· Private foundation
Fair Play Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k20 grants · $82k
- $10k–50k17 grants · $288k
- $50k–250k6 grants · $380k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| FAUNA AND FLORA INTERNATIONAL | $75,000 |
| DELAWARE WILD LANDS | $70,000 |
| WILD EARTH ALLIES | $70,000 |
| CONSERVATION FUND | $60,000 |
| DELAWARE MUSEUM OF NATURE AND SCIENCE | $55,000 |
| HAGLEY MUSEUM & LIBRARY | $50,000 |
| FRIENDS OF FIRST STATE INC | $40,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINA LAW SCHOOL FOUNDATION | $35,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA | $25,000 |
| DOWN SYNDROME ASSOCIATION OF DELAWARE | $25,000 |
| WINTERTHUR MUSEUM | $25,000 |
| CHALLENGE PROGRAM | $20,000 |
| OUTWARD BOUND USA | $15,000 |
| BRIGHT'S CREEK CONSERVANCYINC | $12,500 |
| US SPORTSMEN'S ALLIANCE FOUNDATION | $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 (FY20–21, $25k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 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 11% of Fair Play Foundation’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, 48% of the giving stays in DE; read by stated purpose it is 45% — 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 +42% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
51 repeat relationships — 39 still active in FY2024, 12 since wound down; 4 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, 86% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $103k 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
THE CONSERVATION FUND A NONPROFIT CORPORATION5× · 2020–2024 · $370k · revenue +42%- DMDELAWARE MUSEUM OF NATURE AND SCIENCE INC5× · 2020–2024 · $328k · revenue +2%
- DWDELAWARE WILD LANDS INC5× · 2020–2024 · $320k · revenue +14%
Funded once
- NRNATIVE ROOTS FARM FOUNDATIONone grant, 2020 · $20k
- AHANDRE HARVEY CREATIVE FELLOWSHIP LONGWOOD GARDENSone grant, 2023 · $10k
- LILENAPE INDIAN TRIBE OF DELAWARE INCone grant, 2022 · $10k
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.
Delaware nature society connects people with the natural world to improve our environment through education, advocacy, and conservation.
The friends of the delaware canal is an independent, non-profit organization working to restore, preserve, and improve the delaware canal and its surroundings.
The organization's mission is to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret the history and technology of delaware and the delmarva peninsula's farm life/culture and to offer public education programs and services related to aspects of the…
Glen foerd stewards an eclectic riverfront estate for the enjoyment and educational benefit of the community. drawing from the estate's architecture, art, material culture, and history-as well as its gardens and waterways-glen foerd…
Acquire and preserve property and information of historic value and/or interest concerning delaware county, pennsylvania. the society also operates a research library and museum.
To conserve and support the resiliency of the natural resources in the upper delaware river region by working with willing landowners and by providing conservation education programs at our van scott nature reserve.
Conserve wildlife foundation of new jersey works to preserve rare and at-risk wildlife in new jersey through field science, habitat restoration, education, and public engagement.
The Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art preserves and presents elements of art and nature that highlight the extraordinary beauty of the Brandywine region in Pennsylvania and Delaware. The Brandywine Conservancy protects and conserves…
Partnership for the delaware estuary, inc. (pde), host of the delaware estuary program, leads collaborative, science-based efforts to improve the delaware river and bay, which covers portions of delaware, new jersey, and pennsylvania.
The mission of the atlantic coast conservancy is to provide 21st century solutions and sound scientific applications for conservation of critical natural resources in the face of a changing climate, focusing on the southeasthern united…
The mission of Historic Wilmington Foundation is to protect and preserve the irreplaceable historic resources of Wilmington and the Lower Cape Fear Region.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Delaware Community Foundation Inc and the most unlike its peers is Amboseli Trust for Elephants. 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 45 years old; the field is 10. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 33% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 8% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 11% 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.
38 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. 38 of the 67 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 CONSERVATION FUND A NONPROFIT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds DELAWARE MUSEUM OF NATURE AND SCIENCE INC ↗
- Who funds DELAWARE WILD LANDS INC ↗
- Who funds Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF FIRST STATE INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA LAW SCHOOL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE UNITED STATES SPORTSMEN'S ALLIANCE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Wild Earth Allies Inc ↗
- Who funds DOWN SYNDROME ASSOCIATION OF DELAWARE INC ↗
- Who funds SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENTAL LAW CENTER ↗
- Who funds THE 1103 MARKET STREET FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds STROUD WATER RESEARCH CENTER ↗
- Who funds HISTORIC ODESSA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BRANDYWINE RED CLAY ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds DELAWARE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Yale University ↗
- Who funds ST MICHAEL'S SCHOOL AND NURSERY INC ↗
- Who funds THOMAS JEFFERSON FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds CHALLENGE PROGRAM INC ↗
- Who funds URBANPROMISE WILMINGTON INC ↗
- Who funds OCEAN VIEW HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds ASHLEY INC ↗
- Who funds KALMAR NYCKEL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds OUTWARD BOUND INC ↗
- Who funds GREATER LEWES COMMUNITY VILLAGE ↗
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: Welfare Foundation Inc · Delaware Community Foundation Inc · Crestlea Foundation Inc · Longwood Foundation Inc · Nor' Easter Foundation Inc · Marmot Foundation · Laffey-McHugh Foundation · Ellice & Rosa McDonald Foundation · Sharp Foundation · Wakefield Family Fund Inc · Chichester Dupont Foundation Inc · Rencourt Foundation Inc
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 Fair Play 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Ocean View Historical Society — 100% of income from government
- St Michael's School and Nursery Inc — 48% of income from government
- Challenge Program Inc — 36% of income from government
- Historical Society of Delaware — 18% of income from government
- Greater Lewes Community Village — 16% of income from government
- Kalmar Nyckel Foundation — 14% of income from government
- Delaware Community Foundation Inc — 13% of income from government
- Friends of Coochs Bridge Historic Site Inc — 12% of income from government
- Yale University — 12% of income from government
- First State Squash Inc — 7% of income from government
- The Mary Campbell Center Inc — 6% of income from government
- Delaware Center for Horticulture Inc — 4% of income from government
- Chesapeake Bay Foundation Inc — 2% of income from government
- Delaware Museum of Nature and Science Inc — 2% of income from government
- Native Roots Farm Foundation — 2% of income from government
- Historic Odessa Foundation — 0% of income from government
- Eleutherian Mills-Hagley 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 Fair Play Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Fair Play 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.