· Public charity
Ffwd
FFWD accelerates the growth of technology nonprofits by providing financial and human capital to help scale technology solutions for education, environmental, health, and human rights issues.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 48 grants below total $12,941,108 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $15,229,830 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $2,288,722 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 · FY2024
- $10k–50k11 grants · $285k
- $50k–250k23 grants · $3.2M
- $250k+14 grants · $9.5M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| FreeWorld | $4,786,422 |
| Adalat AI | $682,034 |
| Lenny Learning | $550,723 |
| ColorStack | $405,418 |
| Lemontree Foods Inc | $398,100 |
| Dollar For | $383,850 |
| Koko AI | $302,500 |
| Career Village Inc | $298,000 |
| Upchieve | $295,000 |
| Unlocked Labs | $288,000 |
| Farmers For Forests Inc | $282,426 |
| Rocket Learning Foundation | $270,869 |
| Climate Cabinet Education | $260,829 |
| ASAP | $250,500 |
| Uprooted Academy | $247,803 |
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 (FY18–24, $3.9M) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 78% 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
Grants abroad, by region — $2.3M on the FY2024 return
Schedule F, as filed: 3 regions. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: General Support
Stated purpose: General Support
Stated purpose: General Support
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. Grants abroad on Schedule F are filed by region, purpose and amount with no recipient name, so they are shown by region and cannot be placed on the country map or matched to a grantee.
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 +71% since the first grant, against -13% for the ones you funded once.
72 repeat relationships — 36 still active in FY2024, 36 since wound down; 11 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, 41% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $7.5M 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
- JFJOIN FREEWORLD INC3× · 2021–2023 · $6.9M · revenue +110% · 65% of their budget
- CICOMMONLIT INC5× · 2019–2023 · $2.4M · revenue +281%
- RLRocket Learning Foundation4× · 2021–2024 · $1.3M · revenue ×28 · 30% of their budget
Funded once
- PFPROJECT FOUNDED INCORPORATEDone grant, 2021 · $400k · revenue -100% · 100% of their budget
- JEJOY EDUCATION FOUNDATIONone grant, 2023 · $108k · revenue +16% · 36% of their budget
- ILIMMIGRANTS LIKE US INCone grant, 2020 · $102k · revenue -98% · 64% of their budget
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.
Upturn advances equity and justice in the design, governance, and use of technology.
Center for Humane Technology is a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that the most consequential technologies actually serve humanity. We bring clarity to how the tech ecosystem works in order to shift the incentives that drive it.
Vote.org's primary purpose is to build web-based technologies that remove barriers to voting and increase vote turnout.
The organization's mission is to leverage web-technologies to improve civic engagement and voter education.
Brave New Software is dedicated to keeping the Internet open and decentralized. We build open source software tools that helps users access an uncensored internet, and create a more open and protected information infrastructure for us all.
Improving the transparency and scientific integrity of climate solutions through open data and tools.
Our missions is to ensure that the tech industry is a force for justice in our economy. we do this by empowering tech workers to advocate for structural change through progressive policy and candidate campaigns.
Project Include's mission is to give everyone a fair chance to succeed in tech. We are a non-profit that uses data and advocacy to accelerate diversity and inclusion solutions in the tech industry.
DDL`s Work is designed to widen public access to and use of economic, demographic and physical data that describes, defines and seeks to alleviate poverty, especially in the developing world
FFWD accelerates the growth of technology nonprofits by providing financial and human capital to help scale technology solutions for education, environmental, health, and human rights issues.
Id2020 brings together diverse voices to set technical requirements, influence policy, and accelerate the implementation of digital id programs that benefit the most vulnerable.
Building infrastructure that helps high-performing startups drive competitive advantage while advancing human flourishing and avoiding downstream harms to people, communities, and planet.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Project Founded Incorporated and the most unlike its peers is Joy Education Foundation. 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 9 years old; the field is 14. You back the younger end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 15% of your grantees by number, and just 14% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 4% lost their exemption, against 14% 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.
100 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. 100 of the 105 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 JOIN FREEWORLD INC ↗
- Who funds JOIN FREEWORLD INC ↗
- Who funds CITIZENS CLIMATE EDUCATION CORP ↗
- Who funds COMMONLIT INC ↗
- Who funds Rocket Learning Foundation ↗
- Who funds TALKINGPOINTS ↗
- Who funds Remake ↗
- Who funds EMPIRICAL RESOLUTION INC ↗
- Who funds SUPPORTING INITIATIVES TO REDISTRIBUTE UNUSED MEDICINE - SIRUM ↗
- Who funds DARSEL ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR LEARNING EQUALITY INC ↗
- Who funds Adalat AI Inc ↗
- Who funds UPCHIEVE INC ↗
- Who funds WATTTIME CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds THORN ↗
- Who funds Dost Education ↗
- Who funds Raheem Ai DBA Community Response Works ↗
- Who funds LENNY LEARNING INC ↗
- Who funds Hopebound Mental Health ↗
- Who funds DOLLAR FOR ↗
- Who funds LEMONTREE FOODS INC ↗
- Who funds CAREERVILLAGE INC ↗
- Who funds UPSOLVE INC ↗
- Who funds GRAMHAL INC ↗
- Who funds Koko AI Inc ↗
- Who funds NEXLEAF ANALYTICS ↗
- Who funds COLORSTACK INC ↗
- Who funds PROJECT FOUNDED INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds ALLIES AGAINST SLAVERY ↗
- Who funds UNLOCKED LABS ↗
- Who funds Refugees United Foundation USA ↗
- Who funds RECIDIVIZ INC ↗
- Who funds CloseGap ↗
- Who funds ASYLUM SEEKER ADVOCACY PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds EMPOWR CO ↗
- Who funds Tarjimly Inc ↗
- Who funds BEYOND 12 EDUCATION INC ↗
- Who funds INTELEHEALTH INC ↗
- Who funds OpenAQ Inc ↗
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: Tides Foundation · Impactassetsinc · The Patrick J McGovern Foundation Inc · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Gates Foundation · Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation · Rippleworks Inc · Robin Hood Foundation · Mulago Foundation · The Roddenberry Foundation · Echoing Green Inc · Full Circle 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 Ffwd 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.
- Hera Inc — 100% 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 Ffwd?
Find your warmest path to Ffwd 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.