What Twenty Tax Returns Show About Your October Donation
Credit: Daily Vitality
You are standing at a checkout counter in October, and there is a pink ribbon on the thing in your hand. Or maybe you are looking at a donation page, or a coworker's fundraising link, or a registration form for a walk that starts at seven in the morning. Whatever the moment looks like, you probably have a picture in your head of where the money goes. Most of us do. It usually involves a laboratory.
Here is the reframe. The pink ribbon is a symbol, not a destination. It is not trademarked to any single organization, it carries no promise about how a dollar gets spent, and two charities using the identical ribbon can send wildly different shares of your donation to research. That is not a scandal. It is just a fact that almost nobody puts numbers to, because putting numbers to it means reading tax returns instead of mission statements.
So we read the tax returns. We picked 20 US breast cancer nonprofits, pulled each one's most recent signed Form 990 straight from its own electronic filing, and computed a single figure for each: research cents per dollar. That is research spending divided by total expenses, expressed in cents. We also computed it a second way, against total revenue, because the two numbers tell you different things. Every row below shows its fiscal year, its filing date and its Employer Identification Number, so you can pull the same document we did.
What we found is a spread far wider than most people expect. One organization sent 96.6 cents of every dollar it spent to research. Twelve sent nothing. Across all twenty, the combined figure was 34.8 cents. And the single most important thing to understand before you read the table is that a zero is often the correct answer — the organization paying a patient's rent this month is not failing at research, it is succeeding at something else entirely.
We are going to show you the ranking, show you exactly how we built it, and then show you how to run the same check yourself in about three minutes on any charity you are curious about. That last part is the piece worth keeping after October ends.
Let us put the method on the table before the results, because a ranking you cannot reproduce is just an opinion with decimal places.
The metric, stated plainly. Research cents per dollar equals research spending divided by total expenses — Form 990 Part IX, line 25, column A — expressed in cents. The second column uses total revenue, from Part I line 12, as the denominator instead. Research spending is the Part III program service expense that the organization itself labels as research, where it breaks out such a line; where it does not, we use the sum of Schedule I and Schedule F grants whose stated purpose is research. Every row tells you which of the two bases it used.
That second definition matters more than it sounds. Schedule I is the part of the return where a charity must itemize every grant of $5,000 or more, and beside each one it writes, in its own words, the purpose of that grant. The Internal Revenue Service does not supply a dropdown menu for that field. The charity types what the money was for. Reading those strings is the only way to separate a grant that funded a laboratory from a grant that funded a mammogram, and it is the step that nobody else in this category takes.
We deliberately built the metric to run cool rather than hot. Where a grant's stated purpose is genuinely ambiguous we say so in the row instead of quietly counting it. Where an organization runs research in-house rather than granting it out, we count the program line, but we do not then add the grants inside that line on top — that would double-count, and the number would flatter everyone. Where a filing is a Form 990-EZ, which carries no Schedule I at all, we note the reduced detail rather than pretending it is not there.
A few caveats belong here rather than buried at the bottom. Fiscal years differ between these organizations, and returns are filed months to years after the period they cover, so this is a snapshot rather than a scoreboard. The filings below span fiscal years ending December 2024 through June 2025 and were filed between July 2025 and May 2026. Any single year can be distorted by one large multi-year grant, a bequest, or a deficit — three organizations here spent more than they took in. Research share is one deliberately narrow dimension of merit, and it cannot see anything a filing does not disclose. Our organization list closed on September 9, 2026.
If the per-unit approach feels familiar, it is the same method we use when we rank foods by the best protein per dollar — pick one measurable thing, define it precisely, and apply it identically to every item.
Here is the whole table. Find the organization you were thinking of, then read its section for what the number actually means.
The organization at the top of this list has no employees. Not a small staff — none. Every officer, including president Thomas Scalera, reports zero compensation, and the return shows zero fundraising expense and zero management expense against $481,248 in total spending.
Where did the money go? Two grants: $340,000 to Memorial Sloan Kettering and $125,000 to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, itemized on Schedule I of its Form 990 for the year ending December 2024. That is 96.6 cents of every dollar spent.
Notice the second column, though, because this row is the reason it exists. Against revenue, the figure is 149.1 cents — over a dollar. That is not an error. The foundation granted out more than it raised in this particular year, drawing its net assets down from $423,030 to $253,704. A percentage above 100 is a signal to look at reserves, not a signal of magic.
