We applied network analysis to two years of IRS-990 filings from ten Maine-based foundations and one national Montessori organization, with a focus on how education dollars and board governance are structured across the system.
For advisors who work with nonprofit boards and foundation governance, the picture is unusually legible: one donor dominates education giving, the largest grantees are effectively captured channels, and governance operates in complete silos across all eleven boards.
Every node and edge traces to a specific filing. Deterministic extraction, full audit trail.
Interactive graph. Scroll to zoom · drag any node to rearrange · drag the background to pan · hover or click a node to see the source evidence · click an insight below to focus on its subgraph.
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Of the $341M flowing through these foundations in 2023–2024, $260M (76%) goes to education. And of that education total, $251M (97%) comes from a single institution: the Harold Alfond Foundation. The other nine foundations combined account for under $9M in education giving.
Why it matters: this isn't ten foundations making education decisions — it's one institution's portfolio, with nine smaller funders operating around it. For a board advisor, the implication is that strategy conversations at the smaller foundations are happening inside a gravitational field they may not fully see from the inside.
The top education grantees are all single-funder, large-dollar relationships: Northeastern University ($112M), Maine Community College System ($77M), University of Maine Foundation ($28.5M), Alfond Scholarship Foundation ($7.8M). Only three education grantees in the entire dataset receive from more than one funder — and the largest co-funded grantee (Husson University) receives about $1.5M, two orders of magnitude below the Alfond anchors.
Why it matters: these aren't coordinated investments — they're named initiatives tied to one donor's architecture. That changes the governance question at the grantee side too: boards of captured-channel institutions carry a different risk profile than boards of diversified-revenue nonprofits.
The 116 individuals who serve on these foundation boards are 116 unique people. Zero board interlocks. No one sits on two boards in this network. Governance operates in eleven separate rooms, even while the capital they steward flows through overlapping grantee landscapes.
Why it matters: when funding is concentrated (insight 1) and grantees are captured (insight 2), governance is the layer where cross-funder coordination would normally emerge. Here there is no such layer. Whether that is by design, by tradition, or by inertia is a conversation — but the structural fact is worth naming.
Of the nine board departures flagged across all eleven foundations in this window, five are at TD Charitable Foundation — including the Treasurer, and four of the seven officer-tier positions changing hands in a twelve-month span. The other six foundations have zero to one departure each.
Why it matters: a clustered departure pattern at the officer tier is a specific governance signal. It can indicate strategic reconstitution (deliberate) or institutional instability (reactive). A board advisor reading this dataset would flag TD Charitable as the foundation where the governance question is most time-sensitive right now.
Consultants who work with nonprofit 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. Three examples from this dataset:
This type of diagnostic is not visible in individual 990 filings or in traditional board self-assessment — but becomes legible when the ecosystem is structured as a network.