· Private foundation
The Michelson Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- $10k–50k4 grants · $75k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $100k
- $250k+2 grants · $786k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Vanderbilt University Blair Community Scholars Pr | $453,140 |
| The Better Angels Society Inc | $333,333 |
| Child Mind Institute Inc | $50,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $50,000 |
| Eagles Autism Foundation | $30,000 |
| Teach for America | $25,000 |
| LIBERTAS COLLEGE PREPARATORY | $10,000 |
| Kukio Ho'omana Fund | $10,000 |
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 (FY22–22, $5k) land where the poverty rate runs at 7%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 0% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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 -3% for the ones you funded once.
21 repeat relationships — 4 still active in FY2025, 17 since wound down; 4 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (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 FY2025, 12% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $846k 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
- BMBRYN MAWR COLLEGE4× · 2017–2022 · $2.6M · revenue +37%
Vanderbilt University3× · 2017–2019 · $1.5M · revenue +74%- AEAMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH6× · 2019–2024 · $210k · revenue +47%
Funded once
- CMCOMMUNITY MUSIC CENTERone grant, 2019 · $500k · revenue +10%
- FPFrancisco Park Conservancyone grant, 2019 · $350k · revenue -95%
- TGTHE GEN NEXT FOUNDATION INCone grant, 2019 · $300k · revenue -74% · 30% 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.
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 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.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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.
At the internet society foundation, we focus on funding initiatives that strengthen the internet in function and reach so that it can effectively serve all people. our work advances the vision of the internet society (isoc): the internet…
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
The organization provides professional investment management services for endowed gifts and financial assets entrusted to the ucsf foundation.
The mission of the uc davis foundation is to secure, steward and manage private gifts for uc davis.
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
The npr foundation ("foundation") is organized and operated exclusively for the benefit of its sole supported organization, national public radio, inc. ("npr inc."). the foundation supports npr inc. through various activities such as…
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
Rooted in the liberal arts & sciences & lutheran expression of the christian faith, & is committed to offering a challenging education that develops qualities of mind, spirit, & body necessary for a rewarding life of leadership & service…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Team Impact Inc and the most unlike its peers is Francisco Park Conservancy. 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 31 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) — 6% of your grantees by number, and just 1% 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.
41 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. 41 of the 68 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 BRYN MAWR COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds Vanderbilt University ↗
- Who funds MAYO CLINIC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY MUSIC CENTER ↗
- Who funds Francisco Park Conservancy ↗
- Who funds THE BETTER ANGELS SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds THE GEN NEXT FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Memphis Brooks Museum of Art Inc ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds CITY YEAR INC ↗
- Who funds EAGLES AUTISM CHALLENGE INC ↗
- Who funds THE MICHAEL J FOX FOUNDATION FOR PARKINSON'S RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CHILD MIND INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds Teach for America Inc ↗
- Who funds HAWAII COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CONQUER CANCER FOUNDATION OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CLINICAL ONCOLOGY ↗
- Who funds IMPACT PHILANTHROPY GROUP ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL CHURCHILL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds KUKIO HOOMANA FUND ↗
- Who funds SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ↗
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: Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Marin Community Foundation · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · National Philanthropic Trust · American Endowment Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund
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 Michelson 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.
- City Year Inc — 11% 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 Michelson Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Michelson 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.