· Private foundation
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Inc
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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k20 grants · $41k
- $10k–50k73 grants · $1.7M
- $50k–250k208 grants · $22M
- $250k+60 grants · $33M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| The Caroline D Bradley Association of Scholars | $6,620,000 |
| Bradley Impact Fund Inc | $3,200,000 |
| Historic Haymarket Milwaukee I Inc | $2,000,000 |
| Encounter for Culture and Education Inc | $1,000,000 |
| Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education | $800,000 |
| Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty Inc | $750,000 |
| Foundation for the Constitution | $685,000 |
| Foundation for Government Accountability | $500,000 |
| Manhattan Institute for Policy Research Inc | $500,000 |
| Evergreen Freedom Foundation | $500,000 |
| Concordia University Wisconsin Foundation | $500,000 |
| American Legislative Exchange Council | $500,000 |
| State Financial Officers Foundation Inc | $500,000 |
| Center for Urban Teaching | $500,000 |
| Barry Goldwater Institute For Public Policy Research | $475,000 |
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, $4.3M) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 90% 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
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 9% of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Inc’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 +40% since the first grant, against +12% for the ones you funded once.
332 repeat relationships — 258 still active in FY2024, 74 since wound down; 45 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, 88% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $5.9M 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
- EFENCOUNTER FOR CULTURE AND EDUCATION5× · 2020–2024 · $5.2M · revenue +227% · 38% of their budget
WISCONSIN INSTITUTE FOR LAW & LIBERTY5× · 2020–2024 · $4.3M · revenue +113% · 26% of their budget- FFFoundation For Excellence in Higher Education5× · 2020–2024 · $4.2M · revenue +22%
Funded once
- SESETON EDUCATION PARTNERSone grant, 2023 · $500k · revenue +4%
- HHHIGH HOPES COLORADOone grant, 2020 · $500k · revenue -76%
- SJSan Juan Diego Institute Corpone grant, 2023 · $400k · revenue -65% · 62% of their budget
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 foreign policy research institute (frpi) is dedicated to producing the highest quality scholarship and nonpartisan policy analysis focused on crucial foreign policy and national security challenges facing the united states. we educate…
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.
The open markets institute works to help people relearn how to use competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.
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 r street institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public-policy research organization ("think tank"). our mission is to engage in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government. (continued on…
Wilson college empowers students to be confident and critical thinkers, creative visionaries, effective communicators, honorable leaders, and agents of justice.
To provide accurate, objective information and analysis on international strategic issues for legislators, diplomats, foreign affairs analysts, international business leaders, economists, the military, defense commentators, journalists,…
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
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…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
We conduct impartial public policy research and analysis to drive informed debate and effective decision-making in the state of wisconsin.
We provide exemplary interdisciplinary programs for a community of scholar-practitioners within a distributed learning model grounded in student-driven inquiry and leading to enhanced knowledge.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Heritage Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Salient Publications. 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 29 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) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 3% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.2% 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.
385 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. 385 of the 476 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 CAROLINE D BRADLEY ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS ↗
- Who funds BRADLEY IMPACT FUND INC ↗
- Who funds MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC ↗
- Who funds ENCOUNTER FOR CULTURE AND EDUCATION ↗
- Who funds WISCONSIN INSTITUTE FOR LAW & LIBERTY ↗
- Who funds Foundation For Excellence in Higher Education ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN LEGISLATIVE EXCHANGE COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds MANHATTAN INSTITUTE FOR POLICY RESEARCH INC ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY INC ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR URBAN TEACHING INC ↗
- Who funds MACKINAC CENTER ↗
- Who funds THE PHILANTHROPY ROUNDTABLE ↗
- Who funds Historic Haymarket Milwaukee Inc ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL CENTER FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY FOR LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY STUDIES ↗
- Who funds BADGER INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds Mercatus Center Inc ↗
- Who funds PUBLIC INTEREST LEGAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SAGAMORE INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds FREEDOMWORKS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATIONAL ADVANCEMENT ↗
- Who funds FRANKLIN NEWS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CATO INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds The Buckeye Institute ↗
- Who funds GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds CAPITAL RESEARCH CENTER ↗
- Who funds COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds Leadership Program of the Rockies ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds PARENT CHOICE INC ↗
- Who funds ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds MILWAUKEE REPERTORY THEATER INC ↗
- Who funds ACTS COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds THE MILWAUKEE SCIENCE EDUCATION CONSORTIUM 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: Bradley Impact Fund Inc · Donors Trust Inc · Sarah Scaife Foundation Incorporated · Adolph Coors Foundation · Greater Milwaukee Foundation Inc · State Policy Network · Herbert H Kohl Charities Inc · The Searle Freedom Trust · The Seminar Network Inc · Charles Koch Foundation · Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation · John William Pope 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 Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Inc 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.
- National Bureau of Economic Research Inc — 48% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 13% of income from government
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation 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.