· Private foundation
Diana Davis Spencer Foundation Inc
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 FY2019–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k5 grants · $25k
- $10k–50k15 grants · $300k
- $50k–250k60 grants · $6.6M
- $250k+58 grants · $73M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| DONORS TRUST | $5,000,000 |
| HERITAGE FOUNDATION | $5,000,000 |
| DONORS TRUST | $5,000,000 |
| HILLSDALE COLLEGE | $5,000,000 |
| DONORS TRUST | $5,000,000 |
| TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY | $3,500,000 |
| TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY | $3,500,000 |
| DONORS TRUST | $3,000,000 |
| INDEPENDENT WOMEN'S FORUM | $2,500,000 |
| MAYO CLINIC | $2,000,000 |
| THE JACKSON LABORATORY | $2,000,000 |
| HAZELDEN BETTY FORD FOUNDATION | $2,000,000 |
| THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY FOR LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY STUDIES | $2,000,000 |
| DONORS TRUST | $2,000,000 |
| PENTAGON MEMORIAL FUND INC | $1,250,000 |
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 (FY19–24, $1.9M) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 77% 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 25% of Diana Davis Spencer Foundation Inc’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 +32% since the first grant, against +24% for the ones you funded once.
191 repeat relationships — 94 still active in FY2024, 97 since wound down; 21 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, 96% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $2.1M 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
- MSMASTERS SCHOOL5× · 2019–2024 · $28M · revenue +43% · 34% of their budget
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION5× · 2020–2024 · $15M · revenue +12%
WHEATON COLLEGE2× · 2020–2021 · $12M · revenue +27%
Funded once
- DMDANIEL MORGAN GRADUATE SCHOOLone grant, 2019 · $5.4M · revenue -101% · 35% of their budget
- DMDANIEL MORGAN GRADUATE SCHOOL OF NATIONAL SECURITYone grant, 2019 · $4.6M
- HFHERITAGE FOUNDATIONone grant, 2019 · $2.5M
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 american enterprise institute is a community of scholars and supporters committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise. aei pursues these ideals through independent thinking and the…
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
To provide accurate, objective information and analysis on international strategic issues for legislators, diplomats, foreign affairs analysts, international business leaders, economists, the military, defense commentators, journalists,…
The foreign policy research institute (frpi) is dedicated to producing the highest quality scholarship and nonpartisan policy analysis focused on crucial foreign policy and national security challenges facing the united states. we educate…
The peterson institute for international economics (piie) is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to strengthening prosperity and human welfare in the global economy through expert analysis and practical…
The open markets institute works to help people relearn how to use competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.
The manhattan institute is a community of scholars, journalists, activists, and civic leaders dedicated to advancing opportunity, individual liberty, and the rule of law in america and its great cities.
The mission of the george washington university (gw) is to educate individuals in liberal arts, languages, sciences, learned professions, and other courses and subjects of study, and to conduct scholarly research and publish the findings…
The council on foreign relations (cfr) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and…
The mission of the washington internship institute is to foster students' intellectual, personal, and professional development through individually tailored, quality internships and challenging academic coursework that take full advantage…
Allbritton journalism institute aims to train a new generation of non-partisan political reporters from diverse backgrounds to produce high-quality, fact-based journalism.
To create a nation where everyone enjoys a fair share of our collective prosperity.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Heritage Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Genbiz Inc. 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 29 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) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.4% 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.
264 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. 264 of the 332 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.
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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: Donors Trust Inc · The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Inc · Sarah Scaife Foundation Incorporated · Bradley Impact Fund Inc · The Searle Freedom Trust · Adolph Coors Foundation · Colket Family Foundation · The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation · Charles Koch Foundation · Holman Foundation Inc · John William Pope Foundation · Greater Washington Community 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 Diana Davis Spencer Foundation Inc 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.
- Sister States of Maryland Inc — 92% of income from government
- National Park Trust Inc — 51% of income from government
- Chapel Haven Schleifer Center Inc — 13% of income from government
- National History Day Inc — 13% of income from government
- City Year Inc — 11% of income from government
- Children's Inn at Nih Inc — 10% of income from government
- Babson College — 3% of income from government
- Rising Tide Capital Inc and Subsidiaries — 2% of income from government
- Plimoth Patuxet Museums Inc — 1% of income from government
- Yale New Haven Hospital — 0% of income from government
- Year Up Inc — 0% of income from government
- Wheaton College — 0% of income from government
- Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation 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 Diana Davis Spencer Foundation Inc?
Find your warmest path to Diana Davis Spencer Foundation Inc 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.