· Private foundation
William J Nicholson 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 $10k4 grants · $16k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $99k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| KIDS READ NOW | $30,000 |
| MICHIGAN PARKINSON FOUNDATION | $20,000 |
| SIX FEET OVER | $19,066 |
| FISHTOWN PRESERVATION SOCIETY | $10,000 |
| THE FLINT CHILDREN'S MUSEUM | $10,000 |
| MICHIGAN SCIENCE CENTER | $10,000 |
| MICHAEL'S PLACE | $6,244 |
| GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY | $5,441 |
| ELE'S PLACE | $3,663 |
| PEANUT GALLERY PLAYERS | $805 |
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 (FY17–24) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 50% of your 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.
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 6% of William J Nicholson 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 +79% since the first grant, against +17% for the ones you funded once.
18 repeat relationships — 10 still active in FY2024, 8 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 FY2024, 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
- MPMICHIGAN PARKINSON FOUNDATION8× · 2017–2024 · $91k · revenue +178%
- MSMICHIGAN SCIENCE CENTER5× · 2019–2024 · $88k · revenue +110%
- TFTHE FLINT CHILDREN'S MUSEUM6× · 2019–2024 · $87k · revenue +79%
Funded once
THE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTSone grant, 2019 · $25k · revenue +13%- HMHURON-CLINTON METROPOLITAN AUTHORITYone grant, 2019 · $25k
- MCMID-MICHIGAN CHILDREN'S MUSEUMone grant, 2019 · $11k · revenue -1%
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.
Inspire awareness, appreciation and passion for michigan's history and stories, culture and environment through the arts.
To enhance the community by inspiring creativity, learning and curiosity.
The lincoln children's museum invites children to create, discover and learn through the power of play.
Provide an interactive learning environment for children to foster imagination and creativity while inspiring life-long learning
Our mission is to make science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) come alive, and our vision is a community where all people value stem to inform decision making and enrich lives. (continued on schedule o)guiding principles: we help…
Discovery World educates, motivates,mobilizes and inspires the innovators and entrepreneurs of the 21st century. We connect innovation, science, and technology with exploration, environment, and our Great Lakes freshwater resources through…
The museum celebrates learning through play. Exhibits and programs focus on developing self-direction, problem solving, logic and creativity skills in children (particularly ages 1-8) and their caregivers.
The museum is an educational corporation formed to ignite a life-long passion for exploring, discovering, and valuing nature and science.
The museum school celebrates, nurtures and enhances the ability of all participants through experimental, project-based learning. infusing the arts and utilizing resources available at local museums.
To conserve, sustain, and connect natural areas, land, and waters that make the places we live special
To ignite and fuel a passion for science, technology, arts and math through dynamic interactive experiences.
The milwaukee public museum inspires curiosity, excites minds and increases desire to preserve and protect our world's natural and cultural diversity through exhibitions, educational programs, collections and research.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Mid-Michigan Children's Museum and the most unlike its peers is Six Feet Over. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
17 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. 17 of the 24 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 MICHIGAN PARKINSON FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MICHIGAN SCIENCE CENTER ↗
- Who funds THE FLINT CHILDREN'S MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds MICHAEL'S PLACE ↗
- Who funds ANN ARBOR HANDS-ON MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds SIX FEET OVER ↗
- Who funds ELE'S PLACE INC ↗
- Who funds KIDS READ NOW INC ↗
- Who funds JOHN BALL ZOO ↗
- Who funds FISHTOWN PRESERVATION SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds THE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS ↗
- Who funds GRASS LAKE SANCTUARY ↗
- Who funds PEANUT GALLERY PLAYERS ↗
- Who funds MID-MICHIGAN CHILDREN'S MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds Binder Park Zoological Society Inc ↗
- Who funds KIMBERLY ANNE GILLARY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Neutral Zone ↗
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: Consumers Energy Foundation · Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan · Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · 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 William J Nicholson 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to William J Nicholson Foundation?
Find your warmest path to William J Nicholson 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.