· Private foundation
Make Great Things Happen 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.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Ithaca College | $5,000 |
| Berkshire Woodworkers Guild | $4,000 |
| 518 Elevated | $4,000 |
| Donors Choose | $2,568 |
| St Marys Food Bank | $1,500 |
| PJ Library org | $1,500 |
| Captain Community Human Services | $1,100 |
| World Central Kitchen | $1,000 |
| St Jude Childrens Research Hospital | $1,000 |
| Hudson Valley Community College | $1,000 |
| Philadelphia Furniture Workshop | $1,000 |
| Saratoga Joinery | $1,000 |
| RPM Foundation | $850 |
| Vision to Learn | $750 |
| Deer Valley Education Foundation | $700 |
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, $6k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 26% 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.
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 +33% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
40 repeat relationships — 33 still active in FY2025, 7 since wound down; 5 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, 86% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $5k 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
- DDONORSCHOOSEORG6× · 2020–2025 · $19k · revenue +1%
- NWNORTHEASTERN WOODWORKERS ASSOCIATION INC3× · 2020–2024 · $7k · revenue +40%
ST JUDE CHILDREN'S RESEARCH HOSPITAL INC6× · 2020–2025 · $6k · revenue +78%
Funded once
- TSTHE SHAKER HERITAGE SOCIETYone grant, 2023 · $5k · revenue -86%
- RFREGIONAL FOOD BANK OF NORTHEASTERN NEW YORK INCgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $750 · revenue +242%
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2020 · $250
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 new york botanical garden is a museum of plants and a scientific research center devoted to the study of plants and their uses. it is the garden's mission to improve public understanding of the natural world, horticulture, and the…
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.
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 mission of the jewish museum is to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret art and jewish culture. see schedule o for more information.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
Nysci's mission is to nurture generations of passionate learners, critical thinkers, and active citizens through design make play - an approach to learning and engagement that is deeply rooted in research on stem learning and guides the…
Operate a state-of-the-art, world-class genomic research center that creates and uses advanced genomics to understand the genetic basis of disease. for more information, see schedule o.
The museum of the city of new york fosters understanding of the distinctive nature of urban life in the world's most influential metropolis. it engages visitors by celebrating, documenting, and interpreting the city's past, present, and…
The mission of the new york public library is to inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge, and strengthen our communities.
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)
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 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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is New York Landmarks Conservancy Inc and the most unlike its peers is American Museum of Natural History. 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 42 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) — 6% of your grantees by number, and just 4% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 5% 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.
36 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. 36 of the 54 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 518 ELEVATED INC ↗
- Who funds ITHACA COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds DONORSCHOOSEORG ↗
- Who funds NORTHEASTERN WOODWORKERS ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds ST JUDE CHILDREN'S RESEARCH HOSPITAL INC ↗
- Who funds RPM FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE SHAKER HERITAGE SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds VISION TO LEARN ↗
- Who funds CAPTAIN COMMUNITY HUMAN SERVICES INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds CITY MISSION OF SCHENECTADY ↗
- Who funds PACE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE BROOKLYN COLLEGE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE PHILHARMONIC SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NY INC ↗
- Who funds Pets for Vets Inc ↗
- Who funds THE ACTORS' FUND OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds ST MARY'S FOOD BANK ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK CITY CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds CLIFTON PARK HALFMOON EMERGENCY CORP ↗
- Who funds Society for the Prevention of Cruelty To Animals ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds SARATOGA JOINERY INC ↗
- Who funds PHILADELPHIA FURNITURE WORKSHOP ↗
- Who funds The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ↗
- Who funds REGIONAL FOOD BANK OF NORTHEASTERN NEW YORK INC ↗
- Who funds METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF 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: The Community Foundation for the Greater Capital Region Inc · Price Chopper's Golub Foundation · Ge Aerospace Foundation · Review Foundation · Pioneer Bank Charitable Foundation · American Express Foundation · Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Charities Aid Foundation America · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · American Online Giving Foundation 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 Make Great Things Happen 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 Make Great Things Happen Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Make Great Things Happen 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.