· Private foundation
Commerce Bancshares 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 FY2019–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k612 grants · $1.2M
- $10k–50k28 grants · $567k
- $50k–250k5 grants · $292k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UNITED WAY OF GREATER ST LOUIS INC | $60,500 |
| UNITED WAY OF GREATER ST LOUIS INC | $60,500 |
| UNITED WAY OF GREATER ST LOUIS INC | $60,500 |
| UNITED WAY OF GREATER ST LOUIS INC | $60,500 |
| POLICE FOUNDATION OF KANSAS CITY | $50,000 |
| UNITED WAY OF GREATER KANSAS CITY INC | $42,628 |
| UNITED WAY OF GREATER KANSAS CITY INC | $42,628 |
| UNITED WAY OF GREATER KANSAS CITY INC | $42,628 |
| UNITED WAY OF GREATER KANSAS CITY INC | $42,628 |
| URBAN LEAGUE OF METROPOLITAN ST LOUIS | $40,000 |
| UNITED WAY OF THE PLAINS | $35,000 |
| BLACK ENTREPRENEURS OF THE FLINT HILLS ASSOCIATION | $25,000 |
| HEART OF ILLINOIS UNITED WAY INC | $25,000 |
| COMMUNITY FOUNDATION OF THE OZARKS INC | $25,000 |
| ARTISTS REENVISIONING TOMORROW DBA ART INC | $25,000 |
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 (FY19–24, $713k) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 92% 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.
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 +27% since the first grant, against +24% for the ones you funded once.
821 repeat relationships — 461 still active in FY2024, 360 since wound down; 106 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, 88% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $243k 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
- UWUNITED WAY OF THE PLAINS INC6× · 2019–2024 · $210k · revenue +8%
TULSA AREA UNITED WAY6× · 2019–2024 · $104k · revenue +5%- NSNEIGHBORHOOD SOLIDARITY FUND4× · 2019–2024 · $88k · revenue +219%
Funded once
- SLSt Louis Police Foundationone grant, 2019 · $125k · revenue -62%
- CBCARE BEYOND THE BOULEVARD INCone grant, 2023 · $25k · revenue +8%
- URUNION RESCUE MISSION OF WICHITA INCone grant, 2023 · $20k
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 promote the possibilities of charitable giving, helping charitable citizens understand how they can effectively provide for the community they love and the causes they care deeply about.
Reduce the stigma and promote awareness surrounding mental health within the communities we serve, promote wellness, and provide individualized care with an integrated approach.
Grow food, farms and community in support of a sustainable, healthy and local food system.
Economic development.
Providing day care services to infants and children of low income families in northern st. louis county, missouri
Family service and guidance center provides quality behavioral healthcare to children and families. vision: family service and guidance center shall be the premier, outcomes-focused children and family behavioral healthcare center that…
Provide high quality living and services to enable lower income older adult residents of the managed apartment buildings to flourish independently; and create inspiring programming to enable both residents and community seniors to maintain…
Opportunities, inc. of jefferson county provides services for individuals for the purpose of maximizing their success and enhancing their abilities to be independent, contributing members of the community.
Casa of st. louis advocates for abused and neglected children and youth in st. louis by representing their best interests in court and in the community. our vision is that every child lives in a safe permanent home and has the opportunity…
Children's services fund ('csf') is an innovative way to support child well-being projects. while we are funded by a jackson county sales tax, we are a stand-alone organization led by an independent board. (continued on schedule o)we are…
Child safe of central missouri's mission is to respond to and prevent child abuse by providing advocacy, support, and resources to children who are alleged victims of abuse and other traumatic crimes, and to their non-offending family…
Center for patient safety seeks to reduce preventable patient harm by improving patient safety culture, working in collaboration with providers, associations and government entities.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Heat Up St Louis Inc and the most unlike its peers is Gateway Warrior Foundation. 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 34 years old; the field is 24. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1.0% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
1040 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. 1040 of the 1,372 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 UNITED WAY OF GREATER ST LOUIS INC ↗
- Who funds United Way of Greater Kansas City Inc ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF THE PLAINS INC ↗
- Who funds HEART OF ILLINOIS UNITED WAY INC ↗
- Who funds St Louis Police Foundation ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF GREATER ST JOSEPH ↗
- Who funds TULSA AREA UNITED WAY ↗
- Who funds NEIGHBORHOOD SOLIDARITY FUND ↗
- Who funds HEART OF MISSOURI UNITED WAY INC ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF THE OZARKS INC ↗
- Who funds URBAN LEAGUE OF METROPOLITAN ST LOUIS ↗
- Who funds MISSOURI COLLEGES FUND INC ↗
- Who funds POLICE FOUNDATION OF KANSAS CITY ↗
- Who funds CREDIT & HOMEOWNERSHIP EMPOWERMENT SERVICES ↗
- Who funds JOHNNY MORRIS' WONDERS OF WILDLIFE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FORT HAYS STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY FOUNDATION OF CENTRAL MO ↗
- Who funds SAINT LOUIS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ↗
- Who funds THE KANSAS AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds SEDGWICK COUNTY ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds PITTSBURG STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds United Way of Central Oklahoma Inc ↗
- Who funds JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT OF GREATER ST LOUIS INC ↗
- Who funds Springfield Business Development Corporation ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY FOUNDATION OF THE OZARKS INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION OF THE BLOOMINGTON-NORMAL AREA ↗
- Who funds BOYS AND GIRLS CLUBS OF SPRINGFIELD INC ↗
- Who funds BEYOND HOUSING INC ↗
- Who funds HOUSTON LIVESTOCK SHOW AND RODEO INC ↗
- Who funds EXPLORATION PLACE INC ↗
- Who funds Opera Theatre of Saint Louis ↗
- Who funds Community Services League of Jackson County ↗
- Who funds Greater Kansas City Community Foundation ↗
- Who funds FINNEY COUNTY UNITED WAY 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: St Louis Community Foundation · Norman J Stupp Foundation · United Way of Greater St Louis Inc · St Louis Community Foundation Inc · Edward Jones Foundation · Moneta Group Charitable Foundation · Trio Foundation of St Louis · William T Kemper Foundation Commerce Bank Trustee · Pott Foundation · Brown Dana Charitable Trust · World Wide Technology Foundation · Youthbridge Community 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 Commerce Bancshares 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.
- Mental Health Association in Tulsa Inc dba Mental Health Association Oklahoma — 8% 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 Commerce Bancshares Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Commerce Bancshares 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.