· Community foundation
Greater Houston Community Foundation
The mission of the GREATER HOUSTON COMMUNITY FOUNDATION (ghcf) is expanding philanthropic impact by connecting donors to the causes they care about, providing excellent stewardship of assets entrusted to us, and convening resources to address important community needs.
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 1,724 grants below total $232,335,130 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $253,805,619 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $21,470,489 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
- Under $10k264 grants · $1.8M
- $10k–50k821 grants · $16M
- $50k–250k455 grants · $48M
- $250k+184 grants · $166M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| NATIONAL CHRISTIAN CHARITABLE FOUNDATION INC | $10,026,050 |
| TEXAS A&M FOUNDATION | $8,964,257 |
| ST JOHNS SCHOOL | $7,082,000 |
| MORGAN STANLEY GLOBAL IMPACT FUNDING TRUST INC | $6,719,247 |
| UNITED WAY OF GREATER HOUSTON | $5,963,392 |
| ALPHA USA | $4,559,304 |
| IMPACT INVESTING CHARITABLE FOUNDATION INC | $4,090,000 |
| HUGHEN CENTER INC | $3,875,000 |
| THE KINKAID SCHOOL INC | $3,322,017 |
| BROOKLYN ORG | $3,175,000 |
| ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE AND RELATED DISORDERS ASSOCIATION | $3,045,989 |
| FRIENDS OF RAISING THE VILLAGE INCORPORATED | $3,000,000 |
| THE IRVIN M SHLENKER SCHOOL OF CONGREGATION BETH ISRAEL | $2,712,700 |
| THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN | $2,682,785 |
| INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE MISSION | $2,553,000 |
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, $53.6M) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 93% 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 line in 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 13% of Greater Houston Community Foundation’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, 66% of the giving stays in TX; read by stated purpose it is 63% — less 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 +40% since the first grant, against +7% for the ones you funded once.
1528 repeat relationships — 995 still active in FY2024, 533 since wound down; 115 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, 91% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $17M 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
- YLYOUNG LIFE8× · 2017–2024 · $29M · revenue +59%
United Way of Greater Houston8× · 2017–2024 · $27M · revenue +5%- TATexas A&M Foundation8× · 2017–2024 · $27M · revenue +90%
Funded once
- WPWOODNEXT PHILANTHROPIESone grant, 2022 · $170M · revenue -97% · 77% of their budget
- RFRupani Foundationgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $3.0M · revenue +35%
- EJEQUAL JUSTICE WORKSone grant, 2018 · $1.8M · revenue -11%
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 matches that aren’t grantees — a resemblance in what they say they do, not a recommendation.
To see well-formed people create well-formed ventures and transform our city.
To facilitate research and development within the texas a&m university system and selected other entities.
Glasstire is an online magazine for visual art in Texas.
To provide professional investment management and related services for the funds under management and control of the Board of Regents of The University of Texas System.
Faith based medical research organization bringing innovative treatment to patients through basic science, clinical trials, and health care effectiveness and quality of care research.
The Progress Texas Institute provides research and strategic communications on issues with the ultimate goal of increasing civic engagement.
The Foundation solicits charitable contributions and provides funding to enhance the rule of law and the system of justice in Texas.
As a christian university, we provide education and research opportunities preparing global leaders to partner with local communities.
Houston MediaSource provides public access cable television programming for the City of Houston.
To champion individual rights under a charter granted by the ACLU (National Affiliate).
Community information now (cinow) provides data, tools, analysis, and training to inform decisions to improve texas communities.
Faith based hospitals providing exemplary patient care, medical education, medical research and community service to the greater Austin, Texas metropolitan service area and the surrounding communities.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Both Ends Believing Inc and the most unlike its peers is The Basilica Landmark. 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 27 years old; the field is 12. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 26% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% 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.
1697 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. 1697 of the 2,000 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 WOODNEXT PHILANTHROPIES ↗
- Who funds THE METHODIST HOSPITAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NATL CHRISTIAN CHARITABLE FDN INC ↗
- Who funds DONOR ADVISED CHARITABLE GIVING INC ↗
- Who funds YOUNG LIFE ↗
- Who funds United Way of Greater Houston ↗
- Who funds Texas A&M Foundation ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ↗
- Who funds LOCAL INITIATIVES SUPPORT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds BakerRipley ↗
- Who funds The Alaska Community Foundation ↗
- Who funds Texas Children's Hospital ↗
- Who funds THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS HOUSTON ↗
- Who funds SHELTER PROVIDERS OF HOUSTON INC ↗
- Who funds Glorieta 20 Inc ↗
- Who funds PULSE OUTREACH ↗
- Who funds St John's School ↗
- Who funds Avenue Community Development Corporation ↗
- Who funds Coalition for the Homeless of Houston Harris County ↗
- Who funds The Kinkaid School Inc ↗
- Who funds IMPACT INVESTING CHARITABLE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Houston Christian Foundation dba National Christian Foundation Houston ↗
- Who funds GREATER LAKE CITY ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds Memorial Assistance Ministries ↗
- Who funds CAROLINA CREEK CHRISTIAN CAMPS ↗
- Who funds HOPE MEDIA GROUP ↗
- Who funds NORTHWEST ASSISTANCE MINISTRIES ↗
- Who funds FIDELITY INVESTMENTS CHARITABLE GIFT FUND ↗
- Who funds Young Men's Christian Association of the Greater Houston Area ↗
- Who funds Baylor College of Medicine ↗
- Who funds Alpha USA ↗
- Who funds THE CONSERVATION FUND A NONPROFIT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds MORGAN STANLEY GLOBAL IMPACT FUNDING TRUST INC ↗
- Who funds WARREN WILDLIFE GALLERY ↗
- Who funds Houston Symphony Society ↗
- Who funds IMPACTASSETSINC ↗
- Who funds THE CENTER FOR THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR RESEARCH ON SCHIZOPHRENIA AND DEPRESSION ↗
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: The Elkins Foundation · Albert & Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation · Vivian L Smith Foundation · MD Anderson Foundation · The Methodist Hospital · Houston Endowment Inc · Strake Foundation · The Brown Foundation Inc · Harry S & Isabel C Cameron Foundation Sentinel Trust Company · Baxter Trust Co Private Foundation Services · The John M O'Quinn Foundation · United Way of Greater Houston
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 Greater Houston Community 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 or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Yale University — 12% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% 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.
Play a game based on Greater Houston’s filings →