· Private foundation
Gaia Fund
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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k54 grants · $178k
- $10k–50k14 grants · $370k
- $50k–250k16 grants · $1.1M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Workmoney Foundation Inc | $100,000 |
| Accelerate Change Inc | $100,000 |
| Working America Education Fund | $100,000 |
| New Venture Fund | $90,000 |
| Voto Latino Foundation | $75,000 |
| Real Organic Project | $75,000 |
| Organic Farming Research Fdn | $60,000 |
| Southern Vision Alliance | $50,000 |
| Nonprofit VOTE Inc | $50,000 |
| Cornucopia Institute | $50,000 |
| NEO Philanthropy | $50,000 |
| Contemporary Jewish Museum | $50,000 |
| Community Alliance With Family Farm | $50,000 |
| Jewish Community Federation | $50,000 |
| Tides Foundation | $50,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $236k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 89% 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 7% of Gaia Fund’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, 55% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 58% — more 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 +37% since the first grant, against +24% for the ones you funded once.
119 repeat relationships — 63 still active in FY2024, 56 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, 65% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $476k 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
- APAMERICAN PROMISE EDUCATION FUND INC7× · 2017–2023 · $1.5M · revenue ×13 · 32% of their budget
NEO Philanthropy Inc8× · 2017–2024 · $442k · revenue +191%- FSFREE SPEECH FOR PEOPLE INC5× · 2018–2022 · $350k · revenue +185%
Funded once
- TUThe University Foundation California State University Chicograduatedone grant, 2020 · $100k · revenue +63%
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2019 · $75k
- IFINSTITUTE FOR JEWISH SPIRITUALITY INCgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $75k · revenue +184%
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.
Sustainable Conservation advances the collaborative stewardship of Californias land, air, and water for the benefit of nature and people. For over three decades, Sustainable Conservation has built coalitions of people with different…
The mission of the California Farmland Trust is to help farmers protect the best farmland in the world.
Friends of the earth strives for a more healthy and just world by defendng the environment and human health while advancing social and economic justice by conducting research and education, transforming the economy so it protects the…
The Climate Center is a climate and energy policy nonprofit working to rapidly reduce climate pollution at scale, starting in California.
Ca fwd drives action to identify solutions that can be taken to scale to meet the challenges the state is facing. the organization is driven by the belief that regional solutions across the state will help ensure economic, environmental,…
The Sierra Fund (TSF) is a non-profit organization with a mission to restore ecosystem and community resiliency in the Sierra Nevada.
Food forward fights hunger and prevents food waste by rescuing fresh surplus produce, connecting this abundance with people experiencing food insecurity, and inspiring others to do the same.
SF Partnership is an organization comprised of SF's leading employers dedicated to supporting an equitable, resilient, and vibrant economy shared by all people working and living in San Francisco. Through education, advocacy, and research,…
To research and develop healthy climate solutions comprising global food security, ecosystem regeneration and carbon balance in seas and soils.
Ccof advances organic agriculture for a healthy world. we accomplish our purpose through organic certification, education, advocacy and promotion. we envision a world where organic is the norm.
The organization provides professional investment management services for endowed gifts and financial assets entrusted to the ucsf foundation.
The mission of the Organic Farmers Association is to provide a strong and unified national voice for domestic certified organic producers so that organic agriculture will become the basis of a viable United States food and agricultural…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma and the most unlike its peers is Sonoma League for Historic Preservation. 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 31 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.8% 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.
129 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. 129 of the 176 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 AMERICAN PROMISE EDUCATION FUND INC ↗
- Who funds THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds NEW VENTURE FUND ↗
- Who funds NEO Philanthropy Inc ↗
- Who funds JEWISH COMMUNITY FEDERATION OF SAN FRANCISCO THE PENINSULA MARIN & SONOMA ↗
- Who funds FREE SPEECH FOR PEOPLE INC ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO BALLET ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds TIDES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BIONUTRIENT FOOD ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds Urban Adamah ↗
- Who funds Real Organic Project Inc ↗
- Who funds VOTO LATINO FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds MapLight ↗
- Who funds COMMON CAUSE EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds Earth Island Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds Center for Food Safety ↗
- Who funds MULTIPLIER ↗
- Who funds ORGANIC FARMING RESEARCH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL REDISTRICTING FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ISSUE ONE ↗
- Who funds NEW ISRAEL FUND ↗
- Who funds THE CORNUCOPIA INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds Rodale Institute ↗
- Who funds FRESNO FOOD COMMONS TRUST ↗
- Who funds SONOMA COUNTY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ZERO FOODPRINT ↗
- Who funds REBOOT INC ↗
- Who funds Wilderness Torah ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL YOUNG FARMERS COALITION INC ↗
- Who funds DEMOCRACY INITIATIVE EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds Alliance for Global Justice Corp ↗
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: Marin Community Foundation · Sonoma County Community Foundation · McNabb Foundation · Lisa & Douglas Goldman Fund · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · The San Francisco Foundation · Impactassetsinc · Clif Family Foundation · Simon Blattner Family Foundation · Tides Foundation · Patagoniaorg · The Vadasz Family Foundation
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 Gaia Fund 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.
- Third Sector New England Inc — 3% of income from government
- Real Organic Project Inc — 1% 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.