· Private foundation
Caroline Alexander Buck Foundation
Its FY2025 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2019–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k13 grants · $28k
- $10k–50k32 grants · $588k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $175k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BIG PICTURE PHILADELPHIA | $100,000 |
| INN DWELLING INC | $75,000 |
| HOLY CHILD ACADEMY | $30,000 |
| PROVIDENCE CENTER | $25,000 |
| THORNCROFT EQUESTRIAN CENTER | $25,000 |
| ST JAMES SCHOOL | $25,000 |
| NORTHERN CHILDREN'S SERVICES | $25,000 |
| WELL ROOTED | $25,000 |
| LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD | $25,000 |
| CCSA FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| GATEWAY HORSEWORKS | $25,000 |
| NEED IN DEED | $25,000 |
| THE MONKEY & THE ELEPHANT | $25,000 |
| FAB YOUTH PHILLY | $20,000 |
| CENTRO NUEVA CREATION | $20,000 |
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 (FY19–25, $775k) land where the poverty rate runs at 19%, against an area that typically sits at 8%. 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 +43% since the first grant, against +6% for the ones you funded once.
20 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2025, 12 since wound down; 29 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, 37% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $495k 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
- BPBIG PICTURE PHILADELPHIA4× · 2019–2025 · $400k · revenue +43%
- PHPROJECT HOME4× · 2019–2023 · $300k · revenue +13%
- IDINN DWELLING INC4× · 2020–2025 · $270k · revenue +10%
Funded once
- RAREADING ALLOWEDgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $100k · revenue +79%
- SMSETTLEMENT MUSIC SCHOOL OF PHILADELPHIAgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $100k · revenue +33%
YOUTH EMPOWERMENT FOR ADVANCEMENT HANGOUTone grant, 2024 · $100k · revenue 0%
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.
Friends of the children philadelphia has a mission of impacting generational change by empowering youth who are facing the greatest obstacles through relationships and professional mentors 12+ years, no matter what. 92% go on to enroll in…
It is the mission of the multicultural academy charter school to educate the whole child by providing a safe environment where students can learn and teachers can instruct while emphasizing the importance of parental involvement in the…
The philadelphia school educates children for a future that is impossible to know but not impossible to shape. learn here. go anywhere.
To help young people and their families enhance their innate ability to think flexibly and meet challenges creatively.
Using the parent-child model ecp increases the potential for developing life-long positive relationship.
To empower young adults (17-20 year-olds) to develop skills and connect to opportunities by fostering an environment of love, support, and respect for their whole person. students graduate high school and successfully transition to college…
Horizons Greater Philadelphia advances educational equity by building long-term partnerships with students, families, communities, and schools to create experiences outside of school that inspire the joy of learning.
A charter school for k-5 whose mission is to help every child find a pathway to a successful adult life in the city and beyond.
The mission of philadelphia reads is to build a "city of readers" by providing "in and "out of school time" programs that strengthen the literacy skills of philadelphia school children so they will be able to read at or above grade level…
The mission of the philadelphia electrical and technology charter high school is to develop students who will be employable in the emeraging high-tech industries; while giving students a strong foundation in the core academic…
Summary
Hope partnership for education's mission is empowerment through education. hpe serves families in eastern north philadelphia through its education center, which houses an independent middle school, grades 5 - 8, an after- school enrichment…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Mercy Neighborhood Ministries Inc and the most unlike its peers is ECLOSE Institute. 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 19 years old; the field is 15. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 21% 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 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.
82 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. 82 of the 105 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 PICTURE PHILADELPHIA ↗
- Who funds PROJECT HOME ↗
- Who funds INN DWELLING INC ↗
- Who funds A BOOK A DAY ↗
- Who funds GATEWAY HORSEWORKS ↗
- Who funds COLLECTIVE CLIMB ↗
- Who funds JUBILEE SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THOMAS JEFFERSON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds HEIGHTS PHILADELPHIA ↗
- Who funds READING ALLOWED ↗
- Who funds SETTLEMENT MUSIC SCHOOL OF PHILADELPHIA ↗
- Who funds YOUTH EMPOWERMENT FOR ADVANCEMENT HANGOUT ↗
- Who funds Elevate 215 ↗
- Who funds PLAY ON PHILLY ↗
- Who funds TREE HOUSE BOOKS ↗
- Who funds CONNECTEDLY ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds STUDENTS RUN PHILLY STYLE ↗
- Who funds PROVIDENCE CENTER ↗
- Who funds MINDFULNESS THROUGH MOVEMENT INC ↗
- Who funds Adoption Center ↗
- Who funds THE UNSCRIPTED PROJECT ↗
- Who funds FEDERATION OF NEIGHBORHOOD CENTERS ↗
- Who funds FEAST OF JUSTICE ↗
- Who funds BRIGHTER HORIZON FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds LUCY OUTREACH A NJ NONPROFIT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds MERCY NEIGHBORHOOD MINISTRIES INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY VOLUNTEERS IN MEDICINE ↗
- Who funds WELL ROOTED ↗
- Who funds SOUTHWEST COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT COR ↗
- Who funds Northern Children's Services ↗
- Who funds FAMILY PROMISE OF PHILADELPHIA ↗
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 Philadelphia Foundation · Connelly Foundation · The William Penn Foundation · Henry Dolfinger 2 Trust Uw · Henrietta Tower Wurts Memorial Foundation · The Patricia Kind Family Foundation · The Gordon Charter Foundation · United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey · Adam and Maria Sarah Seybert Institution for Poor Boys and Girls · Lindback Cr & Mf Foundation Tw Main · The Leo and Peggy Pierce Family Foundation Inc · The Allen Hilles Fund
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 Caroline Alexander Buck 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 Caroline Alexander Buck Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Caroline Alexander Buck 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.