· Private foundation
The Macdougal Family 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k59 grants · $109k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $115k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $60k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| GUIDING LIGHT MISSION | $60,000 |
| NEXT GENERATION BULGARIA FUND | $45,000 |
| A SONG FOR YOU | $35,000 |
| BARRY A MURPHY FUND | $25,000 |
| WIREPOINTS | $10,000 |
| THE HISTORY CENTER | $7,000 |
| USC SCHOOL OF DRAMATIC ARTS | $5,000 |
| HEARTSIDE BUSINESS ASSOCIATION | $5,000 |
| FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF LAKE F | $5,000 |
| FRIENDS OF LAKE FOREST PARKS & REC | $5,000 |
| ALLIES FOR COMMUNITY BUSINESS INC | $5,000 |
| SHARON K HARVEY MEMORIAL FOUNDATIO | $5,000 |
| CITADEL THEATER | $5,000 |
| HUDSON INSTITUTE | $4,000 |
| LAKE FOREST OPEN LAND | $3,900 |
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 (FY17–21, $3k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 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.
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 +37% since the first grant, against +22% for the ones you funded once.
91 repeat relationships — 47 still active in FY2024, 44 since wound down; 16 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, 87% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $36k 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
- NGNext Generation Bulgaria Fund8× · 2017–2024 · $125k · revenue +50% · 28% of their budget
- GLGUIDING LIGHT MISSION INC4× · 2020–2024 · $70k · revenue +4%
- WCWIREPOINTS CORP5× · 2019–2024 · $60k · revenue +37%
Funded once
University of Chicagoone grant, 2022 · $30k · revenue +22%- HCHARVARD CLUB OF CHICAGOone grant, 2018 · $10k
- ACAMERICAN CULTURE FOUNDATIONgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $10k · revenue +71%
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.
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…
To create a nation where everyone enjoys a fair share of our collective prosperity.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
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…
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.
See schedule onorc at the university of chicago conducts research and data science on critical societal issues to guide decision-making and the development of programs and public policy. our experts identify relationships and trends, and…
The chicago theatre group is committed to producing both classic and contemporary works giving full voice to a wide range of artists and visions. by dedicating itself to three guiding principles - quality, equity, and community - the…
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.
The institute's mission, as set out in its certificate of incorporation, is to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs, to secure the better administration of justice, and to…
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 The Heritage Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Heartside Business Association 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 41 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) — 1% of your grantees by number, and just 11% 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.
81 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. 81 of the 166 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 Next Generation Bulgaria Fund ↗
- Who funds A song for You ↗
- Who funds GUIDING LIGHT MISSION INC ↗
- Who funds WIREPOINTS CORP ↗
- Who funds UCLA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CENTRAL PARK CONSERVANCY INC ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds ILLINOIS POLICY INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds THE ALEX FUND INC ↗
- Who funds Hudson Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK CITY BALLET INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN CULTURE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO CLUB PRESERVATION FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MANHATTAN INSTITUTE FOR POLICY RESEARCH INC ↗
- Who funds Lyric Opera of Chicago ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF LAKE FOREST PARKS & REC FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds STATE POLICY NETWORK ↗
- Who funds NEW ALTERNATIVES FOR CHILDREN INC ↗
- Who funds CATO INSTITUTE ↗
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 Chicago Community Trust · Lloyd a Fry Foundation · The Canning Foundation · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Ranch Spur Charitable Trust · Garrett Family Foundation · Butler Family Foundation · The Robert Thomas Bobins Foundation · John and Kathleen Schreiber Foundation D/B/A Schreiber Philanthropy · Robert R McCormick Foundation · The Allstate 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 Macdougal Family 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 or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
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.