· Private foundation
The Zeckhauser Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k3 grants · $8k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $55k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $390k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| FIDELITY CHARITABLE GIFT FUND | $200,000 |
| VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY | $100,000 |
| BRIGHAM & WOMEN'S HOSPITAL | $90,000 |
| WINSOR SCHOOL | $30,347 |
| HARVARD COLLEGE | $25,000 |
| BEACON COMMUNITIES CHARITABLE FUND | $7,000 |
| NORTON MUSEUM OF ARTS INC | $300 |
| MUSEM OF SCIENCE | $250 |
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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 88% of your 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.
25 repeat relationships — 6 still active in FY2025, 19 since wound down; 1 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (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 FY2025, 97% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $7k 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
- TCTHE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL INC4× · 2017–2021 · $183k · revenue +32%
THE WINSOR SCHOOL8× · 2017–2025 · $147k · revenue +46%- BMBRYN MAWR COLLEGE4× · 2017–2021 · $120k · revenue +37%
Funded once
- LSLYRIC STAGEone grant, 2019 · $30k
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Incgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $25k · revenue +73%- UOUNIVERSITY OF TORONTOone grant, 2017 · $15k
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.
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
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…
Northeast college of health sciences (the college) is committed to academic excellence, leadership, and professional best practices in the health sciences.
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…
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.
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…
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.
To preserve the unique character and natural resources of harvard.
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 organization's primary exempt purpose is to provide access to and conduct activities in furtherance of higher education.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Belmont Day School Inc and the most unlike its peers is Dana-Farber Cancer Institute 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 45 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) — 0% 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.
38 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. 38 of the 61 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 FIDELITY INVESTMENTS CHARITABLE GIFT FUND ↗
- Who funds THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds THE WINSOR SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds Vanderbilt University ↗
- Who funds BRYN MAWR COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds WESTOVER SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds GROTON SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds Lyric Stage Company of Boston Inc ↗
- Who funds Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds BELMONT DAY SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds HOBE SOUND NATURE CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds THE CONSERVATION FUND A NONPROFIT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds BEACON COMMUNITIES CHARITABLE FUND INC ↗
- Who funds RAYMOND F KRAVIS CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS INC ↗
- Who funds ASHOKA ↗
- Who funds MILTON ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds THE GEORGE AND BARBARA BUSH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Community Concepts Inc ↗
- Who funds Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc ↗
- Who funds FRESH AIR FUND ↗
- Who funds NORTON MUSEUM OF ART INC ↗
- Who funds JUPITER ISLAND MEDICAL CLINIC INC ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM OF SCIENCE ↗
- Who funds PEABODY ESSEX MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds JUPITER ISLAND GARDEN CLUBINC ↗
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 · Fidelity Foundation · John & Weezie Gates Charitable Trust · The David and Elizabeth Long Foundation · Nivin and Duncan Macmillan Foundation · St Clair Charitable Trust · Legatus Foundation · CMB Foundation · Ethel D Colket Foundation · Colket Family Foundation · Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc · Eastern Bank 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 Zeckhauser 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.
- Boston Harbor Now Inc — 45% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc — 7% of income from government
- Gaining Ground Inc — 5% of income from government
- Huntington Theatre Co Inc — 4% of income from government
- Native Plant Trust Inc — 3% of income from government
- Peabody Essex Museum Inc — 3% of income from government
- Museum of Science — 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to The Zeckhauser Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Zeckhauser 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.