· Private foundation
Howell Family Charitable 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
- $10k–50k2 grants · $20k
- $250k+1 grant · $350k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Individual grant recipient | $350,000 |
| GREATER BOSTON FOOD BANK | $10,000 |
| ISLAND GROWN INITIATIVE | $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 (FY17–22, $57k) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 81% 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.
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 +50% since the first grant, against +34% for the ones you funded once.
30 repeat relationships — 1 still active in FY2025, 29 since wound down; 2 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, 95% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $20k 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
THE NORMAN BIRD SANCTUARY TRUST6× · 2017–2022 · $69k · revenue +119%- TMTUNEFOOLERY MUSIC INC7× · 2017–2023 · $67k · revenue +58%
- RSROXBURY STONE HOUSE INC6× · 2017–2022 · $38k · revenue +94%
Funded once
- VHVINEYARD HAVEN PUBLIC LIBRARYone grant, 2023 · $150k
- NRNEWPORTFALL RIVER STAR KIDS SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAMgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $10k · revenue +27%
- PPPLANNED PARENTHOODone grant, 2022 · $8k
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.
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.
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 organization's primary exempt purpose is to provide access to and conduct activities in furtherance of higher education.
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…
Our mission is to ensure that the people of greater boston benefit from a vibrant, resilient, and inclusive waterfront, harbor, and islands; these spaces are equitable, accessible, and adapted to climate change; and to ensure our public,…
We provide exemplary interdisciplinary programs for a community of scholar-practitioners within a distributed learning model grounded in student-driven inquiry and leading to enhanced knowledge.
The institute for nonprofit practice's mission is to transform communities by equipping the most promising nonprofit leaders with the skills, confidence, and resources they need to make their organizations effective, innovative, and…
Wentworth institute of technology is a nationally recognized private coeducational and residential university of higher education with a mission to empower, inspire and innovate through experiential learning with a core purpose of career…
New york school of interior design provides the most innovative, immersive, and transformative interior design education in the world, demonstrating the impact of professionally designed interiors on the health, happiness, and well-being…
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Brighton marine, inc. provides military and veteran families with comprehensive campus-based quality health care, as well as affordable and supportive housing for at-risk veterans and their families.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Soul Fire Farm Institute Inc and the most unlike its peers is Libana Inc. 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 36 years old; the field is 17. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 20% 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 11% 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.
38 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. 38 of the 51 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 THE NORMAN BIRD SANCTUARY TRUST ↗
- Who funds TUNEFOOLERY MUSIC INC ↗
- Who funds AQUIDNECK ISLAND LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds ROXBURY STONE HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds FIRST LITERACY INC ↗
- Who funds MINDFUL PHILANTHROPY INC ↗
- Who funds This is My Brave Inc ↗
- Who funds THE BOTTOM LINE INC ↗
- Who funds FOUNTAIN HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds The Food Project Inc ↗
- Who funds UASPIRE INC ↗
- Who funds GREATER BOSTON FOOD BANK INC ↗
- Who funds NEWPORTFALL RIVER STAR KIDS SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM ↗
- Who funds ISLAND GROWN INITIATIVE LTD ↗
- Who funds SUMMER SEARCH ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY SERVINGS INC ↗
- Who funds HOSPICE OF MARTHA'S VINEYARD INC DBA HOSPICE AND PALLIATIVE CARE OF MARTHA'S ↗
- Who funds THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds SHERIFF'S MEADOW FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR CLUBHOUSE DEVELOPMENT INC ↗
- Who funds LUCY'S HEARTH ↗
- Who funds NAMI National ↗
- Who funds SOUL FIRE FARM INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds THE WILLIAM J GOULD ASSOCIATES INC ↗
- Who funds ARTISTIC NOISE INC ↗
- Who funds CLEAN OCEAN ACCESS INC ↗
- Who funds LOOKING UPWARDS INC ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds THE MARC SANDERS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SAIL MARTHA'S VINEYARD 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: The Rhode Island Community Foundation · Van Beuren Charitable Foundation Inc · Newportfed Charitable Foundation · Gruben Charitable Foundation · Ejmp Fund for Philanthropy · Frederick Henry Prince Testamentary Trust · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Benzak Foundation · Thomas a Rodgers Jr Family Foundation · Alletta Morris McBean Charitable Trust · Boston Foundation Inc · North Family Trust Robert Cummings Margaret Hogan
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 Howell Family Charitable 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.
- Roxbury Stone House Inc — 29% of income from government
- Greater Boston Food Bank Inc — 22% of income from government
- Community Servings Inc — 12% of income from government
- Hospice of Martha's Vineyard Inc Dba Hospice and Palliative Care of Martha's — 5% of income from government
- Tunefoolery Music Inc — 5% of income from government
- Sheriff's Meadow Foundation — 2% of income from government
- Sail Martha's Vineyard Inc — 1% of income from government
- Uaspire Inc — 1% of income from government
- The Bottom Line Inc — 0% of income from government
- Island Grown Initiative Ltd — 0% 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.
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Find your warmest path to Howell Family Charitable 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.