One honest caveat: both grants state their purpose as "to further cancer research and assistance," which bundles research together with assistance in a single phrase. We counted it, because the purpose names research, but you should know the wording is not clean.
This one is a lesson in reading a percentage next to a dollar amount instead of on its own. The research share is 88.9 cents, second highest in the table. The research spending behind it is $71,756.
The foundation's Schedule A tells the fuller story, and it is a steep one. Contributions across five consecutive years run $2,465,432, then $2,393,855, then $1,317,425, then $864,551, and then $70,367 in the year we examined. An organization that once moved millions now files a Form 990-EZ on total expenses of $80,689, with every officer uncompensated.
Two disclosures on this row. The 990-EZ is the short form and carries no Schedule I, so grant purposes are not itemized the way they are elsewhere in this table; we used the program service expense instead. And the foundation's single grant of $60,133, to Tower Cancer Research Foundation, is classified in its own Schedule O as "operations" rather than research, despite the research mission stated at the top of the form.
Now we reach an organization with real scale behind a high share. METAvivor spent $4,477,421 and granted $3,750,000, and all eleven rows on its Schedule I state the same one-word purpose: research.
The recipient list reads like a map of American oncology. The University of California San Francisco received $900,000. Moffitt, Texas A&M, NYU Grossman School of Medicine and LabCentral each received $450,000. Dana-Farber, Stanford, the University of Kansas Medical Center, UT Southwestern and Weill Cornell each received $200,000, and MD Anderson received $50,000, all set out in its return for the year ending December 2024.
There is a further distinction worth knowing, and it is the reason a lot of donors seek this organization out specifically. Its grants are directed at stage IV metastatic disease, which is a narrower target than "breast cancer research" in general. We used the grant total as the research figure, which is the conservative choice; counting its full program line instead would push the number to 91.5 cents.
Rank four by share, rank one by an enormous margin in dollars. BCRF spent $94,845,424 in the year ending June 2025 and sent $71,947,853 of it to research — more than eleven times what every other organization in this table sent combined, once Komen is set aside.
Its Schedule I lists 76 domestic recipients totaling $61,108,218, and its Schedule F lists 31 foreign recipients totaling $10,839,635. Every single row across both schedules reads "medical research." Not most rows. All of them. The combined figure matches the grants line on the face of its Form 990 exactly, which means 100% of the grants it paid carried a research purpose.
Scale brings costs that an all-volunteer foundation does not carry, and they are visible here too: fundraising expense of $9,510,601, and fundraising events grossing $20,105,491 against $3,191,089 in direct event costs. We used the grant total as the research figure; counting its full program service line would give 83.5 cents instead.
Grants at this scale are the front end of a long pipeline, and the studies they eventually produce are the ones that show up years later in breast cancer research news.
Here is the first organization in the table that is essentially an event with a grants program attached, and that is meant descriptively rather than as a criticism. Its fundraising events grossed $1,801,403 against total revenue of $2,045,313. Almost the entire organization is funded by people showing up to things.
What comes out the other end is unambiguous. All nineteen Schedule I rows on its return for the year ending March 2025 state "breast cancer research," including $125,000 to Memorial Sloan-Kettering, $78,125 to Mount Sinai, $75,000 each to Yale and the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, and $65,625 each to Rockefeller University and Washington University.
The gap between the 55.8-cent figure and a number closer to METAvivor's is mostly the cost of running those events, which came to $523,489 in direct expenses. That is the trade every event-funded charity makes, and seeing both halves of it on one return is more useful than arguing about whether galas are good.
This row exists to teach you something the table alone cannot. The Coalition Fund's research spending is not a grant. It is a program line called "Catalytic Research Projects and Collaborations," the Artemis Project, worth $859,106, and it reports zero dollars in grants because the organization runs the work itself rather than sending it out.
If you had checked only Schedule I, you would have concluded this organization funds no research whatsoever. That is how false zeros happen, and it is why the method below asks you to read Part III as well.
The same filing shows a second structure worth understanding. Its only organizational grant is $311,000 to the National Breast Cancer Coalition, a separate but related entity, with the purpose given as general lobbying activities under a 501(h) election. A charity funding an affiliated advocacy arm is a normal, disclosed arrangement — but if you are tracing where a dollar ends up, it is a door you have to walk through rather than around.
