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· Private foundation
This foundation does not accept unsolicited requests — it funds preselected organizations.
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 84% of Chispa Foundation’s grantee dollars go to organizations outside the IRS cause taxonomy (common for large international and research funders), so a chart would be mostly “unclassified” and misrepresent the portfolio.
Beneath the NTEE codes, this is what the grant descriptions actually say.
…and in their own words, year by year
Words distinctive to each year’s grant purposes (TF-IDF) · event-driven terms in cyan.
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
Each grant placed by the hardship in its grantee’s ZIP, then read against the area’s typical level.
Your human-services grants (FY19–23, $60k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13% — the area typically sits at 11%. 100% of those dollars reach neighborhoods with above-average need. 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 line in 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, United Way ALICE — shown as context about the area, never attributed to your giving.
Which organizations you funded more than once, and which you funded a single time. Each grantee is matched to its own filings.
10 repeat relationships — 1 still active in FY2024, 9 since wound down; 2 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, 71% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $31k 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.
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.
To advance UC Santa Barbara's capacity to educate future generations, unlock new discoveries, and enrich California and the world.
The museum inspires a thirst for discovery and a passion for the natural world.
The Climate Center is a climate and energy policy nonprofit working to rapidly reduce climate pollution at scale, starting in California.
Sbiff's mission is to engage, enrich, and inspire people through the power of film. sbiff celebrates the art of cinema and provides impactful educational experiences for their local, national, and global communities.
Sustainable Conservation advances the collaborative stewardship of Californias land, air, and water for the benefit of nature and people. For over three decades, Sustainable Conservation has built coalitions of people with different…
The Sierra Fund mission is to restore ecosystem and community resiliency in the Sierra Nevada. We rely on the principles of science, stewardship, environmental justice, and policy advocacy to promote headwater resiliency for the…
We are building a grassroots climate movement in the Bay Area and beyond to eliminate carbon pollution and achieve a clean energy future with racial, economic, and environmental justice.
California Coastkeeper Alliance coordinates, supports & enhances the work of the local California Waterkeeper programs to provide a statewide voice for safeguarding California's waters, and its world renowned coast & ocean, for the benefit…
Our mission is to fight against fossil fuel executives and industries that have turned our communities into dumping grounds for toxic waste, poisoning our air, water, lan, and bodies. We organize to oppose giant oil refineries, dirty…
Empower individuals, businesses, and communities to take actions today that achieve environmental and economic sustainability.
Provide cash grants and free consulting to grassroots organizations in Santa Barbara County.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Environmental Defense Center and the most unlike its peers is Santa Barbara Maritime Museum. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Each one resolved to its own IRS returns and tracked year by year — your grant beside their revenue.
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
A decade per grantee — revenue shaded, your grants as bars, all rows on one timeline.
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: Santa Barbara Foundation · Hutton Foundation · Brittingham Family Foundation · June G Outhwaite Charitable Trust · Patricia Bragg Foundation · The John C Mithun Foundation · The Kirby-Jones Foundation · Emmett Foundation · Dancing Tides Foundation Inc · The Steele Family Foundation · Mosher Foundation · Towbes 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.
Every dot is one organisation Chispa 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. 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.
Through Plinth
This dossier was generated cold from public filings. In Plinth it’s a working system — every applicant assessed and every grant monitored. Here’s a taste, run on one of your grantees: Community Environmental Council.
Agentic due diligence · confidence × risk
~6 months of operating runway; revenue grew over 8 filed years.
8 years of Form 990 filings, still active; revenue up 3.2× since.
US 501(c)(3); EIN 941728064 on file with current IRS Form 990 filings.
Board composition & governance documents — verified live in Plinth from the applicant.
OFAC / UN sanctions screening — run live in Plinth at assessment.
Staffing, M&E and activity alignment — assessed live in Plinth from submitted proposals.
Live · Plinth’s real DD engine
Run the actual assessment on Community Environmental Council, cold from public data.
Generated live from public IRS filings + open web sources by Plinth’s agentic engine. Shown as an illustration of the product, not a formal assessment.
Post-award monitoring · continuous checks
What you see here is static and public. In Plinth it’s operational — the full six-pillar framework on every applicant (with their own documents + live registry and sanctions checks), monitoring dashboards on every award, custom board reports, and eligibility routing for intake.
Preview generated from this grantee’s public IRS filings and independent reporting. Pillars marked “live in Plinth” require the applicant’s submitted documents. Shown as illustration, not a formal assessment.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPro
Find your warmest path to Chispa Foundation through people who sit on both boards. Search for your organization and Plinth traces the introduction across shared trustees and officers.
Every link is a documented governance overlap in public IRS 990 filings — not a personal network — and each hop carries its own confidence tier. Low-confidence or distant paths are held back rather than guessed.