How much does Ffwd give?

Ffwd reported 48 itemized grants totaling $12,941,108, out of $15,229,830 in total grant expense reported on the return in its FY2024 IRS filing. It funded between 7 and 51 organizations a year over FY2017 to FY2023.

By grant dollars over FY2017 to FY2024, its largest causes are Crime & Legal (31%), Education (25%), Health (10%).

Who are Ffwd's largest grantees?

By total granted over FY2017 to FY2024: Join Freeworld Inc ($6.9M), Join Freeworld Inc ($4.8M), Citizens Climate Education Corp ($2.8M).

Does Ffwd fund new organizations?

In FY2023, 17% of the organizations it funded were first-time grantees.

Which funders back the same organizations as Ffwd?

Its strongest co-funders, measured against what their size predicts, include Tides Foundation, Impactassetsinc, The Patrick J McGovern Foundation Inc.

Ffwd

Ffwd at a glance Mostly funded, not a grantmaker: see who funds it →

· 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.

$15M

Granted FY2024still arriving

Grants FY2024still arriving

States reached

$4.8M

Largest

01What it funds

0198% classified

What it funded, over time

Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year, FY2017 to 2024.

Crime & Legal$14MEducation$11MHealth$4.7MEnvironment$4.4MHuman Services$2.5MCivil Rights$1.1MFood & Nutrition$1.1MYouth Development$906kOther$0

02FY2024 · 48 grants

Where the money goes

Grants by size, and the largest recipients.

How this is measured

The 48 grants below total $12,941,108, the rows itemized in this filing. The $15,229,830 headline is the total grant expense on the return; the other $2,288,722 is giving the schedule does not break out (grants under the $5,000 itemization floor, grants to individuals, grants on other schedules). Every figure below describes the itemized rows only.

By grant size · FY2024

$10k–50k11 grants · $285k
$50k–250k23 grants · $3.2M
$250k+14 grants · $9.5M

$141,079

Median grant

States reached

$14M

Total assets

Largest grants
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

02The need

Does the money reach high-need areas?

Each grant placed by the hardship in its grantee’s ZIP, against the area’s typical level.

show:

Its 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 its grants land in higher-need ZIPs.

grant to an above-average-need area below average· circle size = grant amount

How this is measured

Matched: human-services grants are those whose grantee’s IRS cause code is Human Services. Placed by people below the poverty line in the grantee’s ZIP, averaged from the tracts in that ZIP.

Which US states its 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.

South Asia$1.8M · 79% · 1 grant

Stated purpose: General Support

Europe (including Iceland and Greenland)$360k · 16% · 1 grant

Stated purpose: General Support

North America (Canada and Mexico)$125k · 5% · 1 grant

Stated purpose: General Support

How this is measured

US grants placed by each grantee’s ZIP, which can differ from where services are delivered. Need from public data (U.S. Census/ACS, CDC PLACES, Eviction Lab, USDA), shown as context about the area, never attributed to the funder’s 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.

03Its grantees

repeat funding

Who it funds again

Organizations funded in more than one year, against those funded once.

80%of every dollar goes to organizations it has funded before.

$36M · 72 repeat orgs$9.0M to everyone else

Grantees it renews have grown median revenue +68% since the first grant, against -13% for those 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

Re-uppedFunded once

Organizations

Total granted

$36M

$1.5M

Median revenue growth · since first grant

+68%

-13%

Still filing today

90%

80%

New vs renewed · share of each year

In FY2024, 41% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $7.5M went to new ones.

RenewedFirst-time

Where new relationships form · theme of each grantee’s first grant

EducationHealthHuman ServicesCrime & LegalCivil RightsPublic BenefitOther

How this is measured

First-time means a grantee’s first year in the filing window; renewed means funded in an earlier year too. The renewed share climbs naturally as a portfolio matures, so the signal is a year that bucks it (a wave of new grantees). 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

JF
JOIN FREEWORLD INC
3× · 2021–2023 · $6.9M · revenue +302% · 65% of their budget
CI
COMMONLIT INC
5× · 2019–2023 · $2.4M · revenue +281%
RL
Rocket Learning Foundation
4× · 2021–2024 · $1.3M · revenue ×28 · 30% of their budget

Funded once

PF
PROJECT FOUNDED INCORPORATED
one grant, 2021 · $400k · revenue -100% · 100% of their budget
JE
JOY EDUCATION FOUNDATION
one grant, 2023 · $108k · revenue +16% · 36% of their budget
IL
IMMIGRANTS LIKE US INC
one grant, 2020 · $102k · revenue -98% · 64% of their budget

How this is measured

Repeat means funded in two or more distinct years. Growth and survival are read from each grantee’s own subsequent IRS filings.

