· Private foundation
Spooner John and Susan Charitable Trust
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.
Read this first · the figures below need context
78% of Spooner John and Susan Charitable Trust’s FY2024 grant dollars went to President And Fellows Of Harvard College, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2024 names 0 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it. Everything below is therefore FY2023, the last year Spooner John and Susan Charitable Trust named its own grantees at scale: 6 organizations, $29k. It is dated, not current.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
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 · FY2023
- Under $10k10 grants · $19k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $10k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| NEW BEDFORD LIGHT | $10,000 |
| DANA FARBER CANCER INSTITUTE | $5,000 |
| THE JOEY FUND | $2,500 |
| HARVARD UNIVERSITY | $2,500 |
| ACE MENTOR PROGRAM GREATER BOSTON | $2,500 |
| COMBINED JEWISH PHILANTHROPIES | $2,000 |
| WBUR | $1,500 |
| BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $1,000 |
| BOSTON HEALTH CARE FOR THE HOMELESS | $1,000 |
| CONN AUDUBON SOCIETY | $1,000 |
| DARTMOUTH CULTURAL CENTER | $300 |
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 (FY17–23, $4k) land where the poverty rate runs at 16%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 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 +49% since the first grant, against +18% for the ones you funded once.
20 repeat relationships — 6 still active in FY2023, 14 since wound down; 4 grantees were first funded in FY2023 (too recent to call). Read against FY2023, the last year this funder named its own grantees directly; its giving has since run through a sponsor, which reports no donor behind each grant.
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, 64% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $2k 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
HUNTINGTON THEATRE CO INC5× · 2017–2022 · $38k · revenue +139%
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc4× · 2017–2023 · $16k · revenue +132%- NBNEW BEDFORD LIGHT2× · 2021–2023 · $15k · revenue +99%
Funded once
- BFBANKS FUND BW HOSPITALone grant, 2021 · $2k
- NHNE HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETone grant, 2019 · $1k
- BBBOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL INCgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $1k · revenue +108%
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 bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The mission of mit is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
New england law/boston dedicates itself to preparing students to be successful lawyers and leaders in the public and private sectors through integrated practical, theoretical and ethical education of the highest caliber and to contributing…
Wheaton college provides a transformative liberal arts education, combining theory and practice, for intellectually curious students within a collaborative and vibrant extended community and network that values and strives to create an…
The organization's primary exempt purpose is to provide access to and conduct activities in furtherance of higher education.
Mission strengthened by more than a century and a half of dedication to academic excellence, boston college commits itself to the highest standards of teaching and research in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs and to the…
Bb&n, an all gender day school in cambridge, massachusetts, was established in 1974 by the merger of two independent schools, the buckingham school and the browne & nichols school, founded respectively in 1889 and 1883. located on multiple…
The boston public library fund provides financial support to the boston public library (bpl), ensuring that it remains viable, engaging, accessible, and free to all. the library fund fulfills this mission by working in partnership with…
Wentworth institute of technology is a nationally recognized private coeducational and residential university of higher education with a mission to empower, inspire and innovate through experiential learning with a core purpose of career…
Dean college is a private, residential new england college grounded in a culture and tradition that all students deserve the opportunity to discover and exceed their greatest aspirations. a personal and transformative community since 1865,…
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…
The Boston Public Library provides educational and cultural enrichment free to all by engaging the public through programming and active spaces, restoring and preserving our history, providing access to borrow from our vast collection of…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is West End House Inc and the most unlike its peers is Rocky Mountain Aid 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 40 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 21% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 11% 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 45 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 President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds HUNTINGTON THEATRE CO INC ↗
- Who funds Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds NEW BEDFORD LIGHT ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE WHEELER SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY SERVINGS INC ↗
- Who funds Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc ↗
- Who funds THE AUTHORS GUILD FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds BROOKLINE EDUCATION FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BOSTON HEALTH CARE FOR THE HOMELESS PROGRAM INC ↗
- Who funds OUR SISTERS SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds BEACON HILL CIVIC ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL INC ↗
- Who funds BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC ↗
- Who funds ROCKY MOUNTAIN AID FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds George Stevens Academy ↗
- Who funds NICHOLS HOUSE MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds PREPARATORY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE LOBKOWICZ COLLECTIONS INC ↗
- Who funds USS CONSTITUTION MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds WEST END HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds PROJECT CITIZENSHIP INC ↗
- Who funds LATHAM CENTERS 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: Highland Street Connection and Subsidiaries · Boston Foundation Inc · Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc · Fidelity Foundation · Eastern Bank Foundation · Grayson Family Foundation · The Cabot Family Charitable Trust · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · National Philanthropic Trust · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · American Endowment 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 Spooner John and Susan Charitable Trust 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.
- Latham Centers Inc — 39% of income from government
- Buzzards Bay Coalition — 37% of income from government
- Uss Constitution Museum Inc — 17% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Community Servings Inc — 12% of income from government
- Project Citizenship Inc — 10% of income from government
- Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program Inc — 8% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc — 7% of income from government
- Huntington Theatre Co Inc — 4% of income from government
- West End House Inc — 2% of income from government
- Boston Book Festival Inc — 2% of income from government
- Boston Symphony Orchestra Inc — 0% of income from government
- Our Sisters School — 0% of income from government
- Emerson 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to Spooner John and Susan Charitable Trust?
Find your warmest path to Spooner John and Susan Charitable Trust 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.