· Private foundation
William & Martha Ford Fund
Its FY2024 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
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 $10k50 grants · $93k
- $10k–50k9 grants · $120k
- $50k–250k4 grants · $301k
- $250k+2 grants · $2.6M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| HENRY FORD HEALTH SYSTEM | $2,150,000 |
| THE CHILDREN'S FOUNDATION | $500,000 |
| CHRIST CHURCH GROSSE POINTE | $101,000 |
| THE HENRY FORD | $100,000 |
| DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS | $50,000 |
| OUR LADY OF THE ELMS SCHOOL | $50,000 |
| ST JUDE CHILDRENS RESEARCH HOSPITAL | $25,000 |
| PRINCETON UNIVERSITY | $20,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $15,000 |
| DETROIT ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY | $10,000 |
| RACQUET UP DETROIT | $10,000 |
| JUPITER MEDICAL CENTER FOUNDATION INC | $10,000 |
| FREEDOM INSTITUTE | $10,000 |
| HOBE SOUND COMMUNITY CHEST | $10,000 |
| CATCH | $10,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $70k) land where the poverty rate runs at 19%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 89% 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 +39% since the first grant, against +24% for the ones you funded once.
95 repeat relationships — 57 still active in FY2024, 38 since wound down; 5 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; $33k 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
- HFHENRY FORD HEALTH SYSTEM8× · 2017–2024 · $3.1M · revenue +69%
THE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS8× · 2017–2024 · $207k · revenue +46%
The Trustees of Princeton University8× · 2017–2024 · $120k · revenue +5%
Funded once
- HFHENRY FORD HEALTH SYSTEM FOUNDATIONone grant, 2022 · $150k · revenue -70%
- NCNATIONAL CENTER FOR LEARNING DISABILITIES INCone grant, 2019 · $25k · revenue -5%
- SCSCHAAP CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTSone grant, 2022 · $25k
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.
Gdahc mission: together with our partners, we empower and improve the health and economic vitality of individuals, organizations and communities by catalyzing the power of collaboration. gdahc vision: healthy people. healthy community.…
The chamber is the voice for business and works to power the economy for southeast michigan through public policy, advocacy and leading regional economic development and talent initiatives.
Delta dental fund's mission is to improve the oral health of the public and to advance dental science and the dental profession through research and education.
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.
Informing and educating the public and decision makers about environmental issues.
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.
To inform and enrich the intellectual lives of 20,000 alumni of harvard university in the washington, dc area and to assist harvard university with respect to applicants and undergraduates from the dc area.
The fsmb serves as the voice for state medical boards, supporting them through education, assessment, research and advocacy while providing services and initiatives that promote patient safety, quality health care and regulatory best…
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 corporation is organized and shall be operated exclusively for charitable, educational and scientific purposes by conducting or supporting activites exclusively for the benefit of, to perform the functions of, or to carry out the…
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Children's Hospital of Michigan Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Russ Thomas Scholarship Fund. 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 17. 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 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.
88 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. 88 of the 140 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 HENRY FORD HEALTH SYSTEM ↗
- Who funds THE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS ↗
- Who funds HENRY FORD HEALTH SYSTEM FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds The Trustees of Princeton University ↗
- Who funds FREEDOM INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds HENRY FORD ESTATE ↗
- Who funds PLANNED PARENTHOOD OF MICHIGAN ↗
- Who funds GARDEN CLUB OF MICHIGAN INC ↗
- Who funds RACQUET UP DETROIT ↗
- Who funds Jupiter Medical Center Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds DETROIT ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds SERVICES FOR OLDER CITIZENS INC DBA THE HELM AT THE BOLL LIFE CENTER ↗
- Who funds GROSSE POINTE HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds THE GREENING OF DETROIT ↗
- Who funds DETROIT RIVERFRONT CONSERVANCY INC ↗
- Who funds MACKINAC CENTER ↗
- Who funds EAST HAMPTON HEALTHCARE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL CENTER FOR LEARNING DISABILITIES INC ↗
- Who funds THE SOUTHAMPTON HOSPITAL FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds HOBE SOUND COMMUNITY CHEST INC ↗
- Who funds TAU BETA ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds DETROIT PUBLIC SAFETY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ARTHRITIS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds BELLE ISLE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds JUPITER ISLAND MEDICAL CLINIC INC ↗
- Who funds FOCUSHOPE ↗
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: Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan · Dte Energy Foundation · St Clair Charitable Trust · Lynn & Paul Alandt Foundation · Hudson-Webber Foundation · The Ralph C Wilson Jr Foundation · The Kresge Foundation · Ethel and James Flinn Foundation · McGregor Fund · Ford Philanthropy · Alice Kales Hartwick Foundation · Benson & Edith Ford Fund
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 William & Martha Ford Fund 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.
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- The Shriners' Hospital for Children — 6% of income from government
- Shriners Hospitals for Children — 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 William & Martha Ford Fund?
Find your warmest path to William & Martha Ford Fund 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.