· Private foundation
The Thorson 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 · FY2023
- Under $10k48 grants · $108k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $50k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Alzheimers Foundation of America | $14,160 |
| ACCA Inc | $14,000 |
| Massachusetts General Hospital | $11,500 |
| Noble and Greenough School | $10,500 |
| Circus World MuseumWisconsin | $9,300 |
| ALS Therapy Development Institute | $7,740 |
| The American Legion | $6,000 |
| Family of the Americas Foundation | $6,000 |
| WFUV | $5,750 |
| Trustees of the Reservations | $5,250 |
| Blinded American Veterans Foundation | $5,000 |
| Jan Karski Educational Foundation | $5,000 |
| Lands Sake Farm | $4,000 |
| Wolf Trap Foundation | $4,000 |
| National Eating Disorder Assoc | $3,000 |
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 (FY23–23, $250) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, 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.
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 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 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 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 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.
Wentworth institute of technology is a nationally recognized private coeducational and residential university of higher education with a mission to empower, inspire and innovate through experiential learning with a core purpose of career…
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…
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
Organization's mission: boston university is an international, comprehensive, private research university, committed to educating students to be reflective, resourceful individuals ready to live, adapt, and lead in an interconnected world.…
The organization's primary exempt purpose is to provide access to and conduct activities in furtherance of higher education.
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is New England Aquarium Corporation and the most unlike its peers is Arts Inn Collective. 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 48 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 12% 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, 2017–2025.
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. 36 of the 105 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 ALZHEIMER'S FOUNDATION OF AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds NOBLE AND GREENOUGH SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds ALS THERAPY DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Fordham University ↗
- Who funds Family of the Americas Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds BLINDED AMERICAN VETERANS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds WOLF TRAP FOUNDATION FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL EATING DISORDERS ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds THE FESSENDEN SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds WGBH Educational Foundation ↗
- Who funds NEW ENGLAND AQUARIUM CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds BLAIR HOUSE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CAL RIPKEN SR FOUNDATION INC ↗
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: Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · National Philanthropic Trust · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · Amazonsmile 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 Thorson 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.
- Waltham Boys & Girls Club Inc — 29% of income from government
- New England Aquarium Corporation — 12% of income from government
- Cal Ripken Sr Foundation Inc — 12% of income from government
- The Wang Center for the Performing Arts Inc — 10% of income from government
- Als Therapy Development Foundation Inc — 8% of income from government
- Community Foundation for MetroWest Inc — 4% of income from government
- The Baseball Inc — 1% of income from government
- Wgbh Educational Foundation — 1% of income from government
- Fairfield University — 1% of income from government
- The Fessenden School — 0% of income from government
- Steppingstone Foundation 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 Thorson Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Thorson 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.