· Private foundation
The Ds 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.
Read this first · the figures below need context
53% of The Ds Foundation’s FY2024 grant dollars went to National Philanthropic Trust, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2024 names 10 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it. Everything below is therefore FY2020, the last year The Ds Foundation named its own grantees at scale: 8 organizations, $10M. It is dated, not current.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
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 · FY2020
- Under $10k5 grants · $7k
- $10k–50k3 grants · $47k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $250k
- $250k+1 grant · $10M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| PRINCETON- GIFT | $10,000,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI | $100,000 |
| TECHTOWN DETROIT | $100,000 |
| THE MIAMI FOUNDATION | $50,000 |
| INDIASPORA | $25,000 |
| Presidents & Fellows OF HARVARD COLLEGE | $12,001 |
| PANIIT | $10,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN | $2,500 |
| TRUSTEES OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY | $2,001 |
| NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE & EDUCATIONAL FUND | $1,000 |
| CRY AMERICA | $500 |
| AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY | $500 |
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, $317k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 0% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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 +66% since the first grant, against +1% for the ones you funded once.
5 repeat relationships — 3 still active in FY2020, 2 since wound down; 27 grantees were first funded in FY2020 (too recent to call). Read against FY2020, the last year this funder named its own grantees directly; its giving has since run through a sponsor, which reports no donor behind each grant.
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, 99% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $34k 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
- UOUniversity of Miami5× · 2020–2024 · $12M · revenue +66%
- IINDIASPORA5× · 2020–2024 · $317k · revenue +93%
- TOTrustees of Princeton University5× · 2020–2024 · $20k
Funded once
- PGPRINCETON- GIFTone grant, 2020 · $10M
WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY PARK IN THE CITY OF DETROITone grant, 2020 · $100k · revenue -12%- IMIndiaspora - Miracle Foundationone grant, 2021 · $50k
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.
Organization's mission: boston university is an international, comprehensive, private research university, committed to educating students to be reflective, resourceful individuals ready to live, adapt, and lead in an interconnected world.…
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.
Biu produces students who excel in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business & the arts.
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.
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
Sanford burnham prebys medical discovery institute's mission is to advance the biomedical sciences by cultivating the next generation of scientific leaders, providing meaningful opportunities for researchers of all backgrounds to learn,…
The Academy's mission is to enhance member career fulfillment and promote brain health for all.
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'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…
We educate the next generation of leaders to improve the health of our society.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Naacp Legal Defense & Educ Fund Inc and the most unlike its peers is Paniit 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 25 years old; the field is 19. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 9% 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.
27 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. 27 of the 35 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 NATIONAL PHILANTHROPIC TRUST ↗
- Who funds University of Miami ↗
- Who funds INDIASPORA ↗
- Who funds THE MIAMI FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY PARK IN THE CITY OF DETROIT ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds ACHIEVE MIAMI INC ↗
- Who funds IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation ↗
- Who funds BARROW STREET NURSERY SCHOOL AT GREENWICH HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds AFRICA YOGA PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds Federation of Jain Associations in North America ↗
- Who funds FELLOWSHIPS AT AUSCHWITZ FOR THE STUDY OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS INC ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF YOGA THERAPISTS INC ↗
- Who funds PANIIT INC ↗
- Who funds LAWYERS FOR CHILDREN INC ↗
- Who funds University of Michigan ↗
- Who funds OLIGO NATION ↗
- Who funds Documenting Hope Inc ↗
- Who funds JAIN SOCIETY OF GREATER DETROIT SHAH ↗
- Who funds NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE & EDUC FUND INC ↗
- Who funds GLIOBLASTOMA RESEARCH ORGANIZATION INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds CRY-CHILD RIGHTS AND YOU AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds THE BRONX DEFENDERS ↗
- Who funds MARCY LAB INC ↗
- Who funds American Heart Association Inc ↗
- Who funds BLOOD CANCER UNITED 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: The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Charities Aid Foundation America · National Philanthropic Trust · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · Verizon Foundation · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Network for Good
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 Ds 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- University of Miami — 5% 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 Ds Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Ds 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.