· Private foundation
The Donnelley Foundation
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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k123 grants · $261k
- $10k–50k29 grants · $473k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE SONOMA TEACHING PROJECT | $36,000 |
| THE SONOMA TEACHING PROJECT | $36,000 |
| THE SONOMA TEACHING PROJECT | $36,000 |
| THE SOCIETY OF THE FOUR ARTS | $25,000 |
| LAKE FOREST COLLEGE | $20,000 |
| SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO | $20,000 |
| HELPING HANDS | $20,000 |
| MGH LEADERSHIP COUNCIL FOR PSYCHIATRIC FUND | $20,000 |
| CHICAGO YOUTH CENTERS | $20,000 |
| TUNNEL TO TOWERS FOUNDATION | $20,000 |
| THE MORTEM ARBORETUM | $15,000 |
| ST PAULS EPISCOPAL CHURCH | $15,000 |
| 4THOSE | $15,000 |
| NORTON MUSEUM OF ART | $14,500 |
| THE CHURCH OF BETHESDA-BY-THE-SEA | $13,000 |
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, $33k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 54% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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 +34% since the first grant, against +14% for the ones you funded once.
129 repeat relationships — 69 still active in FY2024, 60 since wound down; 39 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, 78% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $162k 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
Lake Forest College5× · 2020–2024 · $142k · revenue +50%- CYChicago Youth Centers5× · 2020–2024 · $124k · revenue +57%
NORTON MUSEUM OF ART INC5× · 2020–2024 · $88k · revenue +79%
Funded once
- TCTHE CHICAGO CLUB PRESERVATION FUNDone grant, 2023 · $60k
- TATHE ARLINGTON COMMON CAPITAL CAMPAIGNone grant, 2023 · $50k
- TSTHE SONOMA TEACHING PROIECTone grant, 2021 · $36k
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 Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is a world-renowned center for biological discovery and training that is notably affiliated with more than 60 Nobel Prize winners. Research is conducted by full-time faculty as well as hundreds of the…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Be a catalyst! Ignite our community's passion for nature and science.
To collect, display and interpret objects in craft art and design.
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 Detroit Historical Society tells Detroit's stories and why they matter through its exhibits, programs, outreach, and the preservation and dissemination of its artifacts and collections.
To preserve the unique character and natural resources of harvard.
Finance impacts everyone. as a socially relevant organization, the museum of american finance seeks to improve understanding of the influence of financial institutions and capital markets on the u.s. and global economies, and on…
To inspire conservation leadership by connecting people with wildlife and nature.
The organization's mission is to conserve and promote new england's native plants to ensure healthy, biologically diverse landscapes.
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.
Eastern national promotes the public's understanding and support of america's national parks and other public trust partners by providing quality educational experiences, products and services.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Field Museum of Natural History and the most unlike its peers is 4those. 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 43 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 4% 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.
143 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. 143 of the 300 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 Lake Forest College ↗
- Who funds Chicago Youth Centers ↗
- Who funds NORTON MUSEUM OF ART INC ↗
- Who funds The Society of the Four Arts Inc ↗
- Who funds THE MORTON ARBORETUM ↗
- Who funds THE LORD'S PLACE INC ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF HISTORIC SECOND CHURCH ↗
- Who funds MONTANA HISTORY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds LINCOLN PARK CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds 4those ↗
- Who funds FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL CRANE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds STEPHEN SILLER TUNNEL TO TOWERS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN THE UNITED STATES ↗
- Who funds Town of Palm Beach United Way Inc ↗
- Who funds SONOMA CHARTER SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds AUSTEN RIGGS CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds CHAPEL & YORK US FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE PHILANTHROPY WORKSHOP INC DBA FORWARD GLOBAL ↗
- Who funds LINCOLN PARK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds The Renew Democracy Initiative Inc ↗
- Who funds TROUT AND SALMON FOUNDATION ↗
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 Chicago Community Trust · Richard and Mary L Gray Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Red Bird Hollow Foundation · The Gorter Family Foundation · Norwottock Charitable Trust · Francis Beidler Foundation · Maine Community Foundation Inc · Terra Foundation for American Art · Helen V Brach Foundation · Dr Scholl Foundation · The Ayco Charitable 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 Donnelley 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.
- Out in the Open Inc — 25% of income from government
- Yale University — 12% of income from government
- The Lord's Place Inc — 12% of income from government
- Planned Parenthood of Northern New England Inc — 2% of income from government
- The Trustees of Reservations — 2% of income from government
- Proprietors of the Boston Athenaeum — 0% of income from government
- Historic Deerfield Inc — 0% of income from government
- Williams College — 0% of income from government
- Austen Riggs Center 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to The Donnelley Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Donnelley Foundation 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.