· Private foundation
The Ryan Family Foundation
Its FY2023 filing reports that it funds preselected organizations and did not take unsolicited requests; check the foundation's own site before ruling it out.
Read this first · the figures below need context
96% of The Ryan Family Foundation’s FY2023 grant dollars went to Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund For Wealth Management Inc, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2023 names 18 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it. Everything below is therefore FY2022, the last year The Ryan Family Foundation named its own grantees at scale: 26 organizations, $51k. It is dated, not current.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2023.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2022
- Under $10k41 grants · $41k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $10k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| University of Southern California | $10,000 |
| The National Theatre Corporatiom | $8,250 |
| The Georgetown Baptist Church | $5,000 |
| Blair House Restoration Fund | $4,250 |
| University of Michigan | $2,500 |
| National Association for Olmsted Pa | $2,500 |
| St Andrew's Episcopal School | $2,000 |
| Georgetown Visitation Preparatory S | $1,500 |
| Cabin John Park Volunteer Fire Dept | $1,000 |
| Samaritan Ministry of Greater Washi | $1,000 |
| Vassar College | $1,000 |
| The Lab School of Washington | $1,000 |
| National Museum of Women in the Art | $1,000 |
| Louisville High School | $1,000 |
| Fund for the endowment of the DRR | $1,000 |
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 (FY19–23, $6k) 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 +21% since the first grant, against +17% for the ones you funded once.
42 repeat relationships — 35 still active in FY2022, 7 since wound down; 15 grantees were first funded in FY2022 (too recent to call). Read against FY2022, the last year this funder named its own grantees directly; its giving has since run through a sponsor, which reports no donor behind each grant.
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 FY2023, 91% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $3k 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
- SAST ANDREW'S EPISCOPAL SCHOOL INC5× · 2017–2022 · $19k · revenue +68%
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY5× · 2018–2022 · $15k · revenue +44%- BHBLAIR HOUSE FOUNDATION6× · 2018–2023 · $15k · revenue ×17
Funded once
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTIONgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $5k · revenue +34%- GFGerogetown Fundone grant, 2017 · $5k
- CACitizens Association of Georgetownone grant, 2018 · $2k · revenue -84%
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 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 bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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 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 washington university is a co-educational, nondenominational university with a long and distinguished history of teaching, research and (cont'd on schedule o)
Nyu is a private university with approximately 60,000 matriculating students in 20 schools and institutes. nyu's primary missions are education, research and scholarship, and patient care.
The children's hospital of philadelphia, the oldest hospital in the united states dedicated exclusively to pediatrics, strives to be the world leader in the advancement of health care for children by integrating excellent patient care,…
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
As the national university of the catholic church in the united states, founded and sponsored by the bishops of the country with the approval of the holy see, the catholic university of america is committed to being a comprehensive…
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.
Ceu is committed to promoting the values of open society and self-reflective critical thinking. it aims at excellence in the mastery of established knowledge, courage to pursue the creation of new knowledge in the humanities, the social…
To advance human rights and social justice in the americas.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Catholic Medical Mission Board Inc and the most unlike its peers is Knock Out Abuse. 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 47 years old; the field is 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 19% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% lost their exemption, against 10% 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.
44 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. 44 of the 81 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 GS DONOR ADVISED PHILANTHROPY FUND FOR WEALTH MANAGEMENT INC ↗
- Who funds THE NATIONAL THEATRE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds ST ANDREW'S EPISCOPAL SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds BLAIR HOUSE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds University of Michigan ↗
- Who funds VASSAR COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds JOSEPH ROBERT SHAW FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds THE LAB SCHOOL OF WASHINGTON ↗
- Who funds Samaritan Ministry of Greater Washington ↗
- Who funds BROADFUTURES INC ↗
- Who funds OLMSTED NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF AFGHANISTAN ↗
- Who funds Citizens Association of Georgetown ↗
- Who funds LIGHT OF HEALING HOPE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY OF HOPE ↗
- Who funds CABIN JOHN PARK VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT INC ↗
- Who funds Reporters Without Borders Inc ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON NATIONAL OPERA ↗
- Who funds KNOCK OUT ABUSE ↗
- Who funds Georgetown Heritage ↗
- Who funds HOUSE OF RUTH ↗
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: Greater Washington Community Foundation · Alisann and Terry Collins Foundation · The Dorothy G Bender Foundation Inc · Sami & Annie Totah Family Foundation · Clark-Winchcole Foundation · The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation · Thomas Rutherfoord Foundation · Sachiko Kuno Foundation Inc · The Shiloh Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Raymond James Charitable Endowment 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 Ryan 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.
- Save the Children Federation Inc — 30% of income from government
- Pan-Massachusetts Challenge 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to The Ryan Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Ryan Family 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.