· Private foundation
The Alcon Foundation Inc
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 FY2019–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k7 grants · $45k
- $10k–50k62 grants · $840k
- $50k–250k28 grants · $2.6M
- $250k+2 grants · $2.0M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ALCON CHILDRENS VISION CENTER | $1,500,000 |
| PROJECT ORBIS INTERNATIONAL INC | $550,000 |
| VISIONSPRING | $175,000 |
| HELEN KELLER INTERNATIONAL | $150,000 |
| SURGICAL EYE EXPEDITIONS INTERNATIONAL INC | $150,000 |
| FOUNDATION OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF OPHTHALMOLOGY | $150,000 |
| EYELLIANCE INC | $150,000 |
| HIMALAYAN CATARACT PROJECT INC | $140,000 |
| MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM INCORPORATED | $125,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL EYE FOUNDATION | $120,000 |
| OPHTHALMOLOGY FOUNDATION | $100,000 |
| VISION FOR THE POOR | $100,000 |
| RETINA GLOBAL | $100,000 |
| VISION CARE USA INC | $100,000 |
| EMORY UNIVERSITY | $85,000 |
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 (FY20–24, $1.4M) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 82% 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 +36% since the first grant, against +21% for the ones you funded once.
129 repeat relationships — 85 still active in FY2024, 44 since wound down; 13 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, 96% 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
- ACALCON CHILDREN'S VISION CENTER4× · 2021–2024 · $4.6M · revenue +82% · 100% of their budget
- TFTHE FOUNDATION OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF OPHTHALMOLOGY5× · 2020–2024 · $1.0M · revenue +37%
- HKHELEN KELLER INTERNATIONAL5× · 2020–2024 · $1.0M · revenue +47%
Funded once
- OIORBIS INTERNATIONALone grant, 2020 · $861k
- SSIGHTLIFEone grant, 2019 · $325k
- VVISIONSPRINGone grant, 2019 · $275k
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.
OneSight is a leading global nonprofit 501(c)(3)organization dedicated to creating a world where lack of access to vision care is no longer a barrier to human achievement and potential. From one-day charitable clinics, serving those with…
None
To empower lives by restoring vision for millions of people in need.
Houston eye associates foundation is committed to preserving and restoring sight with comprehensive eye care surgeries, medications, and ancillary services for individuals in financial hardship; and supporting education and research…
Our mission is to improve quality of life by transforming the understanding, treatment, and care of the ocular surface.
The mission of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council is to drive evidence-based improvement in patient care and health equity throughout the region.
To work towards eradicating curable blindness all over india. our key program is vision 20/20 - with the goal of performing 500,000 free surgeries per year throughout india. we have been primarily partnering with sankara eye foundation in…
The organization provides medical care to improve, maintain, and restore the health of the people in the communities we serve.
Empower communities worldwide to improve eye health and eliminate preventable blindness.
To eliminate disparities in health care access and outcomes by providing superior quality health and human services through an integrated world-class delivery system for latino, multi-ethnic underserved communities in southern california.
Friends for sight works passionately each day to save sight and change lives. we do this by providing free vision screenings, working to ensure that people of all ages and backgrounds have access to quality eye care, and disseminating…
Doctors of optometry working together to advance excellence in eyecare for every texan.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Visionspring Inc and the most unlike its peers is International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent Soc At the Un 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 36 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) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 21% 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.
173 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. 173 of the 266 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 ALCON CHILDREN'S VISION CENTER ↗
- Who funds PROJECT ORBIS INTERNATIONAL INC ↗
- Who funds THE FOUNDATION OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF OPHTHALMOLOGY ↗
- Who funds HELEN KELLER INTERNATIONAL ↗
- Who funds VISIONSPRING INC ↗
- Who funds EYELLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL EYE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Mercy Ships International ↗
- Who funds SIGHTLIFE ↗
- Who funds SURGICAL EYE EXPEDITIONS INTERNATIONAL INC ↗
- Who funds Emory University ↗
- Who funds ORANGE COUNTY'S UNITED WAY ↗
- Who funds FORT WORTH AREA HABITAT FOR HUMANITY ↗
- Who funds RETINA GLOBAL ↗
- Who funds OPHTHALMOLOGY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FORT WORTH MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND HISTORY ↗
- Who funds SERVE THE PEOPLE INC ↗
- Who funds MASSACHUSETTS EYE & EAR INFIRMARY ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR EDUCATION AND RESEARCH IN VISION INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CATARACT AND REFRACTIVE SURGERY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SIGHTSAVERS INC ↗
- Who funds WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF PIKEVILLE ↗
- Who funds SPECIAL OLYMPICS OF TEXAS INC ↗
- Who funds Illinois College of Optometry ↗
- Who funds VISION FOR THE POOR ↗
- Who funds Georgia Lions Lighthouse Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds HIMALAYAN CATARACT PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds Prevent Blindness Texas ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF BERKS COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds Junior Achievement of Georgia ↗
- Who funds NORTH TEXAS AREA COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTER ↗
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: Thomas M Helen McKee & John P Ryan Fo John P Ryan Foundation Inc · Sid W Richardson Foundation · Amon G Carter Foundation · Community Foundation of North Texas (Tax · Garvey Texas Foundation Inc · United Way of Tarrant County · Ann L Rhodes and Carol Greene Rhodes · The Morris Foundation · Bnsf Railway Foundation · Crystelle Waggoner Charitable Trust · Amon G Carter-Star Tele Emply Fund · Mary Potishman Lard Trust Walker C Friedman Co Trustee
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 The Alcon Foundation Inc 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to The Alcon Foundation Inc?
Find your warmest path to The Alcon Foundation Inc 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.