· Private foundation
Nielsen-Massey 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 FY2017–2023.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2023
- Under $10k5 grants · $20k
- $10k–50k12 grants · $160k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $100k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| JOHNSON & WALES UNIVERSITY | $100,000 |
| COMMON THREADS | $25,000 |
| WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC | $25,000 |
| GRAMEEN FOUNDATION | $15,000 |
| WATERAID AMERICA INC | $15,000 |
| DC CENTRAL KITCHEN | $10,000 |
| SHARE OUR STRENGTH - NO KID HUNGRY | $10,000 |
| PILOT LIGHT | $10,000 |
| PROJECT HARAMBEE | $10,000 |
| FEEDING AMERICA | $10,000 |
| HEALTHY SCHOOLS CAMPAIGN | $10,000 |
| GIGI'S PLAYHOUSE INC | $10,000 |
| COLLEGE OF LAKE COUNTY FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| FOUNDATION FOR CULINARY ARTS KENDAL COLLEGE TRUST | $7,500 |
| FARESTART | $5,000 |
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 (FY20–23, $50k) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 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 +60% since the first grant, against -43% for the ones you funded once.
23 repeat relationships — 17 still active in FY2023, 6 since wound down; 1 grantees were first funded in FY2023 (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 FY2023, 96% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $10k 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
- CTCOMMON THREADS7× · 2017–2023 · $125k · revenue +12%
Feeding America7× · 2017–2023 · $95k · revenue +84%- WAWATERAID AMERICA INC5× · 2017–2023 · $90k · revenue +63%
Funded once
- UWUNITED WAY OF LAKE COUNTY INCone grant, 2020 · $60k · revenue -43%
- WAWAYLAND ACADEMYone grant, 2021 · $50k · revenue +15%
CULINARY INSTITUTE OF AMERICAgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $40k · revenue +43%
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.
Improve the food value chain in developing countries by mobilizing corporate volunteers to share knowledge and expertise with small and growing food processors.
Together with communities, foodcorps serves to connect kids to healthy food in schools.
Accelerate the transformation to a healthy, sustainable and equitable food system.
Through philanthropy, empower current and future food and nutrition practitioners to optimize global health.
We empower food service programs and school districts to make food delicious, nourishing, and responsible through our evidence-based certification program. We provide education and support that inspires students, schools, and communities…
Our mission is to educate, organize and advocate for food and farming systems to become economically prosperous, ecologically sound and socially equitable.
Food forward fights hunger and prevents food waste by rescuing fresh surplus produce, connecting this abundance with people experiencing food insecurity, and inspiring others to do the same.
To nourish the world's hungry through uniting and advancing food banks.
The greater chicago food depository is the nonprofit food bank serving cook county. our mission - is to end hunger. we believe food is a basic human right. to achieve our mission, we work in partnership with a network of community-based…
Foundation for food and agriculture research connects funders, researchers and farmers through public-private partnerships to support audacious research addressing the biggest food and agriculture challenges.
Food alliance works at the juncture of science, business and values to define and promote sustainability in agriculture and the food industry, and to ensure safe and fair working conditions, humane treatment of animals, and careful…
To harness the power of food innovation and markets to make the global food system better for the planet, people, and animals by supporting efforts to make alternative proteins accessible, affordable, and delicious.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Feed My Starving Children Inc and the most unlike its peers is Alliance for a Just Society. 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 32 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 — 0.0% 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.
26 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. 26 of the 36 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 JOHNSON & WALES UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds COMMON THREADS ↗
- Who funds Feeding America ↗
- Who funds WATERAID AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds Healthy Schools Campaign ↗
- Who funds SHARE OUR STRENGTH ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF LAKE COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds THE DC CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds WAYLAND ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds ANOTHER ROUND ANOTHER RALLY ↗
- Who funds GRAMEEN FOUNDATION USA ↗
- Who funds CULINARY INSTITUTE OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds PILOT LIGHT ↗
- Who funds College of Lake County Foundation ↗
- Who funds SUSTAINABLE FOOD LABORATORY INC ↗
- Who funds RESTAURANT WORKERS COMMUNITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ALLIANCE FOR A JUST SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds OXFAM-AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds FARESTART ↗
- Who funds FREEDOM FROM HUNGER ↗
- Who funds ICING SMILES Inc ↗
- Who funds ANGELIC ORGANICS LEARNING CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR CULINARY ARTS ↗
- Who funds FEED MY STARVING CHILDREN INC ↗
- Who funds HOT BREAD KITCHEN LTD ↗
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: AbbVie Foundation · The Chicago Community Trust · Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Network for Good · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund
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 Nielsen-Massey 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.
- Oxfam-America Inc — 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.