· Private foundation
Crankstart Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k49 grants · $126k
- $10k–50k28 grants · $555k
- $50k–250k112 grants · $13M
- $250k+246 grants · $187M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MERIT AMERICA | $10,500,000 |
| ARC RESEARCH INSTITUTE | $10,000,000 |
| UCSF FOUNDATION | $9,100,000 |
| SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION | $5,000,000 |
| PRO PUBLICA INC | $5,000,000 |
| NEO PHILANTHROPY INC | $3,000,000 |
| VOTER REGISTRATION PROJECT | $3,000,000 |
| UASPIRE INC | $3,000,000 |
| THE AFFORDABILITY PROJECT INC | $3,000,000 |
| SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION | $3,000,000 |
| NATIONAL CENTER FOR YOUTH LAW | $2,400,000 |
| SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION | $2,300,000 |
| ALLIANCE FOR SAFETY AND JUSTICE | $2,000,000 |
| THE SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION | $2,000,000 |
| CLIMATEWORKS FOUNDATION | $2,000,000 |
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 (FY20–24, $77.1M) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 99% 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 7% of Crankstart 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, 71% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 68% — 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 +26% since the first grant, against +20% for the ones you funded once.
345 repeat relationships — 235 still active in FY2024, 110 since wound down; 93 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, 70% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $54M 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
- JSJUILLIARD SCHOOL2× · 2020–2021 · $50M · revenue +65% · 28% of their budget
- ARArc Research Institute3× · 2022–2024 · $25M · revenue +27%
PRO PUBLICA INC5× · 2020–2024 · $16M · revenue +71%
Funded once
Public Health Institutegraduatedone grant, 2020 · $7.5M · revenue +33%- FLFARESHARE LTDone grant, 2020 · $2.4M
- TLTHE LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE EDUCATION FUND INCone grant, 2021 · $2.0M · revenue -63%
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.
The organization provides professional investment management services for endowed gifts and financial assets entrusted to the ucsf foundation.
Ca fwd drives action to identify solutions that can be taken to scale to meet the challenges the state is facing. the organization is driven by the belief that regional solutions across the state will help ensure economic, environmental,…
A long-term, strategic alliance of labor, community, faith-based, and student organizations working together to build greater economic power for workers and community members through employee rights at work and access to good jobs,…
The mission of the uc davis foundation is to secure, steward and manage private gifts for uc davis.
Golden gate university prepares individuals to lead and serve by providing high quality, practice-based educational programs in law, taxation, business and related professions - as a nonprofit institution - in an innovative and challenging…
The san diego foundation inspires enduring philanthropy and enables community solutions to improve the quality of life in our region.
For more than five decades, public advocates has challenged the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination by strengthening community voices in public policy and achieving tangible legal victories advancing education, housing,…
SF Partnership is an organization comprised of SF's leading employers dedicated to supporting an equitable, resilient, and vibrant economy shared by all people working and living in San Francisco. Through education, advocacy, and research,…
The american civil liberties union of northern california (aclu nc union) defends and advances the principles of freedom, equality and justice contained in the united states constitution. aclu nc union, a california mutual benefit…
Guided by the principles of academic rigor and diversity, the international school of san francisco offers programs of study in french and english to prepare its graduates for a world in which the ability to think critically and to…
The mission of the silicon schools fund is to improve education through supporting the launch of excellent new schools, improving academic instruction in existing schools, and by funding some of the boldest innovations in education…
To promote philanthropy to make santa cruz county a better place to live, now and in the future.we bring together people, ideas, and resources to inspire philanthropy and accomplish great things.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The San Francisco Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Next Gen Personal Finance. 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 31 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) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 5% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.9% lost their exemption, against 14% 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.
519 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. 519 of the 583 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 THE SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds JUILLIARD SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds NEW VENTURE FUND ↗
- Who funds Arc Research Institute ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PRO PUBLICA INC ↗
- Who funds Bay Area Community Services Inc ↗
- Who funds SPANISH SPEAKING UNITY COUNCIL OF ALAMEDA COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds TIDES CENTER ↗
- Who funds TIPPING POINT COMMUNITY ↗
- Who funds THE OAKLAND PUBLIC EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds MERIT AMERICA ↗
- Who funds San Francisco Education Fund ↗
- Who funds IMMIGRANT LEGAL RESOURCE CENTER ↗
- Who funds Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds TENDERLOIN NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds ENTERPRISE COMMUNITY PARTNERS INC ↗
- Who funds MISSION ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AGENCY ↗
- Who funds Public Health Institute ↗
- Who funds KIPP FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Larkin Street Youth Services ↗
- Who funds Together SF ↗
- Who funds NON-PROFIT HOUSING ASSOCIATION OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds MERCY HOUSING CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds EARTHJUSTICE ↗
- Who funds YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO ↗
- Who funds CHINATOWN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CENTER ↗
- Who funds National Center for Youth Law ↗
- Who funds PICO California ↗
- Who funds UFW FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds UASPIRE INC ↗
- Who funds YEAR UP INC ↗
- Who funds HEALTHRIGHT 360 ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC HEALTH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SPARK SF PUBLIC SCHOOLS ↗
- Who funds San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium ↗
- Who funds SAFE & SOUND ↗
- Who funds ALAMEDA HEALTH CONSORTIUM ↗
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: The San Francisco Foundation · Tipping Point Community · The James Irvine Foundation · The California Wellness Foundation · McNabb Foundation · East Bay Community Foundation · United Way of the Bay Area · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · Stupski Foundation · Kelson Foundation · Walter and Elise Haas Fund · Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr Fund
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 Crankstart 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.
- Enterprise Community Partners Inc — 22% of income from government
- Blueprint Schools Network Inc — 10% of income from government
- Casa Inc — 8% of income from government
- The Morgan State University Foundation Inc — 7% of income from government
- Uaspire Inc — 1% of income from government
- New World Symphony Inc — 0% of income from government
- Year Up Inc — 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 Crankstart Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Crankstart 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.