· Private foundation
The Tom & Elena Matlack Charitable 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 clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2019–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k10 grants · $14k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $20k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF BOSTON | $10,000 |
| MASS GENERAL HOSPITAL | $10,000 |
| BROWN UNIVERSITY | $5,000 |
| BOSTON ARTS ACADEMY FOUNDATION | $2,500 |
| PAN MASS CHALLENGE | $1,027 |
| BREAST CANCER RESEARCH FOUNDATION | $1,000 |
| ROSIE'S PLACE | $1,000 |
| RAISING A READER | $1,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $1,000 |
| NEDSRA | $746 |
| BROOKLINE FOOD PANTRY | $500 |
| FRIENDS OF DANA FARBER CANCER | $500 |
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, $10k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 49% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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 5% of The Tom & Elena Matlack Charitable Foundation’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 +46% since the first grant, against +34% for the ones you funded once.
15 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2024, 7 since wound down; 3 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, 85% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $4k 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
- BGBOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF BOSTON INC6× · 2019–2024 · $60k · revenue +34%
- WUWESLEYAN UNIVERSITY3× · 2019–2022 · $56k · revenue +45%
- PSPERKINS SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND5× · 2019–2023 · $33k · revenue +5%
Funded once
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2022 · $10k
- HAHEROES AND HORSES INCone grant, 2023 · $5k · revenue -27%
PINE STREET INN INCgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $5k · revenue +80%
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 bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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 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.
Mission strengthened by more than a century and a half of dedication to academic excellence, boston college commits itself to the highest standards of teaching and research in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs and to the…
Organization's mission bentley university believes good business can impact more than the bottom line - it can change the world. bentley is a community of future business leaders who will deliver value in the marketplace and lasting…
The mission of the broad institute is to propel progress in biomedicine, through research aimed at the understanding and treatment of disease and the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the scientific community to benefit the public.…
Provider of pediatric healthcare, education, research & community service
Bb&n, an all gender day school in cambridge, massachusetts, was established in 1974 by the merger of two independent schools, the buckingham school and the browne & nichols school, founded respectively in 1889 and 1883. located on multiple…
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…
Bridgespan's mission is to build a better world by strengthening the ability of mission-driven organizations and philanthropists to achieve breakthrough results in addressing society's most important challenges and opportunities.
Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.
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 Boston Foundation Inc and the most unlike its peers is Feeding America. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 31 years old; the field is 17. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 20% 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.
34 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. 34 of the 50 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 BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF BOSTON INC ↗
- Who funds WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds PERKINS SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND ↗
- Who funds THE BREAST CANCER RESEARCH FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds HEROES AND HORSES INC ↗
- Who funds PINE STREET INN INC ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THAYER ACADEMY INC ↗
- Who funds BOSTON BALLET INC ↗
- Who funds UNITED STATES FUND FOR UNICEF ↗
- Who funds BOSTON ARTS ACADEMY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATRE CO INC ↗
- Who funds ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds RAR-MA INC ↗
- Who funds BROOKLINE FOOD PANTRY INC ↗
- Who funds PAN-MASSACHUSETTS CHALLENGE INC ↗
- Who funds BATTEN DISEASE RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds ELLIE FUND INC ↗
- Who funds WESTPORT LAND CONSERVATION TRUST INC ↗
- Who funds Boston Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds DEXTER SOUTHFIELD INC ↗
- Who funds ROSIE'S PLACE INC ↗
- Who funds CHANGE SUMMER INC ↗
- Who funds LUNGEVITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds SOUTHCOAST COMMUNITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds IMPACT MELANOMA INC ↗
- Who funds NAMASTAY SOBER 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: Boston Foundation Inc · Eastern Bank Foundation · Fiduciary Charitable Foundation Dba Fiduciary Trust Charitable · Fidelity Foundation · Arbella Insurance Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · American Endowment Foundation · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program
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 Tom & Elena Matlack Charitable 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.
- Ellie Fund Inc — 15% of income from government
- Pine Street Inn Inc — 11% of income from government
- Southcoast Community Foundation Inc — 10% of income from government
- Perkins School for the Blind — 7% of income from government
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc — 7% of income from government
- Impact Melanoma Inc — 3% of income from government
- Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston Inc — 2% of income from government
- Wesleyan University — 1% of income from government
- Boston Ballet Inc — 0% of income from government
- American Repertory Theatre Co Inc — 0% of income from government
- Boston Arts Academy Foundation Inc — 0% of income from government
- Rosie's Place Inc — 0% of income from government
- Pan-Massachusetts Challenge Inc — 0% of income from government
- Boston 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.
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Find your warmest path to The Tom & Elena Matlack Charitable 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.