· Private foundation
Wonderful Life 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 FY2019–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k13 grants · $17k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $155k
- $50k–250k18 grants · $2.1M
- $250k+16 grants · $22M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME | $4,167,000 |
| SHIRLEY RYAN ABILITYLAB | $4,000,000 |
| CATHOLIC EXTENSION | $3,000,000 |
| WOFFORD COLLEGE | $2,000,000 |
| CENTRAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH | $1,160,000 |
| NORTHWESTERN KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT | $1,000,000 |
| WOODLANDS ACADEMY OF THE SACRED HEART | $1,000,000 |
| WOODLANDS ACADEMY OF THE SACRED HEART | $1,000,000 |
| CENTRAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH | $1,000,000 |
| WOODLANDS ACADEMY OF THE SACRED HEART | $1,000,000 |
| WOODLANDS ACADEMY OF THE SACRED HEART | $1,000,000 |
| CENTRAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH | $1,000,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL | $400,000 |
| RONALD MCDONALD HOUSE CHARITIES INC | $250,000 |
| SHIRLEY RYAN ABILITYLAB | $250,000 |
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 (FY19–23, $375k) land where the poverty rate runs at 16%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 29% of Wonderful Life 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 +45% since the first grant, against +14% for the ones you funded once.
44 repeat relationships — 23 still active in FY2024, 21 since wound down; 8 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, 92% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1.7M 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
- RIRehabilitation Institute of Chicago6× · 2019–2024 · $17M · revenue +33%
WOFFORD COLLEGE6× · 2019–2024 · $7.0M · revenue +24%
Northwestern University5× · 2020–2024 · $5.2M · revenue +33%
Funded once
- FOFRIENDS OF UNIV OF NOTRE DAMEone grant, 2023 · $2.0M · revenue -66%
- JMJupiter Medical Center Foundation Incgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $200k · revenue +86%
- CCCATHOLIC CHURCH EXTENSION SOCIETYone grant, 2019 · $100k
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 mission of the university of chicago has been to sustain at the highest level of excellence, the communication of knowledge, the creation of knowledge and the fostering of a dynamic community of scholars and students.
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
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.
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…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
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…
See Disclosure Above.
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
Saint xavier university, a catholic institution inspired by the heritage of the sisters of mercy, educates persons to search for truth, think critically, communicate effectively and serve wisely and compassionately in support of human…
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation Inc and the most unlike its peers is Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. 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 49 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) — 2% 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.
40 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. 40 of the 77 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 Notre Dame du Lac ↗
- Who funds Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago ↗
- Who funds WOFFORD COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF UNIV OF NOTRE DAME ↗
- Who funds Ronald McDonald House Global ↗
- Who funds JAZZ AT ASPEN-SNOWMASS ↗
- Who funds Big Shoulders Fund ↗
- Who funds Ann & Robert H Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago ↗
- Who funds Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago ↗
- Who funds MARGARET HACKETT FAMILY CENTER NFP ↗
- Who funds Accelerate Institute ↗
- Who funds HARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE INC ↗
- Who funds THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BOYS & GIRLS CLUB OF MARTIN COUNTY ↗
- Who funds Jupiter Medical Center Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds DANIEL MURPHY SCHOLARSHIP FUND ↗
- Who funds CLEARBROOK ↗
- Who funds ANDERSON RANCH ARTS CENTER ↗
- Who funds NAVY SEAL FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Bridging Bionics Foundation ↗
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: J Christopher and Anne N Reyes Foundation · The Chicago Community Trust · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Patrick G and Shirley W Ryan Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · American Endowment Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · AbbVie Foundation · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc
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 Wonderful Life 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.
- Kipp Miami Inc — 6% of income from government
- Boys & Girls Club of Martin County — 2% 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 Wonderful Life Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Wonderful Life 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.