· Private foundation
Mason Foundation Inc
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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k8 grants · $51k
- $10k–50k14 grants · $370k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $81k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO AND SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO | $81,000 |
| MARINE CORPS SCHOLARSHIP FOUNDATION | $48,000 |
| HOOVER INSTITUTION AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY | $39,000 |
| LAKE FOREST COLLEGE | $39,000 |
| CHRISTIAN SCIENCE SOCIETY LIBERTYVILLE IL | $32,000 |
| VASSAR COLLEGE | $32,000 |
| RAVINIA FESTIVAL AND RAVINIA STEANS MUSIC INSTITUTE | $31,000 |
| CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $23,000 |
| JOHN G SHEDD AQUARIUM | $23,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL CRANE FOUNDATION | $23,000 |
| LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO | $23,000 |
| LAKE FOREST-LAKE BLUFF HISTORY CENTER | $16,000 |
| FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST SCIENTIST - BOSTON | $16,000 |
| OUTWARD BOUND USA | $13,000 |
| GOLDEN APPLE FOUNDATION | $12,000 |
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 (FY17–25, $44k) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 0% 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 +53% since the first grant, against -43% for the ones you funded once.
25 repeat relationships — 19 still active in FY2025, 6 since wound down; 3 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, 89% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $52k 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
- TATHE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO9× · 2017–2025 · $421k · revenue +45%
Lake Forest College9× · 2017–2025 · $366k · revenue +73%- MCMARINE CORPS SCHOLARSHIP FOUNDATION INC9× · 2017–2025 · $291k · revenue +28%
Funded once
- PFPROJECT FOR PUBLIC SPACES INCone grant, 2017 · $5k · revenue -43%
- EIETHNOMEDICINE INSTITUTEone grant, 2017 · $500
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 bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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 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 organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is a world-renowned center for biological discovery and training that is notably affiliated with more than 60 Nobel Prize winners. Research is conducted by full-time faculty as well as hundreds of the…
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…
Lake Forest Graduate School of Management's mission is to bring the real world to business education and leadership development.
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 purpose of the water research foundation (wrf) is a definitive research organization to advance the science of all things water to better meet the evolving needs of its subscribers and the water sector. to engage exclusively in…
Williams College strives to achieve educational excellence by fostering a community of learning in collaboration with students, faculty, staff, devoted alumni and parents.
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
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)
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation Inc and the most unlike its peers is World Wildlife Fund Inc. 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 62 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% 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 12% 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.
21 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. 21 of the 31 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 ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds Lake Forest College ↗
- Who funds MARINE CORPS SCHOLARSHIP FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Chicago Symphony Orchestra ↗
- Who funds VASSAR COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds Lyric Opera of Chicago ↗
- Who funds SHEDD AQUARIUM SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL CRANE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds GOLDEN APPLE FOUNDATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING ↗
- Who funds History Center of Lake Forest-Lake Bluff ↗
- Who funds MISS HALL'S SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds DEER PATH ART LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds WORLD MONUMENTS FUND INC ↗
- Who funds Gorton Community Center ↗
- Who funds WINDOW TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds THE MARINE MAMMAL CENTER ↗
- Who funds THE INSTITUTE FOR ETHNOMEDICINE INC DBA BRAIN CHEMISTRY LABS ↗
- Who funds WORLD WILDLIFE FUND INC ↗
- Who funds OUTWARD BOUND INC ↗
- Who funds PROJECT FOR PUBLIC SPACES 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 · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · Clarks Fork Foundation · Butler Family Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · 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 Mason Foundation Inc 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 Mason Foundation Inc?
Find your warmest path to Mason Foundation Inc 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.