· Private foundation
The Charles a Dana Foundation Incorporated
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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k36 grants · $125k
- $10k–50k39 grants · $773k
- $50k–250k21 grants · $2.9M
- $250k+7 grants · $5.0M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES | $2,000,000 |
| MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL (MGH) | $1,000,000 |
| LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO | $750,000 |
| BROWN UNIVERSITY | $354,406 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY | $353,500 |
| AMERICAN BRAIN FOUNDATION | $283,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA | $262,998 |
| SOCIAL GOOD FUND | $235,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON | $219,270 |
| JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY | $186,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IRVINE | $180,000 |
| BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE | $150,700 |
| USAGAINSTALZHEIMER'S | $150,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO | $150,000 |
| MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM INC | $150,000 |
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, $216k) land where the poverty rate runs at 17%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 99% 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 16% of The Charles a Dana Foundation Incorporated’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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +37% since the first grant, against +23% for the ones you funded once.
134 repeat relationships — 54 still active in FY2024, 80 since wound down; 41 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, 68% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $2.5M 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
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc5× · 2020–2024 · $435k · revenue +73%
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY2× · 2022–2024 · $336k · revenue +26%
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE2× · 2023–2024 · $332k · revenue +5%
Funded once
- THThe Hastings Center Incgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $242k · revenue +37%
- IKINCF Karolinska Institutetone grant, 2020 · $200k
- ASArizona State Universityone grant, 2021 · $168k
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.
Nyu is a private university with approximately 60,000 matriculating students in 20 schools and institutes. nyu's primary missions are education, research and scholarship, and patient care.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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 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…
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
Operate a state-of-the-art, world-class genomic research center that creates and uses advanced genomics to understand the genetic basis of disease. for more information, see schedule o.
See Form 990, Part I, Line 1, Description of Organization Mission.
Education, research, medical services and other public services.
Dickinson college provides a useful, innovative and interdisciplinary education in the liberal arts and sciences to prepare students to lead rich and fulfilling lives of engaged global citizenship
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Make-a-Wish Foundation of America and the most unlike its peers is The Neue Galerie New York. 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 47 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 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.4% 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.
217 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. 217 of the 420 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 DANA ALLIANCE FOR BRAIN INITIATIVES INC ↗
- Who funds LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds Baylor College of Medicine ↗
- Who funds GREATER WASHINGTON EDUCATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN BRAIN FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NEW VENTURE FUND ↗
- Who funds READING TEAM INC ↗
- Who funds The Hastings Center Inc ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL GOOD FUND INC ↗
- Who funds ROCKEFELLER PHILANTHROPY ADVISORS INC ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL BRAIN BEE ↗
- Who funds USAGAINSTALZHEIMER'S ↗
- Who funds Chicago Council on Science & Technology ↗
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 New York Community Trust · Hamilton Family Foundation · Jewish Communal Fund · Van Beuren Charitable Foundation Inc · Boston Foundation Inc · The Hyde and Watson Foundation · The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Select Equity Group Foundation · The Simons Foundation Inc · The Bessemer Giving Fund · Pinkerton 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 The Charles a Dana Foundation Incorporated 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
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% 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
- Cox Science Center and Aquarium Inc — 6% of income from government
- The Wetlands Institute — 2% of income from government
- Nova Southeastern University Inc — 2% of income from government
- ME2 Orchestra Inc — 1% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Middlebury College — 1% of income from government
- Concord Antiquarian Society D/B/a Concord Museum — 1% of income from government
- Wheaton Arts & Cultural Center Inc — 1% of income from government
- Boston Symphony Orchestra Inc — 0% of income from government
- Washington College — 0% of income from government
- American Repertory Theatre Co Inc — 0% of income from government
- Partners in Health a Nonprofit Corporation — 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.
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Find your warmest path to The Charles a Dana Foundation Incorporated 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.