· Public charity
Defenders of Wildlife
Defenders of Wildlife is a national, nonprofit membership organization dedicated to the protection of all native animals and plants in their natural communities.
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.
The 21 grants below total $394,210 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $609,434 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $215,224 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k6 grants · $43k
- $10k–50k14 grants · $231k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $120k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| County of Dare | $120,114 |
| Aris Land & Livestock LLC | $24,000 |
| The Blackfoot Challenge Inc | $22,000 |
| Southern Plains Land Trust | $21,186 |
| City of Hamilton | $20,110 |
| Tom Miner Basin Association | $19,000 |
| White Mountain Apache Tribe | $18,000 |
| KCK Investments LLC | $18,000 |
| Beaver Institute Inc | $17,500 |
| Rocky Mountain Front Ranchlands Group | $15,000 |
| Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation | $13,000 |
| Wildlife Restoration Foundation | $13,000 |
| University of North Carolina at Asheville | $10,000 |
| LLCJBARL Ranches | $10,000 |
| Watershed Management Group Inc | $10,000 |
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 (FY22–25, $63k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 8%. 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 35% of Defenders of Wildlife’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, 24% of the giving stays in DC; read by stated purpose it is 20% — 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 +46% since the first grant, against +29% for the ones you funded once.
40 repeat relationships — 13 still active in FY2025, 27 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; $213k 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 WILDERNESS SOCIETY6× · 2017–2023 · $1.2M · revenue +40%
NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL INC5× · 2017–2021 · $1.0M · revenue +41%- AWALASKA WILDERNESS LEAGUE7× · 2018–2024 · $310k · revenue +13%
Funded once
- RMROCKY MOUNTAIN WOLF ACTION FUNDone grant, 2020 · $176k
- FBFORT BELKNAP INDIAN COMMUNITYone grant, 2017 · $136k
- HAHispanic Access Foundationgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $45k · revenue +87%
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.
Wwf's mission is to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on earth. (continued on schedule o)
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…
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,…
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.
Promote wildlife habitat
Defenders of Wildlife is a national, nonprofit membership organization dedicated to the protection of all native animals and plants in their natural communities.
To promote science-based wildlife management that fosters ecosystem health and dynamic equilibrium between species throughout the state of wyoming.
Icl's mission is to create a conservation community and pragmatic, enduring solutions that protect and restore the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the land and wildlife you love.
The resource renewal institute facilitates the creation, development and implementation of practical strategies to solve the entire complex environmental problem by addressing it comprehensively.
To promote and protect Wildlife
Promote research and actions to save wildlife.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Wilderness Society and the most unlike its peers is Badger Creek Corporation. 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) — 4% 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.
62 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. 62 of the 106 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 NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds ALASKA WILDERNESS LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds ROCKY MOUNTAIN WOLF ACTION FUND ↗
- Who funds INDIAN NATIONS CONSERVATION ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds BLACKFOOT CHALLENGE INC ↗
- Who funds CLARK FORK COALITION ↗
- Who funds Wild Earth Society Incorporated ↗
- Who funds Rangeland Wild ↗
- Who funds FLORIDA CONSERVATION GROUP INC ↗
- Who funds Alaska Wildlife Alliance ↗
- Who funds Hispanic Access Foundation ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA WOLF CENTER ↗
- Who funds SOUTHERN PLAINS LAND TRUST INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION ↗
- Who funds Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund ↗
- Who funds PATAGONIA AREA RESOURCE ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds The Partnership Project Inc ↗
- Who funds Mainspring Conservation Trust Inc ↗
- Who funds ROCKY MOUNTAIN BIRD OBSERVATORY ↗
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: National Fish and Wildlife Foundation · The Nature Conservancy · Patagoniaorg · The Wilderness Society · First Nations Development Institute · National Audubon Society Inc · Natural Resources Defense Council Inc · Resources Legacy Fund · The New-Land Foundation Inc · American Rivers Inc · World Wildlife Fund Inc · The Kendeda 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 Defenders of Wildlife 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.
- Florida Conservation Group Inc — 7% 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.