· Private foundation
Michigan Foundation for Vision Awareness
Its FY2025 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2021–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k1 grant · $251
- $10k–50k7 grants · $124k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| EYE CARE FOR DETROIT | $28,291 |
| EXALTA HEALTH | $20,929 |
| UD MERCY SCHOOL OF OPTOMETRY | $20,000 |
| DR GARY BURNSTEIN CLINIC | $15,000 |
| FERRIS STATE UNIVERSITY | $15,000 |
| MICHIGAN COLLEGE OF OPTOMETRY - SVOSH | $14,330 |
| FERRIS STATE UNIVERSITY | $10,715 |
| MICHIGAN COLLEGE OF OPTOMETRY | $251 |
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 (FY21–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 16%, against an area that typically sits at 16%. 59% 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 Michigan Foundation for Vision Awareness’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. Read by recipient address, 98% of the giving stays in MI; read by stated purpose it is 90% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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 +20% since the first grant, against +20% for the ones you funded once.
8 repeat relationships — 4 still active in FY2025, 4 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, 45% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $69k 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
- MCMICHIGAN COLLEGE OF OPTOMETRY5× · 2021–2025 · $123k
- HIHEALTH INTERVENTION SERVICES3× · 2022–2025 · $98k · revenue +5%
- MCMICHIGAN COLLEGE OF OPTOMETRY - SVOSH4× · 2022–2025 · $82k
Funded once
- HUHEALTH UNIT DAVISON AVE (HUDA) CLINICone grant, 2022 · $53k
- EEversightone grant, 2023 · $50k · revenue +11%
- GLGreat Lakes Bay Health Centersone grant, 2024 · $49k · revenue +23%
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.
None
To provide comprehensive outpatient mental health services to over 5400 individuals and their families in a consumer driven person centered delivery system. Approximately 15% of our staff members are our clients who are involved in a…
To provide high quality community-oriented, patient-centered health services for all.
Open Cities Health Center is a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) whose mission is to provide culturally competent primary and preventive healthcare services to a largely underserved population in the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
Cherry Street Health Services improves the health and wellness of individuals by providing comprehensive primary and behavioral health care while encouraging access by those who are underserved.
Hope is a not-for-profit interdenominational christian medical, dental, and social service organization. hope's goal is to provide compassionate and practical help, ministering to the whole person with dignity and respect. this includes…
To provide access to high quality, comprehensive, primary healthcare in cook county to all users, regardless of financial ability to pay for service.
To eliminate treatable blindness through the training of eye care professionals and development of eye care infrastructure.
Creating healthy communities - together
Brighton marine, inc. provides military and veteran families with comprehensive campus-based quality health care, as well as affordable and supportive housing for at-risk veterans and their families.
To improve the communitys health through the efficient provision, coordination, and integration of quality health services, health education, and research. To provide compassionate, quality health services according to the spiritual,…
We are dedicated to providing exceptional healthcare - centered around you.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Health Intervention Services and the most unlike its peers is Dames and Knights of the Order of Malta Medical and Dental Clinic of. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
8 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. 8 of the 23 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 HEALTH INTERVENTION SERVICES ↗
- Who funds Eversight ↗
- Who funds Great Lakes Bay Health Centers ↗
- Who funds ASSOCIATION FOR THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED ↗
- Who funds BALDWIN FAMILY HEALTH CARE INC ↗
- Who funds SPECIAL OLYMPICS MICHIGAN INC ↗
- Who funds DAMES AND KNIGHTS OF THE ORDER OF MALTA MEDICAL AND DENTAL CLINIC OF ↗
- Who funds Southern College of Optometry ↗
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: Donor Advised Charitable Giving 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 Michigan Foundation for Vision Awareness 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.
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How do I get to Michigan Foundation for Vision Awareness?
Find your warmest path to Michigan Foundation for Vision Awareness 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.