Look at the two columns for this organization side by side. Against expenses, 19.3 cents. Against revenue, 9.4 cents. Roughly half. That gap is the most interesting thing on the row.
The research grants themselves are clean and local: $131,262 to the University of Pittsburgh, $125,545 to Temple University, $92,293 to the University of Pennsylvania, $44,526 to Drexel University and $39,224 to the Fox Chase Cancer Center Research Institute, every one stated as breast cancer research.
Where the money came from is the twist. Its Form 990 explains that since July 2008 the organization has served as administrator of Pennsylvania's state income tax check-off for breast and cervical cancer research. Those research dollars are taxpayer check-off funds passing through, not donations it raised — which means a donor writing a check to this organization is largely funding its support and education programs, while the research line is being fed by a different faucet entirely.
This is the name most people picture when they picture a pink ribbon, and it is the largest spender in the table at $110,497,282. Its research share ranks eighth of twenty.
Komen's own return breaks its work into three program lines, and the proportions are the story. Patient care accounts for $47,390,113. Research accounts for $18,085,047. Public policy and advocacy accounts for $5,753,937. Grants to individuals total $7,471,750, described throughout as patient care assistance in amounts of $400, $500 and $750 per person — real money reaching real households, and not research.
Two more figures from the same filing give you the shape of the organization. Fundraising expense was $26,593,861 against program services of $71,229,097, and fundraising events grossed $37,437,873 against $8,635,082 in direct costs. Running the country's best-known cancer walk is itself expensive.
We used the program line Komen labels "Research." Counting only its research-purpose grants on Schedules I and F would give a lower figure of 14.5 cents. Where two defensible bases exist, this table discloses both rather than choosing quietly.
The gap between what a famous name suggests and what its ledger shows is the same gap we keep running into elsewhere, most recently when we ranked morning habits by how much they actually do.
Here is the first zero, and it belongs to a $27 million organization. Before you read anything into it, read what the money did.
Its Schedule I runs to 95 rows totaling $6,718,000, and the stated purposes are: screening and diagnostics, $2,279,000; patient navigation, $1,723,000; screening plus navigation together, $1,467,600; a metastatic retreat, $499,600; patient relief, $255,000; education and outreach, $108,000; survivorship, $87,500. Not one row anywhere in the return names research, and neither does any line of Part III.
This is an organization that gets women screened and then walks them through what happens next. That is a defensible thing to spend $27 million on. It is simply not the thing most people assume a pink ribbon buys, and the only way to know which one you are funding is to look.
The subtlest zero in the table, and a genuinely useful trap to walk into once so you never fall for it again.
Scan this organization's program lines and you will find one called "Research News & News Hub," worth $292,433, staffed by science editors and medical reviewers. The word research is right there. Read the description on its Form 990 and it becomes clear that the program reports on breast cancer research rather than funding any. Its larger programs are medical content and educational resources at $4,232,791 and a moderated patient community, in English and Spanish, at $528,544. It paid no grants of any kind.
Explaining research well is valuable work, and plenty of people reading this have relied on exactly that kind of content at two in the morning. It is just a different line item than funding a laboratory, and keyword-matching the word "research" will not tell them apart.
A well-run mid-sized organization with a zero that is entirely by design. Its Schedule I contains no organizational grants at all. The whole $455,218 goes to individuals as financial hardship grants.
The mechanism is spelled out in its return: one-time grants of up to $1,250 for people in active treatment who are facing financial hardship, alongside education programs, conferences and a website. Against $6,430,211 in total spending, that is what the year bought.
If you have ever wondered what a "support organization" concretely means on a tax return, this is it — a modest check, sent once, to someone in the middle of treatment.
Another organization with science in its programs and no research in its spending, for a reason worth understanding rather than glossing over.
Its largest program line, at $1,541,760, is science, public education and engagement, and its own description says the science program "translates, disseminates and communicates evidence" of environmental links. Translation is not funding. The rest of the filing goes to national and state policy work at $437,194 and market-based campaigns pressing companies on chemicals in consumer products at $349,679, against a single grant of $10,495.
This organization is playing a prevention and policy game rather than a treatment research game. Whether that is what you want your dollar doing is a question only you can answer, but the return answers the factual half of it cleanly.
This row is where we show you the honest limit of our own metric, using a specific organization rather than a vague disclaimer.
Young Survival Coalition serves people diagnosed under 40, and its $72,391 in grants are travel grants — $71,391 spread across 102 individuals so they could attend its conferences. By the definition on this page, research spending is zero.
