· Private foundation
Gordon V and Helen C Smith Foundation
Its FY2025 filing reports that it funds preselected organizations and did not take unsolicited requests; check the foundation's own site before ruling it out.
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 $10k11 grants · $19k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $55k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $68k
- $250k+1 grant · $500k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| OHIO WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY | $500,000 |
| AMERICAN FRIENDS SCH OF ST JUDE | $67,530 |
| OPPORTUNITY INTERNATIONAL | $40,000 |
| CORNERSTONE SCHOOLS OF WASHINGTON | $15,000 |
| BETHESDA UNITED METHODIST CHURCH | $6,450 |
| YOUNG LIFE | $5,000 |
| TUKUTANA | $2,500 |
| PITTSBURGH KIDS FOUNDATION | $2,000 |
| AETAS MIRABILIS FOUNDATION | $1,500 |
| THE FALLS CHURCH ANGLICAN | $600 |
| RIDE ALLEGHENY | $400 |
| BRAWS | $400 |
| WETA | $200 |
| ROCK CREEK CONSERVANCY | $150 |
| MULBERRY SCHOOL | $91 |
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 (FY23–24, $3k) land where the poverty rate runs at 4%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 0% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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.
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 +33% since the first grant, against -3% for the ones you funded once.
20 repeat relationships — 10 still active in FY2025, 10 since wound down; 5 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, 100% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $2k 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
- OWOHIO WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY8× · 2017–2025 · $1.9M · revenue +53%
- CSCORNERSTONE SCHOOLS OF WASHINGTON DC INC6× · 2020–2025 · $40k · revenue +60%
- PKPITTSBURGH KIDS FOUNDATION INC4× · 2021–2025 · $11k · revenue +20%
Funded once
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2018 · $400k
- AFAMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE SCHOOL OF ST JUDEone grant, 2020 · $6k
- FOFriends of Barnabas Foundation Incone grant, 2024 · $5k · revenue 0%
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.
Oberlin College and Conservatory educate students for lives of intellectual, musical and artistic rigor and breadth, sustained inquiry, creativity and innovation, and leadership. Oberlin aims to prepare graduates with the knowledge,…
The school provides classical christian education to students in grades junior kindergarten through twelve.
Marietta college (mc) provides a strong foundation for a lifetime of leadership, critical thinking, and problem solving. we achieve this mission by offering undergraduates a contemporary liberal arts education and graduate students an…
Otterbein University is an inclusive community dedicated to educating the whole person in the context of humane values. Our mission is to prepare graduates to think deeply and broadly, to engage locally and globally, and to advance their…
Wilson college empowers students to be confident and critical thinkers, creative visionaries, effective communicators, honorable leaders, and agents of justice.
Capitol Hill Day School is a co-educational independent school serving students from pre-kindergarten through 8th grade. Capitol Hill Day School deeply engages a diverse community of students in connecting the classroom with the larger…
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…
Geneva college is a christ-centered academic community that provides a comprehensive education to equip students for faithful and fruitful service to god and neighbor.
Christianity Today is a global community inspired by evangelical conviction to advance the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God. Our mission is to elevate the storytellers and sages of the global church.
Oliverian is a non-profit, alternative, college-prep boarding school for adolescents who have not thrived in traditional settings. we fill the gap between traditional and therapeutic schools, providing the right mix of support and guided…
To support the mission of westminster-canterbury on chesapeake bay
The mission of westminster college is to help students develop competencies, commitments, and characteristics which have distinguished human beings at their best. see continuation on schedule o.the liberal arts tradition is the foundation…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Opportunity International Inc D/B/a Opportunity International-Us and the most unlike its peers is Aetas Mirabilis 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 34 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) — 4% 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.
24 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. 24 of the 49 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 OHIO WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds OPPORTUNITY INTERNATIONAL INC D/B/A OPPORTUNITY INTERNATIONAL-US ↗
- Who funds CORNERSTONE SCHOOLS OF WASHINGTON DC INC ↗
- Who funds RIVENDELL SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds PITTSBURGH KIDS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds YOUNG LIFE ↗
- Who funds Friends of Barnabas Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds A PURPOSEFUL DAY ↗
- Who funds AETAS MIRABILIS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HOPE IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA ↗
- Who funds OAKCREST SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds MACALESTER COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds Operation Second Chance Inc ↗
- Who funds GREATER WASHINGTON EDUCATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds Rock Creek Conservancy Inc ↗
- Who funds CABIN JOHN PARK VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT INC ↗
- Who funds American Heart Association Inc ↗
- Who funds LEVINE MUSIC 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: Clark-Winchcole Foundation · The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation · Greater Washington Community Foundation · American Endowment Foundation · Natl Christian Charitable Fdn Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · Network for Good
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 Gordon V and Helen C Smith 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.
- Rock Creek Conservancy Inc — 60% of income from government
- Int'l Orthodox Christian Charities Inc — 7% of income from government
- The Writers Center — 6% 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 Gordon V and Helen C Smith Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Gordon V and Helen C Smith 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.