· Private foundation
James E Robison 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 $10k49 grants · $112k
- $10k–50k3 grants · $52k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| HALEAKELA INC | $30,000 |
| THE CURRENT INC | $12,000 |
| STREB LAB FOR ACTION | $10,000 |
| DANSPACE | $8,500 |
| NORTH CENTRAL MISSOURI COLLEGE FOUN | $8,000 |
| ABBOTT HOUSE | $8,000 |
| THE HOUSE FOUNDATION | $8,000 |
| THIN MAN DANCE | $6,000 |
| PERFORMA INC | $5,000 |
| MOVEMENT RESEARCH | $5,000 |
| RIVER ARTS | $5,000 |
| ELMORE COMMUNITY TRUST | $5,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $4,500 |
| THE WOOSTER GROUP | $3,000 |
| NEW ENGLAND FOUNDATION FOR THE ART | $3,000 |
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 (FY17–25, $89k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 1% 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 +44% since the first grant, against +23% for the ones you funded once.
78 repeat relationships — 50 still active in FY2025, 28 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, 94% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $10k 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
- HIHALEAKALA INC9× · 2017–2025 · $193k · revenue +18%
- TCTHE CURRENT INC8× · 2017–2025 · $104k · revenue +73%
- AHABBOTT HOUSE9× · 2017–2025 · $72k · revenue +65%
Funded once
- WAWALKER ART CENTERgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $5k · revenue +87%
- TPTHE PERFORMANCE ZONE INCgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $5k · revenue +154%
INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FOUNDATION INCone grant, 2018 · $4k · revenue -3%
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.
As one of New Englands leading visual and performing arts institutions, SVAC's mission is to promote and nurture the arts.
The mission of Vermont Performing Arts League is to support and sustain a spirit of community among diverse peoples by fostering educational, cultural, social and recreational
MoonBox Productions is dedicated to supporting local arts and local artists, and to connect communities to the nonprofit organizations that serve them.
See schedule operformance space new york is committed to promoting the arts (including performance, visual and all other contemporary arts), fostering artistic development (including through direct grants), advancing diversity in the field…
The flynn center for the performing arts fosters the enjoyment, understanding and development of the performing arts in vermont through diverse and engaging artisitic experiences. the flynn fulfills this mission through the…
To produce bold theatre experiences that reach across artistic, physical and social boundries. We aim to increase empathy and open-mindedness by illuminating nuanced perspectives and unspoken truths behind the salient issues of our time.…
To create theatre that makes our community a better place by producing plays that show us that what we have in common is more powerful than what separates us, providing a supportive professional environment in which theatre artists are…
The weston playhouse theater is vermont's oldest professional theater company and, with its multi-stage summer festival and year-round educational and outreach programs, is dedicated to quality theater and broad community support.
The council's mission is to advance and preserve the arts at the center of vermont communities. it offers grants and services including workshops, professional development opportunities and arts information, and is the state's foremost…
A center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists since 1977, which continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.
A premier center for the arts in the white mountain area of new hampshire
The mission of the fitchburg art museum is to inspire creativity and learning, and to contribute to the well-being of our diverse communities in fitchburg, north central massachusetts, and new england. to accomplish the mission, we…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Walker Art Center and the most unlike its peers is Merce Cunningham Trust. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 36 years old; the field is 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% lost their exemption, against 10% 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.
68 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. 68 of the 102 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 HALEAKALA INC ↗
- Who funds THE CURRENT INC ↗
- Who funds ABBOTT HOUSE ↗
- Who funds THIN MAN DANCE INC ↗
- Who funds THE WOOSTER GROUP INC ↗
- Who funds MOVEMENT RESEARCH INC ↗
- Who funds NEW ENGLAND FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT AND STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Copley Hospital Inc ↗
- Who funds CAPSTONE COMMUNITY ACTION INC ↗
- Who funds PUBLICOLOR INC ↗
- Who funds HARVESTWORKS INC ↗
- Who funds Other Minds ↗
- Who funds BARRE OPERA HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds VERMONT WORKS FOR WOMEN INC ↗
- Who funds VERMONT FOODBANK ↗
- Who funds STOWE VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTERS INC ↗
- Who funds FRACTURED ATLAS INC ↗
- Who funds STOWE LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds Meals on Wheels of Lamoille County Inc ↗
- Who funds Young Tradition Vermont Inc ↗
- Who funds TRISHA BROWN COMPANY INC ↗
- Who funds RURAL EDUCATION ACTION PROJECT ↗
- Who funds Pick Up Performance Co 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 Vermont Community Foundation · Vermont Council on the Arts Inc · Oakland Foundation Inc · Ben & Jerry's Foundation Inc · National Life Group Charitable Foundation Inc · The Windham Foundation Inc · New England Foundation for the Arts Incorporated · The Howard Gilman Foundation Inc · Tulgey Wood Foundation · The Andrew W Mellon Foundation · Marta Heflin Foundation · Larsen Fund
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 James E Robison 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.
- Lamoille Community House Inc — 100% of income from government
- Vermont Folklife Center — 90% of income from government
- Capstone Community Action Inc — 84% of income from government
- Vermont Works for Women Inc — 52% of income from government
- Clarina Howard Nichols Center Inc — 51% of income from government
- Lund Family Center Inc — 34% of income from government
- Catamount Film & Arts Company — 27% of income from government
- The Green Mountain Club Inc Debonis — 17% of income from government
- Vermont Foodbank — 13% of income from government
- Epilepsy Foundation New England — 11% of income from government
- Vermont Adaptive Ski and Sports — 11% of income from government
- Stowe Land Trust — 10% of income from government
- Clemmons Family Farm Inc — 9% of income from government
- HowardCenter Inc — 8% of income from government
- New England Foundation for the Arts Incorporated — 8% of income from government
- Vermont Studio Center Inc — 2% of income from government
- Brattleboro Museum & Art Centerinc — 1% of income from government
- Vermont Public Co — 0% of income from government
- Migrant Justice Inc — 0% of income from government
- Copley Hospital Inc — 0% of income from government
- The Vermont Community Foundation — 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to James E Robison Foundation?
Find your warmest path to James E Robison 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.