· Private foundation
The Andrew W Mellon 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
- $10k–50k16 grants · $417k
- $50k–250k172 grants · $26M
- $250k+660 grants · $529M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES | $8,556,000 |
| CITY OF RICHMOND | $7,000,000 |
| THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF BLACKS IN DANCE INC | $5,600,000 |
| FREEDOM READS | $5,000,000 |
| WGBH EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION | $5,000,000 |
| MONTPELIER FOUNDATION | $4,282,000 |
| MONUMENT LAB | $4,000,000 |
| LOS ANGELES NOMADIC DIVISION | $3,950,000 |
| NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN THE UNITED STATES | $3,500,000 |
| FIDELITY CHARITABLE | $3,485,813 |
| HUNTER COLLEGE | $3,468,000 |
| THE CITY OF CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS AND SPECIAL EVENTS | $3,400,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT SANTA CRUZ | $3,000,000 |
| SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION | $3,000,000 |
| CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY AT FRESNO | $2,944,000 |
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 (FY18–24, $26.1M) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 96% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 5% of The Andrew W Mellon 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. Read by recipient address, 25% of the giving stays in NY; read by stated purpose it is 27% — more of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +28% since the first grant, against +8% for the ones you funded once.
907 repeat relationships — 430 still active in FY2024, 477 since wound down; 249 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, 76% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $125M 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
- ACAMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES8× · 2017–2024 · $129M · revenue +33% · 68% of their budget
- UOUniversity of Michigan8× · 2017–2024 · $39M · revenue +202%
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION8× · 2017–2024 · $24M · revenue +34%
Funded once
- JFJazz Foundation of America Incgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $5.0M · revenue +728%
- EUEMORY UNIVERSITYone grant, 2023 · $3.8M
- DODEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS CITY OF LOS ANGELESone grant, 2023 · $3.0M
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.
To collect, display and interpret objects in craft art and design.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
The mission of the national academy of design is to promote the fine arts in america through exhibition and education.
The center for arts, design and social research is a private, nonprofit institution of higher education that provides instruction in and conducts research on the relationship of art and design to global societies. the center offers…
New york school of interior design provides the most innovative, immersive, and transformative interior design education in the world, demonstrating the impact of professionally designed interiors on the health, happiness, and well-being…
The mission of rhode island school of design, through its college and museum,is to educate its students and the public in the creation and (see schedule o)appreciation of works of art and design, to discover and transmit knowledge and to…
Seeks to expand the boundaries of theater, producing, performing and presenting works of literary, experimental and educational value. provide a home for outstanding artists, a training ground for young artists (including an extensive…
The Morgan Library & Museum celebrates and shares the history and process of human creativity from antiquity to the present day through the preservation, study, and interpretation of a dynamic and growing collection.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Cultureworks Greater Philadelphia and the most unlike its peers is Science for Monks. 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 35 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) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.8% 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.
1401 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. 1401 of the 1,838 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 AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES ↗
- Who funds TIDES CENTER ↗
- Who funds COUNCIL ON LIBRARY AND INFORMATION RESOURCES ↗
- Who funds University of Michigan ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds NEW ENGLAND FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds New York University ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN THE UNITED STATES ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds WGBH Educational Foundation ↗
- Who funds FRACTURED ATLAS INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL PARK FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FIDELITY INVESTMENTS CHARITABLE GIFT FUND ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds Cornell University ↗
- Who funds United States Artists Inc ↗
- Who funds CENTRO DE ECONOMIA CREATIVA INC ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE FOR CITIZENS AND SCHOLARS ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds The New York Public Library Astor Lenox and Tilden Foundations ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN INDIAN COLLEGE FUND ↗
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 Howard Gilman Foundation Inc · Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Inc · The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc · Terra Foundation for American Art · New England Foundation for the Arts Incorporated · The Shubert Foundation Inc · Jerome Foundation Inc · Mid Atlantic Arts Inc · Booth Ferris Foundation Xxxxx4008 · The Ford Foundation · The Fan Fox and Leslie R Samuels Foundation Inc · The Map Fund Inc
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 Andrew W Mellon 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.
- Mid Atlantic Arts Inc — 66% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 13% of income from government
- Freedom Reads Inc — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- New England Foundation for the Arts Incorporated — 8% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Northeastern University — 7% of income from government
- Silk Road Project Inc — 4% of income from government
- Five Colleges Incorporated — 3% of income from government
- The Theater Offensive Inc — 2% of income from government
- New England Conservatory of Music — 1% of income from government
- The Institute of Contemporary Art Inc — 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
- Wgbh Educational Foundation — 1% of income from government
- Amherst College Trustees — 0% of income from government
- Emerson College — 0% of income from government
- Oregon Shakespeare Festival Association 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.