· Private foundation
Will Bracken 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k38 grants · $34k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $105k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA | $40,150 |
| CARLETON COLLEGE | $25,000 |
| MACPHAIL CENTER FOR MUSIC | $20,000 |
| WILD & FREE FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| BEACON | $10,000 |
| GUTHRIE THEATER | $7,500 |
| MINNESOTA OPERA | $6,500 |
| VOCAL ESSENCE | $6,000 |
| ALIGHT | $2,000 |
| OLD ART BUILDING LEELANAU COMMUNITY CULTURAL CENTER | $2,000 |
| THE ADVOCATES FOR HUMAN RIGHTS | $1,000 |
| MILL CITY COMMONS | $1,000 |
| MPR | $1,000 |
| TWIN CITIES RISE | $1,000 |
| UNITED THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY | $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 (FY17–20, $250) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 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 +33% since the first grant, against +7% for the ones you funded once.
45 repeat relationships — 36 still active in FY2024, 9 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, 99% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1k 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
- MCMACPHAIL CENTER FOR MUSIC6× · 2017–2024 · $177k · revenue +37%
- CCCARLETON COLLEGE4× · 2017–2024 · $60k · revenue +39%
- GTGUTHRIE THEATER FOUNDATION4× · 2017–2024 · $15k · revenue +37%
Funded once
- AARCone grant, 2017 · $2k
- FCFRANKLIN CENTERone grant, 2022 · $1k · revenue -20%
- FOFRIENDS OF LIFE INCgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $1k · revenue +210%
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 minnesota business partnership's mission is to maintain a high quality of life for all minnesotans by ensuring that the state's economy remains strong, globally competitive and its prospects for growth bright by working with elected…
MCF is a vibrant philanthropic community connecting, strengthening and mobilizing the power of philanthropy to advance prosperity and equity.
The minnesota chamber of commerce proactively leads the business community statewide to: advance pro-business, responsible minnesota public policy that creates jobs and grows the econony; provde member services to address evolving business…
To be the leading voice of medicine to make minnesota the healthiest state and the best place to practice.
The mission of minnesota public radio is creating the future of public media by amplifying voices to inform, include, and inspire.
To advance the success of women attorneys and strive for a just society.
Creating powerful advocacy to enhance economic vitality in the minneapolis-st. paul region.
To create an extraordinary downtown minneapolis, applying the core values of leadership, collaboration, advocacy and innovation.
The organization's mission is to bring stakeholders together to promote prosperity and long-term growth of minnesota's economy.
To attract, recruit, advance, and retain attorneys of color in the twin cities through education and collaboration with member organizations.
Move minnesota leads the movement for an equitable and sustainable transportation system that puts people first. we are passionate about connecting communities, ending the climate crisis, expanding access to jobs and resources, and…
The minnesota environmental partnership is a coalition that strengthens member effectiveness and builds collective power to secure a healthy environment for all minnesotans.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Minneapolis Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Wild and Free Foundation. 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 40 years old; the field is 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 20% 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 14% 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.
48 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. 48 of the 71 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 MINNESOTA ORCHESTRAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds MACPHAIL CENTER FOR MUSIC ↗
- Who funds CARLETON COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds WILD AND FREE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds VOCALESSENCE ↗
- Who funds GUTHRIE THEATER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds The Minnesota Opera ↗
- Who funds RISE INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds FISHTOWN PRESERVATION SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHSIDE ACHIEVEMENT ZONE ↗
- Who funds MILL CITY COMMONS ↗
- Who funds Twin Cities Rise ↗
- Who funds ALIGHT ↗
- Who funds MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds UNITED THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF THE TWIN CITIES ↗
- Who funds ONEVILLAGE PARTNERS ↗
- Who funds The Advocates For Human Rights ↗
- Who funds CITIZENS LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds PROJECT SUCCESS ↗
- Who funds FRANKLIN CENTER ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF LIFE INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD WILDLIFE FUND INC ↗
- Who funds MINNESOTA LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds World Savvy ↗
- Who funds Minneapolis Parks Foundation ↗
- Who funds MILL CITY FARMERS MARKET INC ↗
- Who funds MinnPost ↗
- Who funds LEELANAU CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds GLOBAL MINNESOTA ↗
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: Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation · The Minneapolis Foundation · Mightycause Charitable Foundation · The McKnight Foundation · Longview Foundation · The Crosswols Foundation · Lenfestey Family Foundation Inc · Mortenson Family Foundation · Otto Bremer Trust · Hrk Foundation · Fr Bigelow Foundation · Margaret a Cargill 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 Will Bracken 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.
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How do I get to Will Bracken Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Will Bracken Family 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.