· Private foundation
The Dudley H and Sally S Willis Charitable 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
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 44% of THE DUDLEY H AND SALLY S WILLIS CHARITABLE FOUNDATION’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k35 grants · $71k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $10k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UNITED WAY | $10,000 |
| ST ANDREW'S EPISCOPAL CHURCH | $8,000 |
| BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $6,000 |
| THE TRUSTEES | $5,000 |
| SHADY HILL SCHOOL | $5,000 |
| CHATHAM HALL | $5,000 |
| CHARLES RIVER SCHOOL | $5,000 |
| NORWICH UNIVERISTY | $3,000 |
| SHERBORN RURAL LAND FOUNDATION | $3,000 |
| WBUR | $3,000 |
| NEW ENGLAND AQUARIUM | $3,000 |
| CONSERVATION LAW FOUNDATION | $3,000 |
| MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY | $2,000 |
| WCRB | $2,000 |
| MASSACHUSETTS AUDOBON SOCIETY | $2,000 |
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 (FY22–23, $1k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 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.
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.
38 repeat relationships — 34 still active in FY2024, 4 since wound down; 2 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, 84% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $13k 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
- BSBOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC3× · 2022–2024 · $18k · revenue +1%
- SHSHADY HILL SCHOOL3× · 2022–2024 · $15k · revenue +15%
- SRSHERBORN RURAL LAND FOUNDATION3× · 2022–2024 · $7k · revenue +176%
Funded once
- SASTATEMENT Aone grant, 2019 · $27k
MASSACHUSETTS AUDUBON SOCIETY INCone grant, 2022 · $2k · revenue +13%- BGBOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF BOSTON INCone grant, 2022 · $1k · revenue -7%
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.
Western new england university, a comprehensive private institution with a tradition of excellence in teaching and scholarship and a commitment to service, awards undergraduate, master's, and doctoral degrees in various departments from…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Organization's mission bentley university believes good business can impact more than the bottom line - it can change the world. bentley is a community of future business leaders who will deliver value in the marketplace and lasting…
Mission strengthened by more than a century and a half of dedication to academic excellence, boston college commits itself to the highest standards of teaching and research in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs and to the…
Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.
Bates is a college of the liberal arts and sciences, and is a coeducational, nonsectarian, residential college with special commitments to academic rigor, and to assuring in all of its efforts the dignity of each individual, and access to…
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.
Unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives. [text in quotations is taken from the academy's deed of gift, drafted in 1781] knowledge and goodness "above all, it is expected that the attention…
Located in south hadley, massachusetts, mount holyoke college is a highly selective, nondenominational, residential, research liberal arts college for women that is gender-diverse and welcomes applications from female, transgender, and…
Bb&n, an all gender day school in cambridge, massachusetts, was established in 1974 by the merger of two independent schools, the buckingham school and the browne & nichols school, founded respectively in 1889 and 1883. located on multiple…
To promote understanding of the history of massachusetts and the nation by collecting and communicating materials and resources that foster historical knowledge.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Trustees of Reservations and the most unlike its peers is Sherborn Rural Land Foundation. 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 82 years old; the field is 17. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 20% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 11% 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 45 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 BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC ↗
- Who funds CHATHAM HALL ↗
- Who funds SHADY HILL SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF RESERVATIONS ↗
- Who funds THE CHARLES RIVER SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds Norwich University ↗
- Who funds NEW ENGLAND AQUARIUM CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds SHERBORN RURAL LAND FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds CONSERVATION LAW FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds MIDDLESEX SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds CHARLES RIVER WATERSHED ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds SHERBORN HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds PIONEER INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND ↗
- Who funds MASSACHUSETTS AUDUBON SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds HALE EDUCATION INC ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Middlebury College ↗
- Who funds The President and Trustees of Colby College ↗
- Who funds SHERBORN COMMUNITY CENTER FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds DOVER LAND CONSERVATION TRUST ↗
- Who funds ST BERNARD'S SCHOOL 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: Boston Foundation Inc · Haven Trust · Fidelity Foundation · Triple T Foundation · Community Foundation for MetroWest Inc · American Tower Corporation Foundation Inc · Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · 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 Dudley H and Sally S Willis Charitable 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.
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- New England Aquarium Corporation — 12% of income from government
- Women's Lunch Place Inc — 8% of income from government
- Charles River Watershed Association Inc — 8% of income from government
- Norwich University — 4% of income from government
- Third Sector New England Inc — 3% of income from government
- Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston Inc — 2% of income from government
- The Trustees of Reservations — 2% of income from government
- Massachusetts Audubon Society Inc — 1% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Middlebury College — 1% of income from government
- Boston Symphony Orchestra 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 Dudley H and Sally S Willis Charitable Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Dudley H and Sally S Willis Charitable 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.