· Public charity
California Changelawyers
To build a better justice system for all californians.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 24 grants below total $691,500 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $1,092,230 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $400,730 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2024
- $10k–50k22 grants · $532k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $160k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| FOR THE PEOPLE | $80,000 |
| LAWYERS' COMMITTEE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS OF THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA | $80,000 |
| EQUAL JUSTICE WORKS | $41,500 |
| AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION FUND FOR JUSTICE AND EDUCATION | $40,000 |
| LEGAL EDUCATION ACCESS PIPELINE | $40,000 |
| EQUAL JUSTICE SOCIETY | $40,000 |
| CALIFORNIA INDIAN LAW ASSOCIATION INC | $40,000 |
| CALIFORNIA COLLABORATIVE FOR IMMIGRANT JUSTICE | $40,000 |
| APPELLATE PROJECT INC | $40,000 |
| ESQ APPRENTICE INC | $40,000 |
| ECOLOGISTICS INC | $40,000 |
| CENTER FOR GENDER AND REFUGEE STUDIES - CALIFORNIA INC | $40,000 |
| THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES | $20,000 |
| VETERANS LEGAL INSTITUTE | $10,000 |
| ALLIANCE FOR CHILDREN'S RIGHTS | $10,000 |
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 (FY17–19, $98k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 90% 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.
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 +59% since the first grant, against +26% for the ones you funded once.
48 repeat relationships — 18 still active in FY2024, 30 since wound down; 5 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, 78% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $150k 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
Transgender Law Center3× · 2017–2023 · $225k · revenue +202%- DRDISABILITY RIGHTS CALIFORNIA4× · 2020–2023 · $212k · revenue +31%
- FTFOR THE PEOPLE5× · 2019–2024 · $210k · revenue +324%
Funded once
- AOAL OTRO LADOgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $80k · revenue +101%
- CRCA Rural Legal Assistance Incone grant, 2017 · $70k
KIND INCgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $65k · revenue +358%
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.
Legal Link removes legal barriers that prolong poverty by adding critically needed capacity to the legal ecosystem.
The California Lawyers Foundation shares a common mission with the California Lawyers Association of promoting excellence, diversity, and inclusion in the legal profession and fairness in the administration of justice and the rule of law.…
The California Center for Movement Legal Services (Movement Legal) provides legal services in the pursuit of improving the lives of California's traditionally underserved residents, carrying out legal work that fosters community led policy…
Community Lawyers, Inc. provides underserved low- and no-income community members access to legal representation, pro-bono legal clinics, and community advocacy and engagement.
CFJ promotes access to justice for underserved communities seeking to assert their legal rights. Our pro bono-based projects bridge the gap for underserved communities seeking safety, stability, and justice. CFJ engages volunteer attorneys…
Southern California Immigration Project is a public interest nonprofit organization dedicated to providing pro bono legal services to survivors of human and civil rights violations.
La Raza Centro Legal San Francisco provides high quality, highly trusted, free legal services to low-income or immigrant clients in the San Francisco Bay Area.
CIVIL LIBERTIES DEFENSE CENTER (CLDC) educates the general public about their rights and privileges under the US Constitution and provides free legal support to climate and social justice activists.
The legal aid justice center partners with communities and clients to achieve justice by dismantling systems that create and perpetuate poverty.
Community Legal Services was established to ensure the best interests of the public are represented by participating and intervening before the California Public Utilities Commission, and all other municipal, state, or federal regulatory…
The Legal Aid Association of California, the statewide membership of legal services nonprofits, serves its members through advocacy and other support in efforts to provide legal assistance to low-income Californians and ensure access to…
The Asian Law Caucus's mission is to promote, advance, and represent the legal and civil rights of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, recognizing that social, economic, political and racial inequalities continue to exist…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Community Legal Aid Socal and the most unlike its peers is Ecologistics 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 42 years old; the field is 13. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% 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 14% 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.
85 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. 85 of the 92 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 Transgender Law Center ↗
- Who funds DISABILITY RIGHTS CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds FOR THE PEOPLE ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA COLLABORATIVE FOR IMMIGRANT JUSTICE ↗
- Who funds UNCOMMON LAW ↗
- Who funds THE JUSTICE AND DIVERSITY CENTER OF THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA RURAL LEGAL ASSISTANCE INC ↗
- Who funds American Bar Association Fund for Justice and Education ↗
- Who funds Inland Counties Legal Services ↗
- Who funds EQUAL JUSTICE WORKS ↗
- Who funds EAST BAY COMMUNITY LAW CENTER ↗
- Who funds LEGAL EDUCATION ACCESS PIPELINE INC ↗
- Who funds ORANGE COUNTY JUSTICE FUND ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY JUSTICE ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds YOUTH LAW CENTER ↗
- Who funds Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area ↗
- Who funds LEGAL SERVICES OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds COUNCIL ON AMERICAN-ISLAMIC RELATIONS CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds PUBLIC COUNSEL ↗
- Who funds CENTRAL CALIFORNIA LEGAL SERVICES INC ↗
- Who funds ESQ Apprentice Inc ↗
- Who funds AL OTRO LADO ↗
- Who funds Appellate Project Inc ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INDIAN LAW ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds Immigrant Defenders Law Center ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY LEGAL AID SOCAL ↗
- Who funds KIND INC ↗
- Who funds LEGAL AID SOCIETY OF SAN DIEGO ↗
- Who funds Center For Youth Development Through Law ↗
- Who funds CENTRO LEGAL DE LA RAZA ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL GOOD FUND INC ↗
- Who funds BET TZEDEK ↗
- Who funds LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds ASIAN AMERICANS ADVANCING JUSTICE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds ECOLOGISTICS INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHERN CHUMASH TRIBAL COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds TIDES ADVOCACY ↗
- Who funds Center For Gender And Refugee Studies- California 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: California Access to Justice Commission · Equal Justice Works · The Morrison & Foerster Foundation · The California Endowment · The California Wellness Foundation · Munger Tolles & Olson Foundation · The San Francisco Foundation · California Community Foundation · The Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Foundation · Weingart Foundation · East Bay Community Foundation · The Skadden 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 California Changelawyers 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.