Except its Part III also notes that through Project 528, the organization surveyed more than 3,800 young adults across 67 countries, work it describes as elevating underrepresented voices in research and policy. That activity sits inside the program budget on its return without ever being broken out as research spending or paid as a research grant. A filings-based metric cannot see it. Ours does not, and we would rather tell you that than let the zero stand unexplained.
If you only take one row away from this table, consider making it this one, because it is the cleanest example of a zero that is not a criticism.
The Pink Fund spent $2,983,374 and granted $1,480,227, all of it to individuals. The mechanism described in its Form 990 is unusually concrete: patients submit their bills, and the fund pays their creditors directly. A separate Mary Herczog Fund serves metastatic patients not expected to return to work, paying up to $6,000 across six months.
Measuring this organization on research share is like measuring a food bank on literacy rates. It was never trying to do the thing being measured. It exists so that a mortgage gets paid during chemotherapy, and on that basis the return shows it doing exactly what it says.
This organization funds mammograms — $81,225 for diagnostic mammograms, $75,620 for diagnostic testing, $33,972 for screening mammograms, $15,177 for ultrasound and $600 for MRI screening, plus $107,500 in grants to hospitals and partner organizations, all logged as program support. No research anywhere.
There is a second number on this row that has nothing to do with research, and it is the reason we teach readers to look at the functional expense columns. In the year ending March 2025, its return reports fundraising expense of $1,475,162 against program services of $1,061,226 and management costs of $192,857. The organization spent more on raising money than on programs that year.
Judging whether something is worth the money means looking at what you get back, the same discipline we apply to anti-aging ingredients worth paying for.
We are reporting that as a fact rather than a verdict, and one year is genuinely one year — a single filing can be distorted by timing, a campaign build-out, or a bad season. It is the kind of thing worth looking at across several returns before drawing any conclusion, which the method below lets you do.
The most unambiguous zero in the table, and a short section because the organization needs no explaining. Its entire statement of program accomplishments reads, in full: "Free oncology-informed fly fishing retreats for women in treatment or recovery from breast cancer."
That is it. Against $2,010,569 in total spending, its return contains no grant of any kind, to any organization or individual, anywhere. Fundraising events grossed $607,444 against $214,712 in direct costs.
Nobody reading that sentence could mistake this for a research charity, which is rather the point. When an organization tells you plainly what it does, the tax return simply confirms it.
We included one local organization deliberately, to show that the same method reads identically at any scale — and so you can see what to expect when you run it on the charity in your own city.
This Austin, Texas nonprofit spent $1,819,448, with patient navigation as its largest program at $1,140,514. Its $148,564 in grants went to roughly 3,000 individuals under community outreach and client services. Government grants of $509,550 are a meaningful share of its revenue, which is itself a useful thing to notice on a small charity's filing, and its Art Bra Austin event grossed $552,177.
Nothing here is exotic. A local support organization looks on paper exactly like a national one, just with fewer zeros, and the same five steps get you the answer.
A youth-focused education organization, and our third and final example of the word "research" appearing in a filing with no research money behind it.
Its largest program, Check Yourself, costs $589,621 and creates breast health education that its own return describes as "thoroughly researched." That phrase is a claim about the quality of its content, not a description of research funding, and the difference is not a technicality. Its Give Back Grants program distributes $500 financial aid payments, totaling $102,000 for the year.
One structural note for anyone comparing rows: against $1,259,787 in total spending, management and general costs of $348,440 sit relatively high next to program services of $830,547. Small organizations often carry proportionally heavier overhead simply because some costs do not shrink.
Of all twenty filings, this is the one where you can most nearly watch a donated dollar being spent, because its Schedule I itemizes assistance by category rather than lumping it together.
Groceries, $274,232. Transport, $181,690. Housing, $79,210. Utilities, $26,970. A social worker, $5,138. Gifts, $2,442. Co-pays, $422. Telephone, $250. Final expenses, $300. The Huntington Beach organization reports serving an average of 155 patients a month, and its return shows $571,176 in total grants against $775,113 in spending.
Groceries being the single largest category is not an accident either, given what feeding a household actually costs before anyone adds a medical crisis to the budget.
Its event economics are also unusually efficient, which is worth noting factually: a Christmas lunch, golf events and three other events grossed $393,056 against only $49,648 in direct costs. Compare that ratio to the larger organizations above and you get a feel for how differently events can perform.
