· Private foundation
The Dillon Fund
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.
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
- Under $10k18 grants · $80k
- $10k–50k26 grants · $510k
- $50k–250k8 grants · $658k
- $250k+2 grants · $815k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| The POLG Foundation Inc | $560,000 |
| Eaglebrook School | $255,000 |
| The Nature Conservancy - MDDC Chapter | $135,000 |
| Living Classrooms Foundation | $110,000 |
| The Conservation Fund | $100,000 |
| Islesboro Islands Trust | $100,000 |
| Turtle Key Arts Trust | $62,509 |
| Jemicy School | $50,000 |
| The Brookings Institution | $50,000 |
| Depaul USA | $50,000 |
| Montreux Jazz Artists Foundation | $30,000 |
| University of Rochester | $30,000 |
| Harvard School of Public Health | $30,000 |
| Global Caring Alliance | $30,000 |
| Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International | $30,000 |
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 (FY21–24, $160k) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 7% of The Dillon Fund’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 +20% since the first grant, against +5% for the ones you funded once.
47 repeat relationships — 36 still active in FY2024, 11 since wound down; 15 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, 80% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $407k 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
- TPTHE POLG FOUNDATION INC4× · 2021–2024 · $1.8M · revenue +300% · 64% of their budget
- DFDian Fossey Gorilla Fund International Inc4× · 2021–2024 · $345k · revenue +20%
- AFALLEN-CHASE FOUNDATION DBA EAGLEBROOK SCHOOL3× · 2021–2024 · $265k · revenue +29%
Funded once
- PLPEQUOT LIBRARY ASSOCIATIONone grant, 2021 · $250k · revenue -5%
- TNTHE NATURE CONSERVANCY IN VIRGINIAone grant, 2022 · $250k
- CACONNECTICUT AUDUBON SOCIETY INCone grant, 2023 · $150k · revenue +3%
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.
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
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 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.
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…
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.
The Museum of Modern Art is a private, non-profit institution chartered by the State of New York Department of Education in 1929 to foster public awareness of modern and contemporary art. (Continued in Schedule O)
The mission of the organization is to foster the development of creative individuals as writers and artists and to promote public appreciation of excellence in the literary and graphic arts by publishing a magazine containing fiction,…
(see schedule o)
To create a nation where everyone enjoys a fair share of our collective prosperity.
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 new york botanical garden is a museum of plants and a scientific research center devoted to the study of plants and their uses. it is the garden's mission to improve public understanding of the natural world, horticulture, and the…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Medecins Sans Frontieres Usa Inc and the most unlike its peers is Pripet Riding Program. 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 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 19% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 10% 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.
74 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. 74 of the 105 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 THE POLG FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International Inc ↗
- Who funds ALLEN-CHASE FOUNDATION DBA EAGLEBROOK SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds PEQUOT LIBRARY ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART ↗
- Who funds CONNECTICUT AUDUBON SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds CONNECTICUT INSTITUTE FOR REFUGEES AND IMMIGRANTS INC ↗
- Who funds HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INC ↗
- Who funds Islesboro Islands Trust ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds HORSESPEAK CENTER FOR PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT INC ↗
- Who funds THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds THE CONSERVATION FUND A NONPROFIT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds THE EQUUS EFFECT INC ↗
- Who funds Islesboro Affordable Property ↗
- Who funds GETTING OUT AND STAYING OUT INC ↗
- Who funds GROTON SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds MAMA HOPE INC ↗
- Who funds THE JEMICY SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds DEPAUL USA INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICANS FOR OXFORD INC ↗
- Who funds PRIPET RIDING PROGRAM ↗
- Who funds STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE UNITED WAY OF CENTRAL MARYLAND 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: Clarence & Anne Dillon Dunwalke Trust · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Baltimore Community Foundation Inc · Brown Advisory Charitable Foundation Inc · Ibm International Foundation · The United Way of Central Maryland Inc · T Rowe Price Program for Charitable Giving Inc · The Elizabeth Foundation · Windhover Foundation · Cannupa Foundation · Clayton Baker Trust · National Philanthropic Trust
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 Dillon Fund 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.
- Land Preservation Trust Inc — 64% of income from government
- Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants Inc — 37% of income from government
- The Equus Effect Inc — 16% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Jerusalem Peacebuilders Inc — 5% of income from government
- Mystic Seaport Museum Inc — 5% of income from government
- The United Way of Central Maryland Inc — 2% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Middlebury College — 1% of income from government
- Connecticut Audubon Society Inc — 1% of income from government
- Pequot Library Association — 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 The Dillon Fund?
Find your warmest path to The Dillon Fund 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.