· Private foundation
Russell Sage Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k5 grants · $39k
- $10k–50k113 grants · $2.7M
- $50k–250k53 grants · $4.5M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Cornell University | $199,096 |
| Columbia University | $181,173 |
| University of California Los Angeles | $176,777 |
| University of Pennsylvania | $146,742 |
| New York University | $133,824 |
| Drake University | $129,353 |
| University of Pittsburgh | $125,057 |
| University of California Los Angeles | $100,000 |
| Harvard University | $99,999 |
| New York University | $99,840 |
| Boston College | $99,409 |
| University of California Berkeley | $98,448 |
| University of California San Diego | $97,511 |
| University of Nebraska Lincoln | $96,943 |
| University of California Los Angeles | $96,495 |
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 (FY17–24) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 77% 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.
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 15% of Russell Sage Foundation’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.
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.
116 repeat relationships — 62 still active in FY2024, 54 since wound down; 15 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (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 FY2024, 86% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $783k 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
- UOUniversity of Michigan8× · 2017–2024 · $2.2M · revenue +202% · 98% of their budget
- NYNew York University8× · 2017–2024 · $1.7M · revenue +76%
University of Chicago8× · 2017–2024 · $1.1M · revenue +56%
Funded once
- SSSOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCILone grant, 2022 · $175k · revenue -57%
- JJJohn Jay College of Criminal Justiceone grant, 2018 · $146k
- UOUniversity of Oklahomaone grant, 2023 · $137k
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 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…
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 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 bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
Manhattan university is an independent catholic instituion of higher learning that embraces qualified men and women of all faiths, cultures, and traditions. the mission of manhattan university is to provide a contemporary, person-centered…
Case Western Reserve University is an independent, research-oriented university with broadly based strengths in health, including medicine, nursing and dentistry; in engineering; in the arts and sciences; and in law, management and social…
Bates is a college of the liberal arts and sciences, and is a coeducational, nonsectarian, residential college with special commitments to academic rigor, and to assuring in all of its efforts the dignity of each individual, and access to…
Provides innovative education in a dynamic urban setting. dedicated to academic excellence and community engagement,we prepare students of diverse backgrounds with the knowledge, skill,and experience to lead meaningful lives as informed…
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)
Western new england university, a comprehensive private institution with a tradition of excellence in teaching and scholarship and a commitment to service, awards undergraduate, master's, and doctoral degrees in various departments from…
At Roger Williams University, students are prepared to be thinkers and doers ready to solve challenging problems with innovative solutions. RWU offers robust offerings of undergraduate, graduate and professional programs across eight…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Georgetown University and the most unlike its peers is Seattle University. 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 76 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) — 1% 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.
97 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. 97 of the 201 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 University of Michigan ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds New York University ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds DUKE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds The Trustees of Princeton University ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Carnegie Mellon University ↗
- Who funds Cornell University ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds Research Foundation of the City University of New York ↗
- Who funds University of Notre Dame du Lac ↗
- Who funds Trustees of Dartmouth College ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ↗
- Who funds GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Wellesley College ↗
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 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation · Alfred P Sloan Foundation · Gates Foundation · The Ford Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Laura and John Arnold Foundation · Carnegie Corporation of New York · Annie E Casey Foundation Inc · WK Kellogg Foundation · Charities Aid Foundation America · National Philanthropic Trust · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program
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 Russell Sage 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Jsi Research & Training Institute Inc — 69% of income from government
- National Bureau of Economic Research Inc — 48% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- University of Delaware — 30% 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
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- Brandeis University — 9% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Northeastern University — 7% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston College — 3% of income from government
- University of Hartford — 1% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Middlebury College — 1% of income from government
- Wesleyan University — 1% of income from government
- Wellesley College — 1% of income from government
- Assumption University — 0% of income from government
- Emmanuel College — 0% of income from government
- Amherst College Trustees — 0% of income from government
- Williams College — 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.