We applied network analysis to two years of IRS-990 filings from fifteen foundations giving into the Great Lakes region, with a focus on how grant dollars and board governance are structured across the system.
For advisors who work with nonprofit boards and foundation governance, the picture is unusually legible: funding diversity sits alongside complete governance atomization, the role architecture tilts heavily toward the director tier, and clustered transitions at specific foundations signal where advisory work is most time-sensitive right now.
Every node and edge traces to a specific filing. Deterministic extraction, full audit trail.
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Fifteen foundations move $337M through 2,533 grantees in this window. The largest funder — Charles Stewart Mott Foundation at 36% — is dominant but not controlling; the top five funders together hold 77% of capital, with real distribution below that. On the funding side, this reads as a reasonably diverse system.
The governance side reads differently. The 254 board members across the sixteen foundations are 254 unique people. Zero interlocks. And only 2.4% of grantees — 62 out of 2,533 — receive from more than one funder in this window.
Why it matters: funding diversity without governance ties or co-funding is a specific structural pattern. Information, strategy, and lessons don't travel through shared directors, and the grantees that do get co-funded are the only places where cross-funder learning has a natural container. That's a small surface for a large ecosystem.
Across all sixteen boards, the 254 positions break down as 170 Director/Trustee (67%), 59 Leadership (23%), 16 Finance (6%), and 9 Secretary (4%). Per-foundation the pattern is uneven: nine boards have a complete officer slate in their filings; four report partial coverage; three — Porter, Fred A & Barbara M Erb, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation — are missing a treasurer, secretary, or both in the filing record.
Why it matters: the mix of filing conventions and actual structural gaps is itself a signal. Some of this is reporting practice; some of it reflects real architecture. The distinction usually can't be made from a filing alone — but it can be flagged from one, and that's often where a board conversation usefully begins.
Of the nine board departures flagged across all sixteen foundations, the Bay Area Community Foundation carries seven role changes in a single filing window — three departures and four incoming members. The inflection is officer-tier: Diane Mahoney's CEO tenure ended in September 2024; Shawna Walraven came in as President & CEO in October 2024. Three trustees rotated out of the slate in May 2024; three rotated in the same month.
Why it matters: clustered officer and trustee turnover inside a twelve-month window is the exact inflection point where board-advisory work tends to matter most — orientation of incoming directors, officer-tier succession, fiduciary continuity, and role-architecture review all need attention at once. It's also a signal that isn't visible from inside any single foundation's own board review.
Five foundations in this network have boards of two to five people: Porter Family (2), Astor Street (3), The Brookby Foundation (4), McDougal Family (5), Sears Swetland (5). Their composition skews officer-heavy — in most cases the entire board is officers, with little or no separate director tier — and their officer slates are frequently partial as filed.
Why it matters: this isn't a flaw. It's a recognizable stage — common to founder-era and family-governed foundations — with a distinctive consulting profile: succession risk, policy-framework gaps, fiduciary coverage, and role-clarity questions all concentrate here. Outside advisory work tends to land well in this type when framed as transition and structure support rather than compliance critique.
Advisors who work with nonprofit and foundation boards are typically hired into one engagement at a time — a single board, a single governance review, a single succession moment. A network view of the surrounding ecosystem surfaces context that a single-board engagement can't, and points to specific entry points where advisory work is most likely to matter.