We finish with the smallest organization in the set, and there is a certain symmetry in where it lands. Breast Cancer Action is the group that launched Think Before You Pink — the campaign that first pushed people to ask the question this entire article is answering with numbers. Now it sits in the table itself.
It funds no research and pays no grants. Its work is a $19,390 rapid-response watchdog function monitoring legislative and treatment-related issues, plus $58,171 of patient-centered resources. Its most recent return shows total spending down to $120,383 from $708,959 the prior year, as contributions fell from $410,972 to $154,385, and notes that a board officer is currently serving as executive director without compensation.
Scrutiny, it turns out, is not a well-funded line of work. Make of that what you will.
Everything above is a snapshot of one moment. This part does not expire, and it works on any charity in any category — a food bank, an animal shelter, your college.
Do step 5 before you conclude anything from a zero. The National Breast Cancer Coalition Fund's entire research budget lives in Part III and never appears on Schedule I, because the organization runs the work rather than granting it out. Skipping Part III would have produced a false zero on a real research program.
One more piece of context that saves confusion later. Charity rating sites answer a different question than this table does. CharityWatch, for instance, gives the Breast Cancer Research Foundation a program percentage of 84% and a cost to raise $100 of $9 — useful figures, measuring program spending against overhead. But the National Breast Cancer Foundation, which shows 0.0 cents to research here, spent $22,178,431 of $27,117,816 on program services, which is also a program percentage above 80%. A high rating tells you a charity spends on its programs. It does not tell you what those programs are.
About the Author
Angela Nightingale
No, and in most cases here it means the opposite. Twelve of these twenty organizations funded no research, and for organizations like The Pink Fund, Casting for Recovery and Breast Cancer Angels that is the entire stated mission working as intended. The number tells you what a charity does, not how well it does it.
Because they answer different questions. Cents per dollar of expenses asks what share of the money actually spent went to research. Cents per dollar of revenue asks what share of the money coming in went to research. When an organization spends reserves, the revenue figure runs higher; when it builds reserves, it runs lower. The Pennsylvania Breast Cancer Coalition shows 19.3 against 9.4 for exactly this reason.
Yes, and The Cancer Couch Foundation shows 149.1 cents per revenue dollar. It granted more than it raised that year and drew down its net assets to do it. It means the organization dipped into savings, not that the accounting is broken.
Charities choose their own fiscal year ends, and the filings here end anywhere from December 2024 to June 2025. Returns are also filed months to years after the period they cover. That is why every row carries its own year and why this is a snapshot rather than a live scoreboard.
Each organization's own signed, electronically filed Form 990, read line by line — Part I for revenue and total expenses, Part III for program descriptions, Part IX for the functional expense split, Schedule I and Schedule F for grants and their stated purposes. Nothing was taken from a rating site or a press release.
The program service expense an organization labels as research where it breaks out such a line, and otherwise the sum of grants whose stated purpose is research. We use one basis or the other per organization, never both added together, because a research program line already contains its own grants.
We flag it in the row rather than quietly counting or discarding it. The Cancer Couch Foundation's grants say "cancer research and assistance," which mixes two things, and the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation's only grant is classified as "operations" despite a research mission. Both are disclosed above.
Yes, in at least two ways. It can run the research itself as a program, which is what the National Breast Cancer Coalition Fund does with its Artemis Project. Or it can move money through a related organization that files its own separate return. Both are legitimate and both are disclosed on the form if you read past Schedule I.
Not automatically, though scale does bring costs. The Breast Cancer Research Foundation is the largest research funder here by an enormous margin and still sends 75.9 cents per dollar to research. Susan G. Komen, similar in size, sends 16.4 — because it also runs large patient care and advocacy programs. Size explains less than mission does.
That depends entirely on what you want your money to do, and this table is not built to make the choice for you. If you want laboratory research funded, the top of the list is where that happens. If you want someone's electricity bill covered during treatment, the bottom of the list is where that happens. Both are real, and the ribbon on the packaging tells you neither.
No. This is reporting on nonprofit tax filings — where donated money goes and how to trace it. Nothing here addresses risk, screening, treatment or prognosis, and any question in those areas belongs with a clinician.
Roughly once a year, since each organization files annually and the newest return typically appears twelve to twenty-four months after its fiscal year closes. The five-step method above is the part worth saving; the specific figures will move.