04Its field

Closest unfunded matches

The nonprofits that most resemble its grantees but are not funded by it, scored along the direction from the rest of the field toward the portfolio. A resemblance in what they say they do, not a recommendation.

Center for Humane 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.

Science & Tech

Voteorg

Vote.org's primary purpose is to build web-based technologies that remove barriers to voting and increase vote turnout.

Civil Rights

Upturn Inc

Upturn advances equity and justice in the design, governance, and use of technology.

—

Democracy Works Inc

The organization's mission is to leverage web-technologies to improve civic engagement and voter education.

Civil Rights

Meedan Inc

To strengthen journalism, digital literacy and information accessibility for global communities.

Science & Tech

Techequity Action

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.

Civil Rights

Brave New Software Project Inc

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.

Civil Rights

Project Include

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.

Employment

Development Data Lab Inc

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

International

CarbonPlan

Improving the transparency and scientific integrity of climate solutions through open data and tools.

Environment

Collective Intelligence Project Inc

Our mission is to direct technological development towards the collective good.

Science & Tech

Clarity Ai Research Inc

Transluce is an independent research lab that builds open, scalable technology for understanding ai systems and steering them in the public interest.

Science & Tech

How this is measured

The grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Project Founded Incorporated; 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.

04the grantee network

100 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2026.

Each grant beside the grantee’s revenue from every source, year by year.

How this is measured

Counted here: distinct organizations funded across 2017 to 2026, 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.

Each grantee is resolved to its own IRS returns. Association, dated; never a causal claim.

Load-bearing (≥25% of a budget)

Early backer (in before they grew)

92/100

Grantees still filing

63/100

Grew since first funded

Where the money sits, by cause and then by grantee

Education$11,582,892Crime & Legal$9,493,026Other$11,501,446Human Services$4,322,723Health$3,766,745Environment$3,318,546International$1,354,459

Each grantee by its size and the funder’s share of it; top left is load-bearing

Grantee by grantee: a decade per organization, before and after funding

A decade per grantee: revenue shaded, grants as bars, all rows on one timeline.

Co-funders

Grantmakers whose grantees overlap with this funder’s far more than size alone predicts. Closer means stronger alignment; arcs show where they also fund each other. Here they form a tightly interlocked group: most of these funders back each other's grantees too.

Tides FoundationCA42.5× affinity40 shared granteesties to 11 of 11Hover any node to trace its alignments.Compare side by side →

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

How this is measured

Affinity is a Gamma-Poisson posterior co-funding rate, re-centered on the typical rate, so thin evidence shrinks toward no signal. Overlap is association, not proof of shared intent.

How much its grantees rely on government

Each dot is one organization Ffwd funds: left to right is the share of its income from government, bottom to top the share from Ffwd. Bigger dots raise more.

2024

’20’21’22’23’24’25

no gov moneyreceives it· size = income

10get no government money at all

9report government grants on their 990 we could not trace to a source (not plotted)

1rely on government for over half their income

typical government reliance, FY20–25

How this is measured

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 a grant caused the public funding. Coverage is precision-first, a floor rather than 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 to 24 months.

05Through Plinth

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.

Play a game based on Ffwd’s filings →

More from the funding graph

The unnamed billions

grants reported with no recipient in the public record

The regranting layer

51% of grant dollars land in the regranting layer

The DAF merry-go-round

$9.7B circulates between donor-advised funds

The endowment market

who holds foundation money, and what just moved

The camps

funders cluster by geography, not ideology

By state

where grant money is based, and what stays home