Who funds PROUNITAS INC ↗
- Who funds SHAKESPEARE THEATRE OF NEW JERSEY ↗
- Who funds ARMAND HAMMER MUSEUM OF ART AND CULTURAL CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds MISSISSIPPI MUSEUM OF ART INC ↗
- Who funds Astrodome Conservancy ↗
- Who funds UNITED JEWISH APPEAL-FEDERATION OF JEWISH PHILANTHROPIES OF NEW YORK 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 Brown Foundation Inc · Houston Endowment Inc · Greater Houston Community Foundation · Houston Arts Alliance · John P McGovern Foundation · The Elkins Foundation · The Andrew W Mellon Foundation · Oshman Foundation · Anchorage Foundation of Texas · The Wortham Foundation Inc · The Susan Vaughan Foundation Inc · The Cullen 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 John R Eckel Jr 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to John R Eckel Jr Foundation?
Find your warmest path to John R Eckel Jr 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.