· Private foundation
The Thorne Cox 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 FY2019–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k9 grants · $31k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $146k
- $50k–250k4 grants · $395k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Avenue Concept Inc | $195,000 |
| Bay Chamber Concerts Inc | $100,000 |
| Trustees of Dartmouth College | $50,000 |
| Middlesex School | $50,000 |
| United States Ski and Snowboard Association | $45,000 |
| National Debutante Cotillion Foundation Inc | $31,200 |
| Boston Impact Initiative | $25,000 |
| Milton Academy | $25,000 |
| Presidents and Fellows of Harvard | $10,000 |
| Maine Public Broadcasting Corp | $10,000 |
| The William A Farnsworth Library and Art Museum Inc | $6,624 |
| Imagine North Carolina First | $5,000 |
| Knox County Homeless Coalition | $5,000 |
| Lifeflight Foundation | $5,000 |
| YMCA of the USA | $5,000 |
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 (FY21–24, $30k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 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 +38% since the first grant, against +27% for the ones you funded once.
21 repeat relationships — 11 still active in FY2024, 10 since wound down; 6 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, 78% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $113k 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
- TATHE AVENUE CONCEPT INC6× · 2019–2024 · $615k · revenue +73%
- MPMaine Public Broadcasting Corporation4× · 2020–2024 · $285k · revenue +68%
Maine Coast Heritage Trust3× · 2021–2023 · $205k · revenue +5%
Funded once
- RIREFUGEPOINT INCgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $100k · revenue +27%
VITAL VOICES GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP INCone grant, 2021 · $25k · revenue -26%- LCLAND CONSERVANCY OF NORTH KINGSTOWNone grant, 2022 · $20k
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 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.
Bates is a college of the liberal arts and sciences, and is a coeducational, nonsectarian, residential college with special commitments to academic rigor, and to assuring in all of its efforts the dignity of each individual, and access to…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The mission of the Bowdoin International Music Festival is to provide gifted young musicians from around the world with an opportunity to study with world-class artists, and to provide audiences with classical music performed to the…
The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is a world-renowned center for biological discovery and training that is notably affiliated with more than 60 Nobel Prize winners. Research is conducted by full-time faculty as well as hundreds of the…
Wheaton college provides a transformative liberal arts education, combining theory and practice, for intellectually curious students within a collaborative and vibrant extended community and network that values and strives to create an…
to provide a rigorous and transformative liberal arts education that prepares students to become thoughtful, engaged citizens.
At Roger Williams University, students are prepared to be thinkers and doers ready to solve challenging problems with innovative solutions. RWU offers robust offerings of undergraduate, graduate and professional programs across eight…
Williams College strives to achieve educational excellence by fostering a community of learning in collaboration with students, faculty, staff, devoted alumni and parents.
The mission of Islesboro Islands Trust is to enhance the quality of residents' lives through the preservation of open space, educate all residents as to the value of the island's natural ecosystems, and act as an environmental advocate on…
The nantucket conservation foundation owns, protects, and stewards over 9,000 acres of land and coastal shoreline, conserves nantucket's rare and significant natural resources, and engages in impactful ecological research to inform…
The mission of rhode island school of design, through its college and museum,is to educate its students and the public in the creation and (see schedule o)appreciation of works of art and design, to discover and transmit knowledge and to…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Trustees of Reservations and the most unlike its peers is The William a Farnsworth Library and Art Museum 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 35 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) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 0% 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.
36 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2026.
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 2017–2026, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 36 of the 49 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 AVENUE CONCEPT INC ↗
- Who funds Maine Public Broadcasting Corporation ↗
- Who funds ROCKPORT LIBRARY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Friends of Katahdin Woods & Waters ↗
- Who funds BAY CHAMBER CONCERTS INC ↗
- Who funds Maine Coast Heritage Trust ↗
- Who funds Trustees of Dartmouth College ↗
- Who funds MILTON ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds COUNCIL FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION ↗
- Who funds United States Ski Team Foundation ↗
- Who funds REFUGEPOINT INC ↗
- Who funds ISSUE ONE ↗
- Who funds MIDDLESEX SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds Coastal Mountains Land Trust ↗
- Who funds THE WILLIAM A FARNSWORTH LIBRARY AND ART MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATRE CO INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL DEBUTANTE COTILLION FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Homeworthy ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds BOSTON IMPACT INITIATIVE FUND ↗
- Who funds VITAL VOICES GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP INC ↗
- Who funds LifeFlight Foundation ↗
- Who funds NEW VENTURE FUND ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Bay Community College Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds AMOS HOUSE ↗
- Who funds IMAGINE NORTH CAROLINA FIRST ↗
- Who funds WICKFORD SAILING ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF RESERVATIONS ↗
- Who funds Freshgrass Public Foundation ↗
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: Fidelity Foundation · The Aldermere Foundation · Boston Foundation Inc · Tr Ua the Camden Foundation · Otter Island Foundation · Ralph R Papitto & Barbara a Papitto Private Family Foundation · Onion Foundation · Bangor Savings Bank Foundation · The Rhode Island Community Foundation · Maine Community Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · 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 Thorne Cox 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Living Observatory Inc — 30% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- The Trustees of Reservations — 2% of income from government
- American Repertory Theatre Co Inc — 0% of income from government
- Milton Academy — 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.