· Private foundation
Buena Vista 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 FY2020–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k25 grants · $108k
- $10k–50k12 grants · $215k
- $50k–250k13 grants · $1.3M
- $250k+1 grant · $368k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| AUSTIN ED FUND | $368,111 |
| COMMUNITIES IN SCHOOLS | $200,000 |
| EXPLORE AUSTIN | $150,000 |
| UNITED WAY FOR GREATER AUSTIN | $131,663 |
| HUMANITIES TEXAS | $130,000 |
| PLANNED PARENTHOOD GREATER TEXAS | $100,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $100,000 |
| SOCIAL GOOD FUND - AUSTIN 2030 | $75,000 |
| TEACH FOR AMERICA - AUSTIN | $75,000 |
| CREATIVE ACTION | $70,000 |
| POWER FOR PARKINSON'S | $60,000 |
| UNIV OF TEXAS AT AUSTINDEVELOPMENT OFC | $60,000 |
| ST DAVID'S FOUNDATION COMMUNITY FUND | $50,000 |
| ROOTED WHOLEWAY HOUSE INC | $50,000 |
| TEXAS BOOK FESTIVAL | $34,875 |
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 (FY24–25, $39k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 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.
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 11% of Buena Vista 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, 100% of the giving stays in TX; read by stated purpose it is 90% — less 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 +20% since the first grant, against +17% for the ones you funded once.
58 repeat relationships — 36 still active in FY2025, 22 since wound down; 13 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, 59% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $788k 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
- TJTodos Juntos Learning Center6× · 2020–2025 · $424k · revenue +299%
- HTHUMANITIES TEXAS6× · 2020–2025 · $330k · revenue +16%
- AEAUSTIN EXPLORE INC6× · 2020–2025 · $245k · revenue +276%
Funded once
- RFRETINA FOUNDATIONone grant, 2024 · $125k
- WGWATERLOO GREENWAY CONSERVANCYone grant, 2020 · $100k · revenue -79%
- ILI LIVE HERE I GIVE HEREone grant, 2020 · $50k · revenue -19%
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.
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The Progress Texas Institute provides research and strategic communications on issues with the ultimate goal of increasing civic engagement.
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RAISE Texas advances equitable policies and programs that foster financial security and economic mobility for low- and moderate-income Texans. We equip, innovate and advocate to reduce disparities, remove barriers and build opportunities…
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To enrich life through discovery, education, and the conservation of plants and the natural environment.
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For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Humanities Texas and the most unlike its peers is Todos Juntos Learning Center. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 27 years old; the field is 12. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 27% 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 16% 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.
47 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. 47 of the 89 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 St Edwards University ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY FOR GREATER AUSTIN ↗
- Who funds Todos Juntos Learning Center ↗
- Who funds HUMANITIES TEXAS ↗
- Who funds AUSTIN EXPLORE INC ↗
- Who funds Creative Action ↗
- Who funds Texas Book Festival ↗
- Who funds ST DAVID'S FOUNDATION COMMUNITY FUND ↗
- Who funds Teach for America Inc ↗
- Who funds AUSTIN COMMUNITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds WATERLOO GREENWAY CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds PLANNED PARENTHOOD OF GREATER TEXAS INC ↗
- Who funds MAINSPRING SCHOOLS INC ↗
- Who funds TEXAS STATE HISTORY MUSEUM FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TEXAS TRIBUNE INC ↗
- Who funds POWER FOR PARKINSONS ↗
- Who funds AUSTIN YMBL SUNSHINE CAMP ↗
- Who funds THE CONTEMPORARY AUSTIN MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds I LIVE HERE I GIVE HERE ↗
- Who funds Pease Park Conservancy ↗
- Who funds Central Texas Food Bank Inc ↗
- Who funds THE 19TH NEWS ↗
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: Austin Community Foundation Inc · St David's Foundation · Better Business Bureau · Shield-Ayres Foundation · The Moody Foundation · The Powell Foundation · Topfer Family Foundation · Alice Kleberg Reynolds Meyer Foundat A0479800 · Still Water Foundation · The Applied Materials Foundation · Impact Austin Foundation · The Webber Family Foundation
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 Buena Vista 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.
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 Buena Vista Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Buena Vista 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.