· Private foundation
Bently 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 FY2018–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- $50k–250k7 grants · $521k
- $250k+1 grant · $250k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BIG LIFE FOUNDATION | $250,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $155,916 |
| CHARITIES AID FOUNDATION AMERICA | $100,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $65,000 |
| AMAZON WATCH | $50,000 |
| CLASSICAL TAHOE | $50,000 |
| AMERICAN RIVERS | $50,000 |
| UNITE THE PARKS | $50,000 |
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 US giving — 71% of grant dollars ($6.8M). The need read here covers only this US portion; the 29% that went abroad ($2.8M) is mapped below.
Your human-services grants (FY20–24, $150k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 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
Beyond the US — 29% of all-years giving ($2.8M)
1 country, by the recipient’s country on the filing.
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. International giving is mapped by the recipient’s country from the same 990 filings; comparable need data isn’t available at that grain.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 14% of Bently 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. Read by recipient address, 3% of the giving stays in NV; read by stated purpose it is 5% — more of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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 +133% since the first grant, against +32% for the ones you funded once.
10 repeat relationships — 4 still active in FY2024, 6 since wound down; 3 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, 75% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $165k 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
- BLBIG LIFE FOUNDATION USA4× · 2018–2024 · $800k · revenue +133%
- TCTHE CORAL REEF ALLIANCE3× · 2018–2021 · $521k · revenue +30%
- LWLewa Wildlife Conservancy USA3× · 2020–2023 · $209k · revenue +2%
Funded once
- CTCABRACH TRUSTone grant, 2021 · $1.4M
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2021 · $705k
- STSAVE THE RHINO INTERNATIONAL INCone grant, 2020 · $500k · revenue -58% · 27% of their budget
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.
Rainforest trust saves endangered wildlife and protects our planet by creating rainforest reserves through partnerships, community engagement, and donor support.
Wwf's mission is to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on earth. (continued on schedule o)
Ci works to spotlight and secure the critical benefits that nature provides to humanity.
The wildlife conservation society (wcs) saves wildlife and wild places worldwide through science, conservation action, education, and inspiring people to value nature.
Endangered Species International is strongly committed to reversing the trend of human-induced species extinction, saving endangered animals, and preserving wild places.
The resource renewal institute facilitates the creation, development and implementation of practical strategies to solve the entire complex environmental problem by addressing it comprehensively.
Wildlife alliance is the leader in direct protection of forests and wildlife in tropical asia. our mission is to combat deforestation, biodiversity loss, climate change, and poverty by partnering with local communities and governments.…
The California Wilderness Coalition protects the natural landscapes that make California unique, providing clean air and water, a home to wildlife, and a place for recreation and spiritual renewal.
Sustainable Conservation advances the collaborative stewardship of Californias land, air, and water for the benefit of nature and people. For over three decades, Sustainable Conservation has built coalitions of people with different…
Cascadia wildlands defends and restores cacasia's wild ecosystems in the forests,in the courts, and in the streets. we envision vast old-growth forests, rivers full of wild salmon, wolves howling in the backcountry, a stable climate, and…
Our mission is to protect vital areas of our natural world for the benefit of wildlife, habitats, and people by inspiring collaborative action. Our vision is a world where wildlife and people flourish in healthy ecosystems that sustain us…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Wildaid Inc and the most unlike its peers is Ric OBarrys Dolphin Project. 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 31 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) — 0% 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.
35 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. 35 of the 49 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 BIG LIFE FOUNDATION USA ↗
- Who funds THE CORAL REEF ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds SAVE THE RHINO INTERNATIONAL INC ↗
- Who funds SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds WILDAID INC ↗
- Who funds EARTHJUSTICE ↗
- Who funds Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care Inc ↗
- Who funds SAVE THE REDWOODS LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds Lewa Wildlife Conservancy USA ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY INC ↗
- Who funds EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds THE CRUCIBLE ↗
- Who funds BAT CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL ↗
- Who funds CLASSICAL TAHOE ↗
- Who funds LINK GLOBAL ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO BALLET ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds Asia Wild ↗
- Who funds UNITE THE PARKS ↗
- Who funds SEE TURTLES ↗
- Who funds XERCES SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds CHARITIES AID FOUNDATION AMERICA ↗
- Who funds Humane World for Animals International ↗
- Who funds Save The Bay ↗
- Who funds THE HYGEIA FOUNDATION FOR HEALTH SCIENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT INC ↗
- Who funds LOS ANGELES CLEANTECH INCUBATOR ↗
- Who funds THE DAVID SHELDRICK WILDLIFE TRUST USA INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN RIVERS INC ↗
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: Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · AbbVie Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · American Endowment Foundation · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · Paypal Charitable Giving Fund · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · American Online Giving Foundation 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 Bently 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.
- Xerces Society Inc — 22% of income from government
- See Turtles — 11% 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 Bently Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Bently 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.