· Private foundation
The Simons Foundation Inc
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 $10k636 grants · $5.1M
- $10k–50k154 grants · $3.4M
- $50k–250k705 grants · $100M
- $250k+232 grants · $163M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| NEW YORK GENOME CENTER | $20,000,000 |
| STONY BROOK FOUNDATION | $6,666,667 |
| UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH | $5,146,400 |
| NEW YORK UNIVERSITY | $4,434,919 |
| CLINICAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATES | $4,227,515 |
| NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY | $4,125,000 |
| UC BERKELEY | $3,750,000 |
| STONY BROOK FOUNDATION | $3,498,868 |
| COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY | $3,380,302 |
| STONY BROOK FOUNDATION | $3,072,666 |
| UCSF | $2,865,975 |
| Individual grant recipient | $2,187,500 |
| COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY | $2,015,343 |
| CORNELL UNIVERSITY | $1,544,180 |
| NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY | $1,500,000 |
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 (FY22–23, $420k) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 8% of The Simons 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 +34% since the first grant, against +28% for the ones you funded once.
505 repeat relationships — 294 still active in FY2024, 211 since wound down; 129 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, 83% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $40M 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 GENOME CENTER INC5× · 2020–2024 · $105M · revenue +36% · 38% of their budget
- SBSTONY BROOK FOUNDATION INC6× · 2018–2024 · $97M · revenue +214% · 33% of their budget
The Trustees of Princeton University6× · 2018–2024 · $37M · revenue +8%
Funded once
- USUC SAN DIEGOone grant, 2023 · $20M
- ROREGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT SAN DIEGOone grant, 2020 · $12M
- UOUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCOone grant, 2022 · $5.4M
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.
We educate the next generation of leaders to improve the health of our society.
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.
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 graduate center foundation is committed to promoting and safe-guarding the success of the graduate center by raising funds and managing and investing donations for use by the graduate center. the board of trustees of the foundation…
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The nstmf's mission is to build inclusive stem communities across the united states. fundamental to these communities are the significant, inspirational connections we foster between the individuals who have received national recognition…
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Biu produces students who excel in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business & the arts.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Please see schedule o
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Exploratorium and the most unlike its peers is Poster House 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 40 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) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 8% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.8% 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.
327 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. 327 of the 997 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 NEW YORK GENOME CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds STONY BROOK FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds MATH FOR AMERICA ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds The Trustees of Princeton University ↗
- Who funds COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds New York University ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY - LOUIS BAMBERGER & MRS FELIX FULD FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds CLINICAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATES LLC ↗
- Who funds Cornell University ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MATHEMATICS ↗
- Who funds Children's Hospital Corporation ↗
- Who funds Emory University ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds SIMONS LAUFER MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds DUKE UNIVERSITY ↗
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: Alfred P Sloan Foundation · Gordon E and Betty I Moore Foundation · The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York · The Kavli Foundation · Howard Hughes Medical Institute · The Hyde and Watson Foundation · Johns Hopkins University · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Global Genes · Gates Foundation · The Andrew W Mellon Foundation · The Heising-Simons 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 Simons 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.
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — 63% of income from government
- Hugo W Moser Research Institute at Kennedy Krieger Inc — 39% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Marine Biological Laboratory — 20% of income from government
- The Broad Institute Inc — 19% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 13% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins 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
- Brandeis University — 9% of income from government
- Institute for Advanced Study - Louis Bamberger & Mrs Felix Fuld Foundation — 7% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Northeastern University — 7% of income from government
- Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research — 7% of income from government
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc — 7% of income from government
- Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Inc — 6% of income from government
- University of Miami — 5% of income from government
- The American Society for Cell Biology — 4% of income from government
- American Academy of Arts & Sciences — 3% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston College — 3% of income from government
- Code for Science & Society Inc — 2% of income from government
- Wesleyan University — 1% of income from government
- Wellesley College — 1% of income from government
- Museum of Science — 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.