· Private foundation
Elsie & William Viles Foundation
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 FY2020–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k35 grants · $142k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $94k
- $50k–250k6 grants · $624k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MaineGeneral Health | $159,800 |
| Kennebec Valley Humane Society | $159,800 |
| Viles Arboretum | $79,900 |
| Maine State Museum | $79,900 |
| South Parish Congregational Church | $79,900 |
| Cony High School | $64,977 |
| Augusta Food Bank | $25,000 |
| Foundation for Maine's Community Colleges | $24,000 |
| City of Augusta | $20,200 |
| Kennebec Land Trust | $15,000 |
| Children's Center Early Intervention and Family Support | $10,000 |
| Hubbard Free Library | $8,500 |
| Winthrop Food Pantry | $7,500 |
| Friends of the Kennebec River Rail Trail | $7,500 |
| Augusta Boys and Girls Club | $7,500 |
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.
Your human-services grants (FY23–25, $38k) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 87% 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.
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 +42% since the first grant, against +18% for the ones you funded once.
35 repeat relationships — 26 still active in FY2025, 9 since wound down; 20 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, 90% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $85k 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
- KVKENNEBEC VALLEY HUMANE SOCIETY6× · 2020–2025 · $874k · revenue +93%
- VAViles Arboretum6× · 2020–2025 · $435k · revenue +77% · 31% of their budget
- AFAUGUSTA FOOD BANK6× · 2020–2025 · $115k · revenue +101%
Funded once
- MHMaineGeneral Health - Cancer Careone grant, 2024 · $25k
- KVKENNEBEC VALLEY FAMILY DENTISTRYgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $20k · revenue +50%
- VWVAUGHAN WOODS AND HISTORIC HOMESTEADone grant, 2024 · $20k · revenue 0%
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.
Kennebunk Land Trust's mission is to permanently conserve and steward land to benefit natural and human communities.
To preserve collect and digitize the archive of the town of Lincolnville Maine's history ecology flora and fauna
Maine Historical Society, founded in 1822, is a private non-profit whose mission is to preserve and share Maine's story. Based in Portland, we work closely with communities and partners throughout the state, and serve a statewide and…
The Association's primary mission is to keep the tourism insdustry sustainable by providing visitors and residents with tourism information, to develop travel, tourism, and advocacy, and to promote workforce development in Maine.
The mission of the mount desert land & garden preserve is to conserve and share the beauty of our historic lands and gardens.
The mission of the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts is to inspire, engage and educate through the exhibition, preservation and collection of photographic works. The Museums programs address contemporary, historical, cultural and…
The mission of the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust is to conserve, restore, and instill appreciation of the land and water resources of the Kennebec Estuary for the benefit of today's communities and future generations.
The Eastern Maine Conservation Initiative (EMCI) is a non-profit organization with broad conservation interests that seeks to: 1) Foster environmentally sustainable communities of the eastern Maine coast; 2) Encourage an appreciation of…
The Piscataquog Land Conservancy is a nonprofit land conservation organization founded in 1970. Its purpose is to conserve the natural and scenic environment of the Piscataquog, Souhegan and Nashua River watershed communities of southern…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Midcoast Conservancy and the most unlike its peers is Neighbors Driving Neighbors. 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 33 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 16% 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 9% 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.
64 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. 64 of the 90 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 KENNEBEC VALLEY HUMANE SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds Viles Arboretum ↗
- Who funds The Foundation for Maine's Community Colleges ↗
- Who funds AUGUSTA FOOD BANK ↗
- Who funds Children's Center Early Intervention & Family Support ↗
- Who funds BOYS&GIRLS CLUBS OF KENNEBEC VALLEY ↗
- Who funds KENNEBEC HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF BAXTER STATE PARK ↗
- Who funds THE KENNEBEC LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds SPORTSMAN'S ALLIANCE OF MAINE ↗
- Who funds KENNEBEC VALLEY FAMILY DENTISTRY ↗
- Who funds VAUGHAN WOODS AND HISTORIC HOMESTEAD ↗
- Who funds PEACE RIDGE SANCTUARY ↗
- Who funds THE THEATER AT MONMOUTH ↗
- Who funds PINELAND SUZUKI SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds YOUNG MENS CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF KENNEBEC VALLEY ↗
- Who funds Victoria Mansion ↗
- Who funds SPECTRUM GENERATIONS ↗
- Who funds PINE TREE SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds AUGUSTA DOWNTOWN ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds The Susan L Curtis Foundation ↗
- Who funds MAINE STATE MUSIC THEATRE ↗
- Who funds NEIGHBORS DRIVING NEIGHBORS ↗
- Who funds HUBBARD FREE LIBRARY ↗
- Who funds GARDINER LIBRARY ASSOCIATION ↗
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: Maine Community Foundation Inc · Kennebec Savings Bank Foundation · Davis Family Foundation · Bangor Savings Bank Foundation · Elmina B Sewall Foundation · Fisher Charitable Foundation · Onion Foundation · Morton-Kelly Charitable Trust · Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation Inc · Libra Foundation · Reny Charitable Foundation · Simmons Foundation - PerkinsThompson
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 Elsie & William Viles 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.
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 Elsie & William Viles Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Elsie & William Viles 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.