· Public charity
Helzel Family Foundation
The mission of the HELZEL FAMILY FOUNDATION is to improve the quality of life in the san francisco bay area and beyond through support of not-for-profit educational, arts, and cultural institutions.
What you funded, over time
Every grant clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2017–2021.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2021
- $10k–50k10 grants · $200k
- $50k–250k6 grants · $528k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| HIDDEN GENIUS PROJECT | $150,000 |
| LIFE ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL | $100,000 |
| THE HEAD-ROYCE SCHOOL | $87,500 |
| CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS | $87,500 |
| UC BERKELEY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM FS UC BERKELEY FOUNDATION | $52,500 |
| GIRLS INCORPORATED OF ALAMEDA COUNTY | $50,000 |
| HEBREW FREE LOAN ASSOCIATION | $40,000 |
| GOLDEN GATE UNIVERSITY | $25,000 |
| BAY AREA CHILDREN'S THEATRE | $25,000 |
| NORTHERN LIGHT SCHOOL | $25,000 |
| PRESIDIO GRADUATE SCHOOL | $20,000 |
| BERKELEY ART MUSEUMPACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE FS REGENTS OF THE UC | $15,000 |
| LAWRENCE HALL OF SCIENCE FS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY FOUNDATION | $15,000 |
| OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA | $15,000 |
| PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM | $10,000 |
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 (FY17–21, $105k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 100% 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.
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 6% of Helzel Family 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, 99% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 86% — 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 +27% since the first grant, against -17% for the ones you funded once.
15 repeat relationships — 13 still active in FY2021, 2 since wound down; 2 grantees were first funded in FY2021 (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 FY2021, 66% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $250k 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
- UOUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY FOUNDATION5× · 2017–2021 · $478k · revenue +189%
- THTHE HEAD ROYCE SCHOOL5× · 2017–2021 · $330k · revenue +31%
- CCCALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS5× · 2017–2021 · $320k · revenue +33%
Funded once
- GGGOLDEN GATE NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVANCYone grant, 2020 · $100k · revenue -17%
- MMMAGNES MUSEUM FOUNDATIONone grant, 2017 · $100k · revenue -88% · 35% of their budget
- MCMILLS COLLEGEone grant, 2019 · $10k · revenue -37%
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.
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For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Oakland Public Education Fund and the most unlike its peers is Father Flanagan's Boys' Home. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
23 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. 23 of the 24 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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE HEAD ROYCE SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds HIDDEN GENIUS PROJECT ↗
- Who funds HEBREW FREE LOAN ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO ↗
- Who funds OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds EAST BAY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PRESIDIO GRADUATE SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds THE OAKLAND PUBLIC EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds MAGNES MUSEUM FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GOLDEN GATE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds GIRLS INCORPORATED OF ALAMEDA COUNTY ↗
- Who funds BAY AREA CHILDRENS THEATRE FKA ACTIVE ARTS THEATRE FOR YOUNG AUDIEN ↗
- Who funds PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds Northern Light School ↗
- Who funds JEWISH COMMUNITY FEDERATION OF THE GREATER EAST BAY ↗
- Who funds REGIONAL PARKS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CHABOT SPACE & SCIENCE CENTER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds MILLS COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds Father Flanagan's Boys' Home ↗
- Who funds UC PRESS 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: East Bay Community Foundation · The James Irvine Foundation · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · Marin Community Foundation · The San Francisco Foundation · J B Arnovitz Foundation Inc · Farallon Foundation · T Gary and Kathleen Rogers Private Family Foundation · Esb Charitable Foundation · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program
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 Helzel Family 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.
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.