· Private foundation
The Ithaka Foundation
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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k11 grants · $24k
- $10k–50k7 grants · $123k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| WOLF TRAP FOUNDATION FOR THE | $35,000 |
| LIBRARY OF CONGRESS | $25,000 |
| MONTGOMERY COUNTRYSIDE ALLIANCE | $15,000 |
| REVELS INC | $15,000 |
| GLESSNER HOUSE MUSEUM | $12,500 |
| THE ASPEN INSTITUTE | $10,000 |
| PESTALOZZI USA CHILDRENS CHARITY | $10,000 |
| THE PUTNEY SCHOOL | $5,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $5,000 |
| MUSIC ASSOCIATES OF ASPEN INC | $3,750 |
| NATIONAL CONSTITUTION CENTER | $2,500 |
| CATHEDRAL CHORAL SOCIETY | $2,500 |
| BLACKROCK CENTER FOR THE ARTS | $1,000 |
| MILLENIA MUSIC INC | $1,000 |
| SMITH COLLEGE | $1,000 |
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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–24) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 48% of your 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.
24 repeat relationships — 11 still active in FY2024, 13 since wound down; 7 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, 89% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $16k 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
THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC7× · 2017–2024 · $190k · revenue +243%- WTWOLF TRAP FOUNDATION FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS5× · 2017–2021 · $155k · revenue +54%
- MCMONTGOMERY COUNTRYSIDE ALLIANCE INC7× · 2017–2024 · $115k · revenue +30%
Funded once
- EOExperiential Orchestra Incone grant, 2023 · $18k · revenue -63%
WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INCgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $8k · revenue ×15- HBHarvard Business School Interactive Incgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $5k · revenue +863%
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.
Williams College strives to achieve educational excellence by fostering a community of learning in collaboration with students, faculty, staff, devoted alumni and parents.
The mission of the Bowdoin International Music Festival is to provide gifted young musicians from around the world with an opportunity to study with world-class artists, and to provide audiences with classical music performed to the…
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…
Wheaton college provides a transformative liberal arts education, combining theory and practice, for intellectually curious students within a collaborative and vibrant extended community and network that values and strives to create an…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The music institute of chicago ("music institute") leads people toward a lifelong engagement with music, by providing widely accessible resources for high quality music teaching, performing, and service activities.
Washington performing arts champions the arts as a unifying force. through collaborations with artists, educators, community leaders, and institutional partners, we bring wide-ranging artistic programs to stages, schools, and neighborhoods…
The broad mission of the ASCSA has remained constant over its distinguished history: teaching research archaeological exploration publication and dissemination of research. Founded in 1881 the ASCSA provides graduate students and scholars…
The washington conservatory of music provides exceptional musical learning & listening experiences for students and the community. its vision is a community inspired and informed by the experience of music.
Wilson college empowers students to be confident and critical thinkers, creative visionaries, effective communicators, honorable leaders, and agents of justice.
The philadelphia school educates children for a future that is impossible to know but not impossible to shape. learn here. go anywhere.
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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts and the most unlike its peers is Food and Environment Reporting Network 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 39 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) — 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 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.
28 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. 28 of the 42 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 ASPEN INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds WOLF TRAP FOUNDATION FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS ↗
- Who funds MONTGOMERY COUNTRYSIDE ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds PESTALOZZI US CHILDRENS CHARITY INC ↗
- Who funds The Potomac School ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON REVELS INC ↗
- Who funds GLESSNER HOUSE MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds REVELSINC ↗
- Who funds Experiential Orchestra Inc ↗
- Who funds WALLINGFORD SYMPHONY SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds THE BARNESVILLE SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds PUTNEY SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds COUNTRY DANCE AND SONG SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds CHOATE ROSEMARY HALL FOUNDATION INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds Harvard Business School Interactive Inc ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF THE SMITH COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds MUSIC ASSOCIATES OF ASPEN INC ↗
- Who funds The Metropolitan Opera Guild Inc ↗
- Who funds OWL MOON RAPTOR CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL CONSTITUTION CENTER ↗
- Who funds MADISON HOUSE AUTISM FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds PINEWOODS CAMP INC ↗
- Who funds THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum Inc ↗
- Who funds HERITAGE TOURISM ALLIANCE OF MONTGOMERY COUNTY 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: T Rowe Price Program for Charitable Giving Inc · Greater Washington Community Foundation · Ibm International Foundation · The Chicago Community Trust · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · American Endowment Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Network for Good · American Online Giving Foundation Inc
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 Ithaka 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.
- Washington Revels Inc — 9% of income from government
- Revelsinc — 1% of income from government
- The Trustees of the Smith College — 1% of income from government
- Choate Rosemary Hall Foundation Incorporated — 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.