· Private foundation
The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience
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 FY2018–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- $10k–50k6 grants · $99k
- $50k–250k39 grants · $3.3M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Northwestern University | $110,310 |
| Regents of the University of Michigan | $100,000 |
| Yale University | $100,000 |
| Regents of the University of California | $100,000 |
| Regents of the University of California | $100,000 |
| Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center | $100,000 |
| University of Utah | $100,000 |
| St Jude Children's Research Hospital | $100,000 |
| University of Alabama at Birmingham | $100,000 |
| Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine | $100,000 |
| Stanford University School of Medicine | $100,000 |
| Mass General Brigham Incorporated | $100,000 |
| Carnegie Mellon University | $100,000 |
| University of Utah | $75,000 |
| Regents of the University of California | $75,000 |
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 (FY18–24) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 82% of your 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 12% of The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience’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.
46 repeat relationships — 17 still active in FY2024, 29 since wound down; 9 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, 73% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $783k 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
- NYNew York University5× · 2019–2024 · $675k · revenue +51%
ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI4× · 2019–2022 · $600k · revenue +41%- CICALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY4× · 2020–2023 · $517k · revenue +18%
Funded once
- UOUniversity of California Berkeleyone grant, 2022 · $175k
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2021 · $100k
DUKE UNIVERSITYone grant, 2022 · $100k · revenue +3%
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.
See Form 990, Part I, Line 1, Description of Organization Mission.
Education, research, medical services and other public services.
As a leading research university with a distinctive commitment to undergraduate education, Rice University aspires to path breaking research, unsurpassed teaching, and contributions to the betterment of our world. It seeks to fulfill this…
Education and Research
The university's goal in the coming decade is to advance learning through the integration of teaching, research and service to others. the core of this goal is to prepare graduates to engage with the world and lead lives of meaning. to do…
Biu produces students who excel in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business & the arts.
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.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
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…
Case Western Reserve University is an independent, research-oriented university with broadly based strengths in health, including medicine, nursing and dentistry; in engineering; in the arts and sciences; and in law, management and social…
Seton hall university is a catholic institution of higher education
The graduate school of the stowers institute for medical research ("gssimr") exempt purpose is to provide graduate education that will prepare scholars for scientific research in the biological sciences.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Trustees of Boston University and the most unlike its peers is University of Michigan. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 63 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 — 3% 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 123 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 TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds New York University ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds University of Michigan ↗
- Who funds Baylor College of Medicine ↗
- Who funds The Salk Institute for Biological Studies ↗
- Who funds ST JUDE CHILDREN'S RESEARCH HOSPITAL INC ↗
- Who funds Yale University ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY ↗
- Who funds VAN ANDEL RESEARCH INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds FRED HUTCHINSON CANCER RESEARCH CENTER ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
Government reliance of your grantees
Every dot is one organization The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience 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.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Max Planck Florida Corporation — 23% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Yale University — 12% of income from government
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- Children's Hospital Corporation — 10% of income from government
- Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research — 7% 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.