· Private foundation
BESS Family 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 FY2021–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k2 grants · $11k
- $10k–50k42 grants · $838k
- $50k–250k8 grants · $500k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN | $100,000 |
| INQUIRING SYSTEMS INC | $100,000 |
| INWARD BOUND MINDFULNESS EDUCATION INC | $50,000 |
| OUR LADY OF THE RESURRECTION MONASTERY INC C O BEN | $50,000 |
| INSIGHT MEDITATION SOCIETY INC | $50,000 |
| GARRISON INSTITUTE | $50,000 |
| SATI CENTER FOR BUDDIST STUDIES | $50,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION | $50,000 |
| BELOVED COMMUNITY CIRCLES | $40,000 |
| BARRE CENTER FOR BUDDHIST STUDIES INC | $35,000 |
| ROCKY MOUNTAIN ECODHARMA RETREAT CENTER | $33,333 |
| INSIGHT MEDITATION COMMUNITY OF WASHINGTON | $33,333 |
| BARRE CENTER FOR BUDDHIST STUDIES INC | $33,333 |
| BIG SPRINGS GARDEN RETREAT CENTER INC | $33,333 |
| SHAMBHALA USA | $25,000 |
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 human-services grants (FY21–24, $646k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 40% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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
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.
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.
39 repeat relationships — 25 still active in FY2024, 14 since wound down; 16 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, 70% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $388k 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
- ISINQUIRING SYSTEMS INC2× · 2023–2024 · $285k · revenue +109%
- BCBARRE CENTER FOR BUDDHIST STUDIES INC4× · 2021–2024 · $210k · revenue +110%
- NDNATURAL DHARMA FELLOWSHIP4× · 2021–2024 · $185k · revenue +35%
Funded once
MULTIPLIERgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $50k · revenue +65%
SOCIAL INNOVATION FORUM INCgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $26k · revenue +47%- TBTHE BERKELEY ALEMBIC FOUNDATIONone grant, 2021 · $25k · revenue +22%
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.
In a natural spiritual setting, the Dharmakaya Center for Wellbeing provides a wide range of practices drawn from ancient wisdom, for all levels of interest, in order to cultivate physical and emotional wellbeing in the greatest number of…
An educational center providing retreat and study facilities for people interested in environmental stewardship and training in practices for peace.
Our purpose is to support the inner pathway of all who come to us. By inner pathway, we refer to the innate qualities of the human spirit: love, joy, gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, inner peace, beauty, and humor. The inner pathway is…
Living Dharma sponsors podcasts and public dialogues and retreats that focus on training in awareness and communication based in ethics and peaceful solutions in community life.
To provide graduate level education in the full breadth of the buddhist tradition with specialized education supporting pure land and contemporary shin buddhist studies, while advancing jodo shinshu buddhist ministry and buddhist…
Land of medicine buddha is a center devoted to the transmission of buddhism in the mahayana tradition.
To teach, preserve, and publish about Tibetan Buddhist meditation and Chinese esoteric practices.
Wisdom & Money offers retreats, trainings, spiritual companioning, written reflections & workshops designed to encourage people of wealth and people from a culture of wealth to engage with money as a doorway to spiritual transformation at…
Providing classes and retreats in the Buddhist religion.
Buddhist Meditation and Study
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Barre Center for Buddhist Studies Inc and the most unlike its peers is Beloved Community Circles. 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 24 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) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 2% 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.
46 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. 46 of the 74 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 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MIND & LIFE INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds INQUIRING SYSTEMS INC ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds BARRE CENTER FOR BUDDHIST STUDIES INC ↗
- Who funds INWARD BOUND MINDFULNESS EDUCATION INC ↗
- Who funds NATURAL DHARMA FELLOWSHIP ↗
- Who funds THE GARRISON INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds THE LOTUS INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds Mindful Living Revolution ↗
- Who funds Prison Dharma Network Inc ↗
- Who funds SATI CENTER FOR BUDDIST STUDIES ↗
- Who funds SKY MIND RETREATS ↗
- Who funds Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute ↗
- Who funds SARANALOKA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MULTIPLIER ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Lineage Project Inc ↗
- Who funds Beloved Community Circles ↗
- Who funds SOUNDS TRUE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds DHARMADATTA COMMUNITY ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL INNOVATION FORUM 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: The Frederick P Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism · Impactassetsinc · Tan Teo Charitable Foundation · Dana Sila Foundation · Boston Foundation Inc · Rsf Social Finance Inc · The Himachal Foundation Inc · Unlikely Collaborators Inc · The Gusti Brandt Foundation · Sea Stone Foundation · Clermont Foundation · Jonathan & Kathleen Altman Fndtn
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 BESS Family 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Essex County Community Foundation Inc — 2% 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 BESS Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to BESS Family 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.