· Private foundation
The Lemelson 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 FY2018–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k2 grants · $15k
- $10k–50k13 grants · $317k
- $50k–250k33 grants · $3.7M
- $250k+23 grants · $16M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| NATIONAL COLLEGIATE INVENTORS & INNOVATORS ALLIANCE | $2,959,932 |
| NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION | $1,650,000 |
| ALLIANCE FOR TRIBAL CLEAN ENERGY INC | $1,250,000 |
| MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY | $1,150,000 |
| ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE | $1,000,000 |
| ROCKEFELLER PHILANTHROPY ADVISORS INC | $750,000 |
| WILLIAM MARSH RICE UNIVERSITY | $600,000 |
| SUSTAINABLE ENERGY FOR ALL VEREIN FUR NACHHALTIGE ENERGIE | $500,000 |
| KENYA IMPACT INNOVATIONS FOUNDATION | $500,000 |
| ROCKEFELLER FAMILY FUND INC | $500,000 |
| SEEDING JUSTICE | $500,000 |
| OIL CHANGE INTERNATIONAL | $500,000 |
| CLIMATE BREAKTHROUGH INC | $500,000 |
| CLEARPATH INC | $400,000 |
| SELCO FOUNDATION | $395,740 |
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 US giving — 86% of grant dollars ($89M). The need read here covers only this US portion; the 14% that went abroad ($15M) is mapped below.
Your human-services grants (FY18–24, $1.9M) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 93% 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
Beyond the US — 14% of all-years giving ($15M)
5 countries, by the recipient’s country on the filing.
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. International giving is mapped by the recipient’s country from the same 990filings; comparable need data isn’t available at that grain.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 29% of The Lemelson Foundation’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 +25% since the first grant, against +18% for the ones you funded once.
76 repeat relationships — 42 still active in FY2024, 34 since wound down; 10 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, 83% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $2.8M 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
- NCNational Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance Inc7× · 2018–2024 · $22M · revenue +681%
Rocky Mountain Institute4× · 2019–2024 · $3.0M · revenue +227%- WMWilliam Marsh Rice University7× · 2018–2024 · $2.9M · revenue +63%
Funded once
- ICINSTITUTO CLIMA E SOCIEDADEone grant, 2023 · $1.0M
- SISMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORYone grant, 2022 · $850k
- GFGEARBOX FOUNDATIONGEARBOX LIMITEDone grant, 2018 · $295k
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.
Activate empowers scientists to reinvent the world by bringing their research to market. activate partners with u.s. based funders, research institutions, and other pillars of the hard technology community to help entrepreneurial…
The mission of the george washington university (gw) is to educate individuals in liberal arts, languages, sciences, learned professions, and other courses and subjects of study, and to conduct scholarly research and publish the findings…
The union of concerned scientists puts rigorous, independent science into action, developing solutions and advocating for a healthy, safe, and just future.
Working with our world-class network of innovators, business and industry leaders, and policy experts, we accelerate the innovation of climate technologies at every stage - from discovery to development to deployment.
Central indiana corporate partnership (cicp) is an alliance of indiana's business and research university leaders coming together to foster long-term prosperity for the region. cicp's mission is to transform the economy of indiana in order…
The american enterprise institute is a community of scholars and supporters committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise. aei pursues these ideals through independent thinking and the…
The peterson institute for international economics (piie) is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to strengthening prosperity and human welfare in the global economy through expert analysis and practical…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Acec research institute serve as the leading source of knowledge and thought leadership for creating a more sustainable, safe, secure, and technically advanced built environment. identify, fund, and provide industry wide research forecasts…
As an organization, the institute of food technologists is focusing its work in four main areas, or "roles and goals." each is wide-reaching and helps to advance our mission.steward for the profession and its community - provide learning,…
Orcid provides an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. we provide open tools that enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Aspen Institute Inc and the most unlike its peers is Global Minimum 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 32 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) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 3% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.9% 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.
103 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. 103 of the 145 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 Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance Inc ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Rocky Mountain Institute ↗
- Who funds William Marsh Rice University ↗
- Who funds IMPACT INNOVATORS AND ENTREPRENEURS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds GREATER WASHINGTON EDUCATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO INC ↗
- Who funds THE EDISON INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds CLIMATE BREAKTHROUGH INC ↗
- Who funds ALLIANCE FOR TRIBAL CLEAN ENERGY INC ↗
- Who funds SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC ↗
- Who funds American Society for Engineering Education ↗
- Who funds Oregon State University Foundation ↗
- Who funds Inclusive Entrepreneurs Foundation FKA TiE Oregon Foundation ↗
- Who funds CLEARPATH INC ↗
- Who funds WINDWARD FUND ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE ↗
- Who funds THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds THE ASME FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ROCKEFELLER PHILANTHROPY ADVISORS INC ↗
- Who funds NONPROFIT ENTERPRISE AND SELF- SUSTAINABILITY TEAM INC (NESST) ↗
- Who funds THE OREGON COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Beyond Benign Inc ↗
- Who funds SEEDING JUSTICE ↗
- Who funds ROCKEFELLER FAMILY FUND INC ↗
- Who funds Oil Change International Inc ↗
- Who funds WGBH Educational Foundation ↗
- Who funds STEM NEXT OPPORTUNITY FUND ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
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 Oregon Community Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Meyer Memorial Trust · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation Trust · Climateworks Foundation · National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance Inc · New Venture Fund · Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation · The Collins Foundation · Tides Foundation · Charles Stewart Mott 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 Lemelson 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.
- Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service Inc Dba Global Refuge — 100% of income from government
- National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance Inc — 38% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Connected Lane County — 17% of income from government
- Moco Kidsco Inc — 15% of income from government
- VertueLab — 12% of income from government
- University of Central Florida Research Foundation Inc — 10% of income from government
- The Oregon Community Foundation — 2% of income from government
- Wgbh Educational Foundation — 1% of income from government
- Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology Inc — 0% of income from government
- National Academy of Inventors Inc — 0% of income from government
- Beyond Benign Inc — 0% of income from government
- Oregon State University Foundation — 0% of income from government
- Seeding Justice — 0% of income from government
- Portland State University Foundation — 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 Lemelson Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Lemelson 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.