Breakthrough T1D's Event Giving Held Steady While Its Other Gifts Grew. What Can a Smaller Organization Learn?

A smaller organization can learn one clear lesson from Breakthrough T1D's latest public filing: a steady event program and a growing gift base can live side by side, and in this filing the growth came from gifts outside the events. In its fiscal year ending June 30, 2025, Breakthrough T1D reported $277.0M in contributions, up from $211.6M the year before (FY2025 Form 990, Part I, line 8). Contributions from fundraising events came to $103.0M (Part VIII, line 1c), close to the $100.2M reported a year earlier (FY2024 Form 990, Part VIII, line 1c). The line for all other contributions, which covers gifts from individuals, companies, and grantmakers outside events, rose from $108.5M to $171.0M (Part VIII, line 1f). This article reads the filing line by line, says what it shows and what it cannot show, and turns the pattern into steps an organization of any size can run on its own donor file.

What does the FY2025 filing show at a glance?

The table below collects the figures a careful reader would pull from the FY2025 Form 990 before interpreting any of them. The middle column is what the filing reports, with its part and line. The right column names the question each figure raises that only the organization's own donor records could answer.

What is Breakthrough T1D doing well?

Breakthrough T1D funds research into type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune condition in which the body stops making insulin. Its filing states the mission in one line: "improving lives by accelerating breakthroughs to cure, prevent and treat T1D" (Part I, line 1). The organization was known as JDRF until June 4, 2024, when it announced its new name. Research funding is the largest program by expense: the filing reports $121.7M of expense for the research-funding program, all of it reported as grants, and its narrative gives $121.1M of research grant expense, net, under accounting rules, plus $15.5M of research investments held on the balance sheet (Part III, line 4a), and the organization states on its research page that it has funded more than $2.5 billion in research since its founding in 1970, an organization-reported cumulative figure.

The second visible strength is a very large volunteer community. The filing estimates 235,000 volunteers (Part I, line 6), against 688 employees (Part I, line 5). In a February 2026 release, the organization described "over 120 Breakthrough T1D Walks across the country" (Breakthrough T1D via PR Newswire, 2026). A walk is a peer-to-peer event: each participant asks friends and family to sponsor them, so every participant is also a small-scale fundraiser who brings new names into the organization's records. The third strength is that the whole base is private. The filing reports no government grants (Part VIII, line 1e), so every contributed dollar came from a person, a company, or a grantmaker who chose to give.

What does the revenue path show?

Total revenue reached $301.7M in FY2025 (Part I, line 12) against total expenses of $281.0M (Part I, line 18), which left revenue $20.7M above expenses (Part I, line 19). The fiscal year ends on June 30 in every year shown, so there is no short or stub year in this comparison, and the three years can be read side by side.

One detail keeps the growth figures honest. Total revenue grew about 17% from the prior year, while contributions grew about 31% (our arithmetic from Part I, lines 8 and 12). The two rates differ because the prior year included $21.8M of revenue reported as program-related investment income on the program service revenue line (FY2024 Form 990, Part VIII, line 2a), and that line is zero in FY2025 (Part I, line 9). A reader who compared only total revenue would understate how much the gift base grew.

Where did the contribution growth come from?

Part VIII of Form 990 splits contributions into categories. Line 1c holds the contribution portion of fundraising events: the part of a walk sponsorship, gala ticket, or table purchase that was a gift rather than payment for a meal or an item. Line 1f holds all other contributions, which for an organization like this one means gifts from individuals, companies, and grantmakers that did not arrive through an event, a federated campaign, or a government grant. The chart compares those two lines across the last two filings.

Event contributions rose by about $2.8M, from $100.2M to $103.0M. All other contributions rose by about $62.5M, from $108.5M to $171.0M (FY2025 Part VIII, lines 1c and 1f, against the same lines in the FY2024 filing). Workplace giving campaigns, reported on line 1a, supplied the remaining $3.1M of FY2025 contributions. Total contributions rose by about $65.5M, so nearly all of the year's contribution growth came from outside the event line. By our arithmetic, events were about 47% of contributions in FY2024 and about 37% in FY2025. The share fell because the rest of the base grew faster. The event program itself held its size.

The filing also shows what the events cost to stage. Beyond the $103.0M counted as contributions, events brought in $30.2M of gross event income (Part VIII, line 8a), which is the portion of receipts that paid for something participants received, against $20.8M of direct event expenses such as venues and meals (Part VIII, line 8b). The form subtracts those direct expenses from event income, so they are not part of the $50.6M fundraising total discussed below. Under the Form 990 instructions, staff time spent organizing events is not in line 8b. It belongs in the fundraising column of Part IX, which is why direct event costs alone understate what an event program costs to run.