· Public charity
Mercatus Center Inc
The Center builds and maintains a vibrant community of scholars dedicated to market-oriented thinking and classical liberal principles.
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.
The 50 grants below total $2,850,041 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $10,877,082 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $8,027,041 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k1 grant · $7k
- $10k–50k35 grants · $706k
- $50k–250k13 grants · $1.0M
- $250k+1 grant · $1.1M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Kyiv School of Economics | $1,100,000 |
| George Mason University Foundation | $185,887 |
| Ukraine Global Scholars Foundation | $100,000 |
| ChinaTalk Group LLC | $100,000 |
| Digital Harbor Foundation Inc | $100,000 |
| The Argument Inc | $100,000 |
| California Institute of Technology | $86,219 |
| The Econ Of LLC | $65,000 |
| Nucleate Bio | $50,000 |
| The David Network | $50,000 |
| Women's Health Fund | $50,000 |
| Center for Innovative Governance Research | $50,000 |
| ARC Prize Foundation | $50,000 |
| Edge Institute Inc | $50,000 |
| Energy for Growth Hub | $40,000 |
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 (FY23–24, $55k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 64% 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
Grants abroad, by region — $5.9M on the FY2025 return
Schedule F, as filed: 9 regions, $2.3M to organizations and $3.6M to individuals. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: Research Grant · Student development/education fellowships, research grants, and stipend support
Stated purpose: Research Grant · Student development/education fellowships, research grants, and stipend support
Stated purpose: Student Development/education grant · Research Grant · Student development/education fellowships, research grants, and stipend support
Stated purpose: Research Grant · Student development/education fellowships, research grants, and stipend support
Stated purpose: Student Development/education grant · Student development/education fellowships, research grants
Stated purpose: Research Grant · Student development/education fellowships, research grants, and stipend support
Stated purpose: Student development/education fellowships, research grants, and stipend support
Stated purpose: Research Grant · Student development/education fellowships, research grants
Stated purpose: Student development/education fellowships, research grants
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. Grants abroad on Schedule F are filed by region, purpose and amount with no recipient name, so they are shown by region and cannot be placed on the country map or matched to a grantee.
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 +36% since the first grant, against +11% for the ones you funded once.
58 repeat relationships — 15 still active in FY2025, 43 since wound down; 34 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, 64% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1.0M 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
- KSKYIV SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS4× · 2022–2025 · $3.3M · revenue +10%
- CHChildren's Hospital Corporation2× · 2020–2021 · $1.6M · revenue +55%
ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI2× · 2020–2021 · $1.3M · revenue +39%
Funded once
- EIESSENTIAL IMPACT INCone grant, 2023 · $1.0M · 36% of their budget
- UDUKRAINE DEFENSE FUND INCone grant, 2023 · $500k · revenue -87%
- CSCOLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORYgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $500k · revenue +26%
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 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'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…
Wpi transforms lives, turns knowledge into action to confront global challenges, and revolutionizes stem through distinctive and inclusive education, projects and research. (http://www.wpi.edu/about/mission.html)
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…
See Disclosure Above.
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.
As a leading research university with a distinctive commitment to undergraduate education, Rice University aspires to path breaking research, unsurpassed teaching, and contributions to the betterment of our world. It seeks to fulfill this…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
Claremont Graduate University prepares individuals to be leaders for positive change in the world. Unique in its transdisciplinary approach, the University is dedicated to the creation, dissemination, and application of new knowledge and…
The mission of the university of chicago has been to sustain at the highest level of excellence, the communication of knowledge, the creation of knowledge and the fostering of a dynamic community of scholars and students.
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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is University of Kentucky Research Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Chinese Reconciliation Project Foundation. 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 30 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) — 12% of your grantees by number, and just 6% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% 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.
135 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. 135 of the 245 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 KYIV SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Yale University ↗
- Who funds Children's Hospital Corporation ↗
- Who funds ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Emory University ↗
- Who funds Cornell University ↗
- Who funds GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ESSENTIAL IMPACT INC ↗
- Who funds THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE SCRIPPS RESEARCH INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds THE ADMINISTRATORS OF THE TULANE EDUCATIONAL FUND ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds UKRAINE DEFENSE FUND INC ↗
- Who funds COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds PROGRESSIVE LEARNING INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds Development Data Lab Inc ↗
- Who funds Trustees of Tufts College ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds 1DAY SOONER INC ↗
- Who funds THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL PUBLIC HEALTH FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION FOR A NEW AMERICAN UNIVERSITY ↗
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 Seminar Network Inc · Charles Koch Foundation · Good Ventures Foundation · Donors Trust Inc · Atlas Economic Research Foundation · Charles Koch Institute · Founders Pledge Inc · John Templeton Foundation · The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Inc · John William Pope Foundation · Yale University · Sarah Scaife Foundation Incorporated
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 Mercatus Center 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 13% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Yale University — 12% of income from government
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- Children's Hospital Corporation — 10% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research — 7% of income from government
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc — 7% of income from government
- Digital Harbor Foundation — 2% of income from government
- Suffolk University — 1% of income from government
- Addgene Inc — 0% of income from government
- Rutgers University Foundation — 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.