· Private foundation
Joy 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
- Under $10k10 grants · $33k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $59k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $325k
- $250k+1 grant · $257k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| INERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE | $257,200 |
| AMERICAN ACADEMY IN BERLIN | $150,000 |
| MAYO CLINIC | $100,000 |
| ASPEN INSTITUTE | $75,000 |
| NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL | $22,100 |
| CHABAD JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER ASPEN | $16,000 |
| PITZER COLLEGE | $10,400 |
| OCEANA | $10,200 |
| SIXTH & I SYNAGOGUE | $5,000 |
| SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEURS | $5,000 |
| FAIRVOTE | $5,000 |
| MILTON ACADEMY | $4,300 |
| SCHOOL YEAR ABROAD | $4,000 |
| MERIT SCHOOL OF MUSIC | $3,000 |
| HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | $2,800 |
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 (FY18–21, $13k) land where the poverty rate runs at 17%, 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 +44% since the first grant, against +28% for the ones you funded once.
28 repeat relationships — 14 still active in FY2024, 14 since wound down; 3 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; $7k 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
- IRInternational Rescue Committee INC3× · 2017–2024 · $567k · revenue +81%
- AAAMERICAN ACADEMY IN BERLIN8× · 2017–2024 · $460k · revenue +37%
THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC6× · 2019–2024 · $360k · revenue +192%
Funded once
- TPTHE PRESIDENT & FELLOWS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITYone grant, 2017 · $50k
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2018 · $50k
- EIErikson Institutegraduatedone grant, 2019 · $5k · revenue +27%
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 peterson institute for international economics (piie) is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to strengthening prosperity and human welfare in the global economy through expert analysis and practical…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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.
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 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 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.
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…
Wri is committed to creating change that improves people's lives and ensures the natural world can thrive. (see schedule o)wri's bold vision requires a formula for success we call "count it. change it. scale it.":- count it: our work is…
See schedule onorc at the university of chicago conducts research and data science on critical societal issues to guide decision-making and the development of programs and public policy. our experts identify relationships and trends, and…
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 organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
To provide accurate, objective information and analysis on international strategic issues for legislators, diplomats, foreign affairs analysts, international business leaders, economists, the military, defense commentators, journalists,…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Aspen Institute Inc and the most unlike its peers is Camp for All Kids. 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) — 0% 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.
43 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. 43 of the 52 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 MAYO CLINIC ↗
- Who funds International Rescue Committee INC ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO COUNCIL ON GLOBAL AFFAIRS ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ACADEMY IN BERLIN ↗
- Who funds THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds THE BETTER ANGELS SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds SCHOOL YEAR ABROAD INC ↗
- Who funds COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds MERIT SCHOOL OF MUSIC ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEURS (SEE) INC ↗
- Who funds Pitzer College ↗
- Who funds Camp for All Kids ↗
- Who funds OCEANA INC ↗
- Who funds GIRLS WHO CODE INC ↗
- Who funds MILTON ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds ONEGOAL ↗
- Who funds Youth Guidance ↗
- Who funds FAIRVOTE ↗
- Who funds Rush University Medical Center ↗
- Who funds SHARE OUR STRENGTH ↗
- Who funds WINDY CITY PLAYHOUSE ↗
- Who funds HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INC ↗
- Who funds SIXTH & I SYNAGOGUE INC ↗
- Who funds Erikson Institute ↗
- Who funds KIPP CHICAGO SCHOOLS ↗
- Who funds ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF ARAVA THE INSTITUTE LTD ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds GARDENEERS ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART ↗
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: Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · Baird Foundation Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · American Endowment Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · Amazonsmile 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 Joy 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.
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Milton Academy — 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.