· Public charity
Society of Photo Optical Instrumentation Engineers
SPIE is an international nonprofit technical society dedicated to advancing scientific research and engineering applications of optical, photonic, imaging and optoelectronic technologies through its meetings, education programs and publications.
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.
The 10 grants below total $879,985 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $2,951,440 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $2,071,455 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 · FY2024
- Under $10k3 grants · $18k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $35k
- $50k–250k4 grants · $325k
- $250k+1 grant · $502k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Trustees of Boston University | $501,500 |
| University of Colorado Foundation | $100,000 |
| Tuskegee University | $100,000 |
| California Institute of Technology | $75,000 |
| UT Southwestern Medical Ctr | $50,000 |
| Michigan Tech University | $20,350 |
| Monroe Community College Foundation | $15,000 |
| UR SPIE Student Chapter | $6,500 |
| Ithaka Harbors Inc | $6,460 |
| The Regents of the University of California | $5,175 |
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 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 91% 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
Grants abroad, by region — $1.4M on the FY2024 return
Schedule F, as filed: 8 regions, $706k to organizations and $687k to individuals. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: Donations and Support · Donations & Support · Awards
Stated purpose: Outreach Grant, Student Chapter Activity Grant · Donations & Support · Awards
Stated purpose: Awards · Donations & Support · Scholarships
Stated purpose: Awards · Scholarships · Conference Fee Waivers
Stated purpose: Awards · Scholarships · Family Care Grants
Stated purpose: Donations & Support · Awards · Scholarships
Stated purpose: Scholarships · Conference Fee Waivers · Outreach Grants
Stated purpose: Family Care Grants · Conference Fee Waivers · Student Travel Support
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 +32% since the first grant, against +6% for the ones you funded once.
11 repeat relationships — 6 still active in FY2024, 5 since wound down; 4 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, 74% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $230k 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 COLORADO FOUNDATION3× · 2020–2024 · $610k · revenue +76%
TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY2× · 2019–2024 · $577k · revenue +32%
University of Arizona Foundation2× · 2019–2022 · $545k · revenue +20%
Funded once
Vanderbilt Universityone grant, 2021 · $500k · revenue -1%- ROREGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT IRVINEone grant, 2021 · $75k
- UOUNIVERSITY OF HOUSTONone grant, 2020 · $75k
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.
Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.
Education and Research
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)
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
The university of virginia investment management company (uvimco) is organized to invest funds on behalf of the rector and visitors of the university of virginia (the university or uva) and university-associated organizations (uaos).
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 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 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…
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
The mission of the montana tech foundation is to advance the teaching, research and public service endeavors of montana tech by generating private contributions to supplement the institution's state and federal revenues for capital,…
The university of tulsa is a student-centered research university that cultivates interconnected learning experiences to explore complex ideas and create new knowledge in a spirit of free inquiry. guided by our commitment to diversity,…
A diverse and sustainable learning community dedicated to discovery and excellence in teaching, scholarship and practice, pacific university inspires students to think, care, create and pursue justice in our world.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is University of Arizona Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Sciencecounts Inc. 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 59 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.
28 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. 28 of the 44 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 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds University of Arizona Foundation ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER ↗
- Who funds Vanderbilt University ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Tuskegee University ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds DELAWARE STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN - RIVER FALLS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds MOREHOUSE COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds UT SOUTHWESTERN HEALTH SYSTEMS ↗
- Who funds MONROE COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ITHAKA HARBORS INC ↗
- Who funds ENVIRONMENT NEXT INC ↗
- Who funds OSA Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds ARIZONA TECHNOLOGY COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds Michigan Tech Fund ↗
- Who funds Spark Museum of Electrical Invention ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND COLLEGE PARK FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds SCIENCECOUNTS INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL SPACE SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds ROCHESTER MUSEUM & SCIENCE CENTER ↗
- Who funds American Association of Physics Teachers 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: Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · American Endowment Foundation · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · 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 Society of Photo Optical Instrumentation Engineers 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 Boston University — 12% of income from government
- American Association of Physics Teachers Inc — 2% 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.