· Private foundation
Bissell Family Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k13 grants · $33k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $25k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $50k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| KALMAZOO COLLEGE | $50,200 |
| LANTERN THEATER COMPANY | $25,000 |
| INHERITANCE OF HOPE | $6,500 |
| WHYY | $5,000 |
| PHILADELPHIA ZOO | $3,500 |
| THE BARNES FOUNDATION | $3,000 |
| CAPE REGIONAL FOUNDATION | $2,500 |
| TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENN | $2,500 |
| MARIETTA COLLEGE | $2,500 |
| ISLAND ACAD INTL SCH | $2,000 |
| EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE FOUNDATION | $2,000 |
| THE BEE FOUNDATION | $1,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $1,000 |
| NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART | $1,000 |
| STONE HARBOR RESCUE SQUAD | $100 |
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 (FY23–25, $4k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 0% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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
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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +24% since the first grant, against +9% for the ones you funded once.
28 repeat relationships — 10 still active in FY2025, 18 since wound down; 4 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (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 FY2025, 94% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $6k 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
- KCKALAMAZOO COLLEGE8× · 2017–2025 · $377k · revenue +41%
- LTLANTERN THEATER COMPANY5× · 2017–2025 · $145k · revenue +10%
WHYY INC8× · 2017–2025 · $41k · revenue +20%
Funded once
- NPNATIONAL PROPANE GAS FDN SCHOLARone grant, 2024 · $45k
- NPNational Propane Gas Foundationgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $15k · revenue +33%
- HCHEALTH CARE FOR THE HOMELESS INCone grant, 2020 · $10k · revenue +13%
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.
Wilson college empowers students to be confident and critical thinkers, creative visionaries, effective communicators, honorable leaders, and agents of justice.
Provides innovative education in a dynamic urban setting. dedicated to academic excellence and community engagement,we prepare students of diverse backgrounds with the knowledge, skill,and experience to lead meaningful lives as informed…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
As a diverse community of learners, we cultivate integrity, curiosity, connection and resilience.
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
The philadelphia school educates children for a future that is impossible to know but not impossible to shape. learn here. go anywhere.
Visit philadelphia is our name and our mission. as the region's official tourism marketing agency, we build greater philadelphia's image, drive visitation and boost the economy.
The rosenbach museum & library is a community that engages with and celebrates the art of the written word using our collection of rare books and manuscripts.
The Morgan Library & Museum celebrates and shares the history and process of human creativity from antiquity to the present day through the preservation, study, and interpretation of a dynamic and growing collection.
The mission of pittsburgh public theater is to provide artistically diverse theatrical experiences of the highest quality. pittsburgh public theater also strives to serve, challenge, stimulate, and (continued on schedule o)
To discover philadelphia's river of history and world of connections. serving a wide and diverse audience and holding its collections in trust for the community, the museum tells the stories of the people, historical events and…
The University of New Haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts and professional education. Our mission is to prepare our students to lead purposeful and fulfilling lives in a…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and the most unlike its peers is The Harbaugh House Inc. 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 44 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) — 3% 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.
37 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. 37 of the 70 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 KALAMAZOO COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds LANTERN THEATER COMPANY ↗
- Who funds WHYY INC ↗
- Who funds Marietta College ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR ADVOCACY FOR THE RIGHTS AND INTERESTS OF THE ELDERLY ↗
- Who funds THE PENNSYLVANIA HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds THE BARNES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF PHILADELPHIA ↗
- Who funds National Propane Gas Foundation ↗
- Who funds ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY INC ↗
- Who funds HEALTH CARE FOR THE HOMELESS INC ↗
- Who funds THE BEE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Prison Dharma Network Inc ↗
- Who funds TINY DYNAMITE INC ↗
- Who funds INHERITANCE OF HOPE INC ↗
- Who funds EAST LYNNE THEATER COMPANY ↗
- Who funds THE WINDSOR HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WINDSOR CONN INC ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds Philabundance ↗
- Who funds EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE HARBAUGH HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds AVALON RESCUE SQUAD 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: Lincoln Financial Foundation Inc · Lillian Lincoln Foundation · The William Penn Foundation · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Network for Good · National Philanthropic Trust · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · 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 Bissell 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.
- East Lynne Theater Company — 12% of income from government
- The American Visionary Art Museum Inc — 6% of income from government
- Health Care for the Homeless 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 Bissell Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Bissell 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.