· Private foundation
Elizabeth Buford Shepherd Scholarship
Its FY2025 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
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 $10k21 grants · $39k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $21k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AT KNOXVILLE | $21,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AT CHATTANOOGA | $4,500 |
| LIPSCOMB UNIVERSITY | $3,000 |
| TN TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY | $3,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI | $3,000 |
| VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY | $1,500 |
| UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA | $1,500 |
| MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY | $1,500 |
| UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA | $1,500 |
| FURMAN UNIVERSITY | $1,500 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - LOS ANGELES | $1,500 |
| LEE UNIVERSITY | $1,500 |
| STANFORD UNIVERSITY | $1,500 |
| JACKSONVILLE STATE UNIVERSITY | $1,500 |
| BETHEL UNIVERSITY | $1,500 |
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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY24–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 64% of your 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.
45 repeat relationships — 17 still active in FY2025, 28 since wound down; 3 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, 92% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $5k 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
Vanderbilt University6× · 2017–2025 · $23k · revenue +74%- LULEE UNIVERSITY5× · 2020–2025 · $14k · revenue +5%
- LULIPSCOMB UNIVERSITY4× · 2017–2025 · $8k · revenue +44%
Funded once
- TUTHE UNIVERSITY OF TN KNOXVILLEone grant, 2022 · $24k
- UUNIVERSITYone grant, 2023 · $14k
- TUTHE UNIVERSITY OF TN CHATTANOOGAone grant, 2022 · $5k
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 university's goal in the coming decade is to advance learning through the integration of teaching, research and service to others. the core of this goal is to prepare graduates to engage with the world and lead lives of meaning. to do…
As a leading research university with a distinctive commitment to undergraduate education, Rice University aspires to path breaking research, unsurpassed teaching, and contributions to the betterment of our world. It seeks to fulfill this…
Trinity university is an independent co-educational university whose mission is excellence in the interrelated areas of teaching, research and services.
As the national university of the catholic church in the united states, founded and sponsored by the bishops of the country with the approval of the holy see, the catholic university of america is committed to being a comprehensive…
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
Education and Research
The University of New Haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts and professional education. Our mission is to prepare our students to lead purposeful and fulfilling lives in a…
Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.
At Roger Williams University, students are prepared to be thinkers and doers ready to solve challenging problems with innovative solutions. RWU offers robust offerings of undergraduate, graduate and professional programs across eight…
See Form 990, Part I, Line 1, Description of Organization Mission.
John brown university (jbu) provides christ-centered education that prepares students to honor god and serve others by developing their intellectual, spiritual, and professional lives. (continued on schedule o)jbu serves traditional…
As a Catholic, Jesuit university our mission is to search for truth, discover shareknowledge, foster personal professional excellence, promote a life of faith and developleadership expressed in service to others. See Schedule O.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Georgetown University and the most unlike its peers is Wake Forest University. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 79 years old; the field is 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 21% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% 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.
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 69 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 Vanderbilt University ↗
- Who funds LEE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds LIPSCOMB UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER ↗
- Who funds WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds BERRY COLLEGE INC ↗
- Who funds GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds BRYAN COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds DUKE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds The Trustees of Princeton University ↗
- Who funds ST LOUIS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds MILLIGAN UNIVERSITY ↗
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 set of overlaps that mostly run through you, not between each other.
Open a dossier: Amazonsmile 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 Elizabeth Buford Shepherd Scholarship 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.
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 11% 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 Elizabeth Buford Shepherd Scholarship?
Find your warmest path to Elizabeth Buford Shepherd Scholarship 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.