· Private foundation
Cottonwood Foundation
Its FY2025 filing reports that it funds preselected organizations and did not take unsolicited requests; check the foundation's own site before ruling it out.
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.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Southern Plains Land Trust | $1,000 |
| Indian Land Tenure Foundation | $1,000 |
| Wild Animal Sanctuary | $1,000 |
| Rainbow World Fund | $500 |
| Red Lake Rosies Rescue | $500 |
| Friends of Animals | $500 |
| Kerulos Center for Nonviolence | $500 |
| Save the Chimps | $500 |
| Chicken Run Rescue | $500 |
| Friends Boundary Waters Wilderness | $500 |
| Land Loss Prevention Project | $500 |
| Compassionate Action for Animals | $500 |
| Monarch Butterfly Fund | $500 |
| The Wildcat Sanctuary | $500 |
| The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee | $500 |
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, $5k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 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.
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.
23 repeat relationships — 10 still active in FY2025, 13 since wound down; 4 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, 75% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $2k 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
- TWTHE WILD ANIMAL SANCTUARY7× · 2019–2025 · $7k · revenue +82%
- SPSOUTHERN PLAINS LAND TRUST INC7× · 2019–2025 · $7k · revenue +115%
- MBMONARCH BUTTERFLY FUND7× · 2019–2025 · $4k · revenue +17%
Funded once
- HIHAWAIIAN ISLANDS LAND TRUSTone grant, 2024 · $1k · revenue 0%
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2024 · $1k
- FOFriends of Animalsone grant, 2024 · $500
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.
Rainforest trust saves endangered wildlife and protects our planet by creating rainforest reserves through partnerships, community engagement, and donor support.
Wwf's mission is to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on earth. (continued on schedule o)
Wild landscapes, inc. (wli) is dedicated to conserving large and connected landscapes globally significant to wildlife and crucial to local communities. our environmental conservation strategy is to empower communities, conservationists,…
Wildlands Network works to reconnect, restore and rewild North America so that life-in all its diversity-can thrive.
The resource renewal institute facilitates the creation, development and implementation of practical strategies to solve the entire complex environmental problem by addressing it comprehensively.
Dedicated to protecting the world's natural environment on behalf of the public by serving as a public interest law firm. refer to schedule o, part iii, line 4a, for list of litigated cases or advocacy work.
Cascadia wildlands defends and restores cacasia's wild ecosystems in the forests,in the courts, and in the streets. we envision vast old-growth forests, rivers full of wild salmon, wolves howling in the backcountry, a stable climate, and…
Protecting vital native predators & ending war on wildlife.
Wildlife alliance is the leader in direct protection of forests and wildlife in tropical asia. our mission is to combat deforestation, biodiversity loss, climate change, and poverty by partnering with local communities and governments.…
Awf's mission is to ensure wildlife and wild lands thrive in modern africa. we work to equip african governments, institutions, business, and communities with the tools, insights, and support they need to define, own, and realize a…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Wildearth Guardians and the most unlike its peers is Chicken Run Rescue. 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 27 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) — 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 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.
29 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. 29 of the 40 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 THE WILD ANIMAL SANCTUARY ↗
- Who funds SOUTHERN PLAINS LAND TRUST INC ↗
- Who funds INDIAN LAND TENURE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MONARCH BUTTERFLY FUND ↗
- Who funds SAVE THE CHIMPS INC ↗
- Who funds CHICKEN RUN RESCUE ↗
- Who funds RED LAKE ROSIE'S RESCUE INC ↗
- Who funds WILDEARTH GUARDIANS ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF ANIMALS INC ↗
- Who funds COMPASSIONATE ACTION FOR ANIMALS ↗
- Who funds North Carolina Association of Black Lawyer Land Loss Prevention Projec ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE BOUNDARY WATERS WILDERNESS ↗
- Who funds EARTH LAW CENTER ↗
- Who funds OUR CHILDREN'S TRUST ↗
- Who funds Nonhuman Rights Project Inc ↗
- Who funds TRANSITION US ↗
- Who funds HOWLING FOR WOLVES ↗
- Who funds BUFFALO FIELD CAMPAIGN INC ↗
- Who funds LOWER PHALEN CREEK PROJECT ↗
- Who funds INTERTRIBAL SINKYONE WILDERNESS COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds HAWAIIAN ISLANDS LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds RURAL RENEWABLE ENERGY ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds THE ELEPHANT SANCTUARY IN TENNESSEE ↗
- Who funds THE WILDCAT SANCTUARY ↗
- Who funds TREES WATER AND PEOPLE ↗
- Who funds RED CLOUD RENEWABLE ↗
- Who funds Rainbow World Fund ↗
- Who funds SOUL FIRE FARM INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL NETWORK ↗
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: Mightycause Charitable Foundation · Patagoniaorg · The K Foundation · The Jamf Nation Global Foundation · Impactassetsinc · Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation · Network for Good · The Chicago Community Trust · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · American Endowment 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 Cottonwood 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 Cottonwood Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Cottonwood 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.