· Public charity
Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption
The DAVE THOMAS FOUNDATION FOR ADOPTION is a national nonprofit public charity dedicated exclusively to finding permanent homes for more than 150,000 children waiting in north america's foster care systems.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k1 grant · $8k
- $10k–50k12 grants · $340k
- $50k–250k92 grants · $10M
- $250k+30 grants · $21M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE VILLAGES OF INDIANA INC | $3,056,524 |
| CARING FOR KIDS INC | $2,116,250 |
| RAISE THE FUTURE | $2,060,348 |
| MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES | $1,251,562 |
| ADOPT AMERICA NETWORK INC | $1,186,500 |
| NORTHEAST OHIO ADOPTION SERVICES | $1,131,000 |
| BETHANY CHRISTIAN SERVICES OF GEORGIA | $954,800 |
| FRANKLIN COUNTY CHILDREN SERVICES | $557,800 |
| GATEWAY-LONGVIEW INC | $550,000 |
| CHILDREN'S HOME OF WYOMING CONFERENCE | $550,000 |
| FOCUS ON YOUTH INC | $528,600 |
| HAMILTON COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF JOB AND FAMILY SERVICES | $465,000 |
| SJRC TEXAS | $461,250 |
| SPECIALIZED ALTERNATIVES FOR FAMILIES AND YOUTH OF OHIO | $456,000 |
| CHILDREN'S HOME SOCIETY OF NORTH CAROLINA | $450,000 |
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 (FY17–25, $113.1M) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 75% 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 +40% since the first grant, against +19% for the ones you funded once.
175 repeat relationships — 121 still active in FY2025, 54 since wound down; 12 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, 96% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1.1M 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
- RTRAISE THE FUTURE9× · 2017–2025 · $16M · revenue +169% · 37% of their budget
- TVThe Villages of Indiana Inc9× · 2017–2025 · $9.9M · revenue +34%
- CFCARING FOR KIDS INC9× · 2017–2025 · $9.0M · revenue +103% · 31% of their budget
Funded once
- ACARROW CHILD & FAMILY MINISTRIESone grant, 2023 · $446k
- NDNEW DIRECTIONS YOUTH AND FAMILY SERVICESgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $169k · revenue +48%
- EFEMBRACE FAMILIES INCone grant, 2023 · $150k · revenue -96%
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 mission of christian family care is to strengthen families and serve at-risk children in the name of jesus christ. the outcome of our work results in building flourishing families and communities focusing on three pillars: preserve,…
Concern's mission: concern brings hope, offers opportunity, and inspires change. concern's vision: to encourage growth and promote positive healthy lives.
To provide safe homes, education and counseling to vulnerable children and families. the program philosophy reinforces personal responsibility and emphasizes the need for a strong family unit.
Centers for children & families, inc. exists to improve quality of life and strengthen the communities we serve through counseling, education and supportive services
Established to recruit, train, and provide extensive services to foster family homes so that children who were in, or might otherwise be placed in, residential treatment facilities can be placed and maintained in foster homes.provides…
Family focus adoption services ("family focus") was founded in 1987 by a group of new york and new jersey adoptive parents, social workers, and other adoption advocates, out of the belef that every child who needs a permanent adoptive…
Child Link provides foster care, family counseling, and therapy services to Chicago area adolescents who are at risk of homelessness. Child Link also refers adolescents to other agencies that are able to provide additional resources and…
The child center of ny strengthens children and families with skills, opportunities, and emotional support to build healthy, successful lives.
The mission of children's friend and service (the organization) is to be the innovative leader in improving the well-being and healthy development of rhode island's most vulnerable young children. they accomplish this by providing flexible…
To strengthen the well-being and development of families and individuals through professional human services programs, including therapy, counseling, education, special assistance, and advocacy.
The agency's overarching philosophy is based in the neurosequential model of therapeutics (nmt), developed by dr. bruce perry. nmt is a trauma-informed, developmentally sensitive approach to understanding the impact of a child's history on…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Children's Village Inc and the most unlike its peers is Adoptee Mentoring Society. 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 41 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) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 1% 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.
166 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. 166 of the 213 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 RAISE THE FUTURE ↗
- Who funds The Villages of Indiana Inc ↗
- Who funds CARING FOR KIDS INC ↗
- Who funds Children's Home Society of North Carolina Inc ↗
- Who funds NORTHEAST OHIO ADOPTION SERVICES ↗
- Who funds ADOPT AMERICA NETWORK ↗
- Who funds CHILDRENS HOME SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON ↗
- Who funds THE BOYS & GIRLS AID SOCIETY OF OREGON ↗
- Who funds AID TO ADOPTION OF SPECIAL KIDS AASK ARIZONA ↗
- Who funds SPECIALIZED ALTERNATIVES FOR FAMILIES & YOUTH OF INDIANA INC ↗
- Who funds PARSONS CHILD AND FAMILY CENTER ↗
- Who funds GROWING HOME SOUTHEAST INC ↗
- Who funds THE CHILDREN'S VILLAGE INC ↗
- Who funds LUTHERAN FAMILY SERVICES OF NE INC ↗
- Who funds LUTHERAN SOCIAL SERVICES OF THE SOUTH INC ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S HOME OF WYOMING CONFERENCE ↗
- Who funds GATEWAY-LONGVIEW FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FOCUS ON YOUTH INC ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR ADOPTION SUPPORT AND EDUCATION INC ↗
- Who funds Hope for Youth Inc ↗
- Who funds United Methodist Family Services of Virginia ↗
- Who funds KLINGBERG COMPREHENSIVE FAMILY SERVICES INC ↗
- Who funds ADOPTION RHODE ISLAND ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Adoption Resource Exchange Inc ↗
- Who funds MISSION WEST VIRGINIA 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 loosely connected circle, clustered around a few shared anchors.
Open a dossier: Ticket to Dream Foundation · Casey Family Programs · Hearts to Homes Furnishings Inc · Annie E Casey Foundation Inc · Redlich Horwitz Foundation · Oneohio Recovery Foundation Inc · Tickets for Kids Foundation · Ohio Assoc Cnty Behavioral Hlth Auth Foundation · Mother Cabrini Health Foundation Inc · Ohio Children's Alliance · Interact for Health · Workforce Professionals Training Institute
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 Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption 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.
- Center for Adoption Support and Education Inc — 51% of income from government
- Lund Family Center Inc — 34% of income from government
- The Treehouse Foundation Inc — 23% of income from government
- FosterClub Inc — 21% of income from government
- Eckerd Youth Alternatives Inc — 12% of income from government
- The Children's Home Society of Florida — 6% of income from government
- The Contingent — 5% of income from government
- The Boys & Girls Aid Society of Oregon — 3% of income from government
- Citrus Health Network Inc — 2% of income from government
- Lakeview Center Inc — 2% of income from government
- Children's Aid and Family Services Inc — 1% of income from government
- Family Support Services of North Florida Inc — 0% of income from government
- Camelot Community Care 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.