· Private foundation
Crane Family 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 FY2020–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k2 grants · $10k
- $10k–50k10 grants · $170k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $203k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THIRD OPTION FOUNDATION | $102,846 |
| ASTROS FOUNDATION | $100,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL MISSOURI | $25,000 |
| MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS | $25,000 |
| ST JOHNS SCHOOL | $25,000 |
| Kinkaid School | $20,000 |
| MEN OF DISTINCTION | $15,000 |
| POST OAK LITTLE LEAGUE | $15,000 |
| TEXAS BUSINESS HALL OF FAME | $15,000 |
| Richard Davis Kann Melanoma Foundation | $10,000 |
| AMERICAN RED CROSS | $10,000 |
| SAM HOUSTON AREA COUNCIL | $10,000 |
| AMFAR FOUNDATION FOR AIDS RESEARCH | $5,000 |
| RIVER OAKS BAPTIST SCHOOL | $5,000 |
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 (FY20–25, $149k) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 23% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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 7% of Crane Family 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.
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 +30% since the first grant, against +25% for the ones you funded once.
9 repeat relationships — 6 still active in FY2025, 3 since wound down; 8 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, 46% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $205k 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
- TOTHIRD OPTION FOUNDATION2× · 2023–2025 · $115k · revenue +40%
- MHMemorial Hermann Foundation3× · 2023–2025 · $55k · revenue +30%
- SJSt John's School2× · 2022–2025 · $50k · revenue +89%
Funded once
- LHLUTHERAN HIGH SCHOOLone grant, 2023 · $1.0M
- MAMD ANDERSON CANCER CENTERone grant, 2022 · $505k
THE BARACK OBAMA FOUNDATION2× · 2024–2025 · $500k · 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.
To enrich life through discovery, education, and the conservation of plants and the natural environment.
Plant, protect and promote trees all over the greater Houston area.
The HISD Foundation is dedicated to mobilizing the local community to support innovative priorities in HISD to improve outcomes for all students in the district. Our mission is to fund projects and programs of merit that fall outside of…
Memorial hermann health system is a nonprofit, values-driven, community-owned health system dedicated to improving health. our vision is to create healthier communities, now and for generations to come. our values are community,…
The Health Museum is an innovative science center that provides an interactive and entertaining experience for all ages, promotes understanding and appreciation of the human body, mind, and spirit, and inspires a lifelong commitment to…
University of Houston Foundation provides program support to University of Houston System for various scholarship and educational programs.
The museum of fine arts, houston serves as a welcoming and inclusive place for all people, connecting the communities of houston with diverse histories of art spanning 6,000 years and six continents. through our permanent collections,…
Memorial hermann health system is a nonprofit, values-driven, community-owned health system dedicated to improving health. our vision is to create healthier communities, now and for generations to come. our values are community,…
Mission: this organization is part of the methodist hospital, doing business as houston methodist hospital, whose mission is: to provide high quality, cost-effective health care that delivers the best value to the people we serve in a…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Memorial Hermann Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Philip & Amy Mickelson Charitable 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 45 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 7% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 17% 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.
31 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. 31 of the 44 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 BARACK OBAMA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY FOUNDATION FOR MONTEREY COUNTY ↗
- Who funds THIRD OPTION FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MONTEREY PENINSULA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ASTROS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PHILIP & AMY MICKELSON CHARITABLE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ANGELS AND CAUSES INC ↗
- Who funds Memorial Hermann Foundation ↗
- Who funds St John's School ↗
- Who funds The Kinkaid School Inc ↗
- Who funds Men of Distinction of Greater Houston ↗
- Who funds University of Central Missouri Foundation ↗
- Who funds ALLEY THEATRE ↗
- Who funds ASIA SOCIETY TEXAS CENTER ↗
- Who funds Houston Grand Opera Association Inc ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds Houston Zoo Inc ↗
- Who funds Bayou Bend Gardens Endowment ↗
- Who funds Little League Baseball Inc 3431607 Post Oak LL ↗
- Who funds Texas Business Hall of Fame Foundation ↗
- Who funds THE GEORGE AND BARBARA BUSH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds The Brookwood Community Inc ↗
- Who funds CORRERA FAMILY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MISSION OF YAHWEH INC ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds Pathways for Little Feet ↗
- Who funds RIVER OAKS FOUNDATION ↗
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: Greater Houston Community Foundation · The Alkek and Williams Foundation · The Robert and Janice McNair Foundation · Hobby Family Foundation · Alvin & Lucy Owsley Foundation · The Holthouse Foundation for Kids · John P McGovern Foundation · Mechia Foundation · Strake Foundation · The Kayser Foundation · The Weingarten Schnitzer Foundation Inc · Vivian L Smith 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 Crane Family 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 Crane Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Crane Family 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.