· Private foundation
Townsend Family 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 $10k1 grant · $200
- $10k–50k4 grants · $123k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $141k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO | $140,599 |
| CATO INSTITUTE | $48,400 |
| THE SEAQUIST HOUSE FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE | $25,000 |
| THE JOFFREY BALLET | $25,000 |
| THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO | $200 |
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 (FY20–20, $2k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 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 +70% since the first grant, against +22% for the ones you funded once.
22 repeat relationships — 5 still active in FY2025, 17 since wound down.
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, 100% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $0 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
University of Chicago8× · 2017–2025 · $972k · revenue +56%- TJTHE JOFFREY BALLET9× · 2017–2025 · $270k · revenue +90%
- CICATO INSTITUTE9× · 2017–2025 · $245k · revenue +70%
Funded once
- BMBella Mente Quantum Racing Associationone grant, 2020 · $13k · revenue -67%
- PPPETERS PRAIRIE SCHOOL COMMUNITY ASSOCIATIONone grant, 2023 · $2k
- OFONE FAMILY ILLINOISone grant, 2020 · $2k · revenue +22%
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.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
To collect, display and interpret objects in craft art and design.
The Museum of Modern Art is a private, non-profit institution chartered by the State of New York Department of Education in 1929 to foster public awareness of modern and contemporary art. (Continued in Schedule O)
The Morgan Library & Museum celebrates and shares the history and process of human creativity from antiquity to the present day through the preservation, study, and interpretation of a dynamic and growing collection.
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.
Finance impacts everyone. as a socially relevant organization, the museum of american finance seeks to improve understanding of the influence of financial institutions and capital markets on the u.s. and global economies, and on…
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…
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
The mission of the jewish museum is to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret art and jewish culture. see schedule o for more information.
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…
The Chicago History Museum strives to be a destination for learning, inspiration, and civic engagement. Through dynamic exhibitions, tours, programs, digital resources, and special events, the Museum connects people to Chicago's history…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Aspen Art Museum and the most unlike its peers is Bella Mente Quantum Racing Association. 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 35 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) — 5% 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.
21 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. 21 of the 29 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 University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds THE JOFFREY BALLET ↗
- Who funds CATO INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds JAZZ AT ASPEN-SNOWMASS ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE ↗
- Who funds SEAQUIST HOUSE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Bella Mente Quantum Racing Association ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO YACHT CLUB FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ASPEN ART MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds JUDD GOLDMAN ADAPTIVE SAILING FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Les Dames D'Aspen LTD ↗
- Who funds KINGSPORT HOMELESS MINISTRY INC ↗
- Who funds ONE FAMILY ILLINOIS ↗
- Who funds FAMILIES AGAINST MANDATORY MINIMUMS ↗
- Who funds METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART ↗
- Who funds CHI OMEGA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HILLSDALE COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO MARITIME MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds MOVING PICTURE INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds BREAKTHROUGH T1D ↗
- Who funds American Museum of Natural History ↗
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: Donor Advised Charitable Giving 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 Townsend 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 or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
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.