· Private foundation
Coleman Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k21 grants · $74k
- $10k–50k12 grants · $209k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| 3RD STREET ALLIANCE | $31,904 |
| BOSTON AREA GLEANERS | $25,000 |
| HOPEWELL FUND | $25,000 |
| BOSTON HARBOR NOW | $20,000 |
| HUMANE SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL | $17,000 |
| PLANNED PARENTHOOD FED OF AMERICA | $17,000 |
| CALVARY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH | $15,000 |
| TEMPLE UNIVERSITY | $13,000 |
| CORNELL LAB OF ORNITHOLOGY | $12,000 |
| XERCES SOCIETY | $12,000 |
| WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN | $11,000 |
| SAN FRANCISCO-MARIN FOOD BANK | $10,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $9,000 |
| NORTH PHILLY COMMUNITY CHURCH | $9,000 |
| EDDIE'S RANCH | $8,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $28k) land where the poverty rate runs at 21%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 100% 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.
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 16% of Coleman 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, 28% of the giving stays in PA; read by stated purpose it is 23% — 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 +32% since the first grant, against +27% for the ones you funded once.
46 repeat relationships — 20 still active in FY2024, 26 since wound down; 11 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, 81% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $49k 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
- WHWOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION2× · 2019–2023 · $60k · revenue +32%
BOSTON AREA GLEANERS INC4× · 2020–2024 · $58k · revenue +296%
PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA INC7× · 2017–2024 · $50k · revenue +12%
Funded once
- AHANIMAL HOPE AND WELLNESS FOUNDATIONone grant, 2018 · $25k · revenue -69%
- TKTHE KEVIN GRAY MUSICAL ENDOW FNDone grant, 2019 · $10k
- TKTHE KEVIN GRAY MUSICAL THEATERone grant, 2017 · $10k
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 earth strives for a more healthy and just world by defendng the environment and human health while advancing social and economic justice by conducting research and education, transforming the economy so it protects the…
Wildaid's mission is to inspire change and empower the world to protect wildlife and vital habitats from critical threats.
Wwf's mission is to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on earth. (continued on schedule o)
The organization's mission is to conserve and promote new england's native plants to ensure healthy, biologically diverse landscapes.
Rainforest trust saves endangered wildlife and protects our planet by creating rainforest reserves through partnerships, community engagement, and donor support.
To establish and promote programs to protect the global climate, forests, wildlife and the natural environment, through research, advocacy, and investigation.
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…
Wri is committed to creating change that improves people's lives and ensures the natural world can thrive. (see schedule o)wri's bold vision requires a formula for success we call "count it. change it. scale it.":- count it: our work is…
The union of concerned scientists puts rigorous, independent science into action, developing solutions and advocating for a healthy, safe, and just future.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Nacwa is the national voice of public clean water utilities, shaping water policy, convening a vibrant peer network, and empowering water leaders.
To strenghten people's ability to guarantee their individual and collective right to a healthy environment, via the development, implementation, and effective enforcement of national and international law.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Philadelphia Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Twain. 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 36 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) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 3% 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.
69 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. 69 of the 107 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 WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds BOSTON AREA GLEANERS INC ↗
- Who funds PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds BOSTON HARBOR NOW INC ↗
- Who funds Humane World for Animals International ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds GREATER BOSTON FOOD BANK INC ↗
- Who funds NEW SANCTUARY MOVEMENT OF PHILADELPHIA ↗
- Who funds HOPEWELL FUND ↗
- Who funds ANIMAL HOPE AND WELLNESS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NATIONALITIES SERVICE CENTER OF PHILADELPHIA ↗
- Who funds NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE & EDUC FUND INC ↗
- Who funds Philadelphia Tennis Club ↗
- Who funds SOUTHWESTERN LAW SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds UC GREEN INC ↗
- Who funds XERCES SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds Temple University - Of The Commonwealth System of Higher Education ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO FOOD BANK ↗
- Who funds RARE ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds WEAVERS WAY COMMUNITY PROGRAMS ↗
- Who funds NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds WAGNER FREE INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE ↗
- Who funds EDDIE'S RANCH INC ↗
- Who funds Restorative Justice Project Maine ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds Philabundance ↗
- Who funds TREE HOUSE BOOKS ↗
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: Coleman Resid Tw · The Philadelphia Foundation · The William Penn Foundation · Connelly Foundation · Citizens Charitable Foundation · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · Philadelphia City Fund Inc · Henrietta Tower Wurts Memorial Foundation · The Barra Foundation Inc · Henry Dolfinger 2 Trust Uw · The Cigna Group Foundation · Arbella Insurance 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 Coleman 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.
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — 63% of income from government
- Boston Harbor Now Inc — 45% of income from government
- Xerces Society Inc — 22% of income from government
- Greater Boston Food Bank Inc — 22% of income from government
- Boston Area Gleaners Inc — 20% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- The Trustees of Reservations — 2% of income from government
- Sandy Hook Promise Foundation — 0% of income from government
- Partners in Health a Nonprofit Corporation — 0% of income from government
- Choate Rosemary Hall Foundation Incorporated — 0% 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 Coleman Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Coleman 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.