· Private foundation
Firehole 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k16 grants · $26k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $104k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $50k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| CARDIGAIN MOUNTAIN SCHOOL | $50,000 |
| COLUMBIA INDEPENDENT SCHOOL | $38,380 |
| STANFORD UNIVERSITY HOOVER INSTITUT | $25,000 |
| BAPTIST HEALTH SOUTH FLORIDA FOUNDA | $20,000 |
| KAPPA DELTA FOUNDATION | $11,000 |
| CENTRAL MO HUMANE SOCIETY | $10,000 |
| COPA SAFETY AND EDUCATION FOUNDATIO | $5,000 |
| EMPOWERS AFRICA | $5,000 |
| FOOD BANK FOR CENTRAL AND NORTHEAST | $2,341 |
| COLBY FUND | $2,300 |
| GREATER PITTSBURGH FOOD BANK | $2,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH | $2,000 |
| AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY | $2,000 |
| NORTHWEST FILM FORUM | $1,000 |
| TRYPS CHILDRENS THEATER | $1,000 |
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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 43% of your dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +34% since the first grant, against +10% for the ones you funded once.
24 repeat relationships — 9 still active in FY2025, 15 since wound down; 13 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, 75% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $45k 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
- CMCARDIGAN MOUNTAIN SCHOOL3× · 2023–2025 · $105k · revenue +69%
- EAEMPOWERS AFRICA INC4× · 2022–2025 · $24k · revenue +290%
- HSHOLDERNESS SCHOOL2× · 2022–2023 · $15k · revenue +4%
Funded once
- TOTOWN OF LYME-FIRE STATIONone grant, 2020 · $50k
- VFVISIONS FOR CREATIVE HOUSING SOLUTIONSgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $25k · revenue +49%
- TOTOWN OF HANOVER NHone grant, 2017 · $24k
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 bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The mission of mit is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
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…
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
Bates is a college of the liberal arts and sciences, and is a coeducational, nonsectarian, residential college with special commitments to academic rigor, and to assuring in all of its efforts the dignity of each individual, and access to…
Northeast college of health sciences (the college) is committed to academic excellence, leadership, and professional best practices in the health sciences.
Rooted in the liberal arts & sciences & lutheran expression of the christian faith, & is committed to offering a challenging education that develops qualities of mind, spirit, & body necessary for a rewarding life of leadership & service…
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
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.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
Education and Research
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Breakthrough Miami Inc and the most unlike its peers is St Stephens Anglican Church. 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 30 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% 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.
58 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. 58 of the 100 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 CARDIGAN MOUNTAIN SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds COLUMBIA INDEPENDENT SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds VISIONS FOR CREATIVE HOUSING SOLUTIONS ↗
- Who funds EMPOWERS AFRICA INC ↗
- Who funds Baptist Health South Florida Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds KAPPA DELTA FOUNDATION INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds HOLDERNESS SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds CENTRAL MISSOURI HUMANE SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds BREAKTHROUGH MIAMI INC ↗
- Who funds Copa Safety & Education Foundation ↗
- Who funds CARE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF MAGEN DAVID ADOM ↗
- Who funds Young Leadership Addiction Awareness Inc ↗
- Who funds AUTISM SPEAKS INC ↗
- Who funds UPPER VALLEY TRAILS ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds The President and Trustees of Colby College ↗
- Who funds Ball State University Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds LYME HISTORIANS INC ↗
- Who funds Wildlife Heritage Foundation of New Hampshire ↗
- Who funds GREATER PITTSBURGH COMMUNITY FOOD BANK ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds SECOND AMENDMENT FOUNDATION ↗
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: New Hampshire Charitable Foundation · Dunspaugh Dalton Foundation Inc · The Miami Foundation Inc · Mightycause Charitable Foundation · Assurant Foundation · United Way Miami Inc · The Kirk Foundation · Cyril F & Marie O'Neil Foundation · The Couch Family Foundation · The Batchelor Foundation Inc · Veterans United Foundation · Gulf Coast Community 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 Firehole 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.
- Upper Valley Haven — 38% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Care Elementary School Inc — 8% of income from government
- Als Therapy Development Foundation Inc — 8% of income from government
- Upper Valley Trails Alliance — 3% 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 Firehole Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Firehole 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.