· Private foundation
James M Lea Foundation
Its FY2023 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 FY2019–2023.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2023
- Under $10k4 grants · $12k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $85k
- $50k–250k7 grants · $858k
- $250k+1 grant · $300k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| WASHINGTON NATIONAL PARK FUND | $300,000 |
| WASHINGTON TRAILS ASSOCIATION | $200,000 |
| CONSERVATION NW | $168,000 |
| YMCA OF GREATER SEATTLE | $150,000 |
| UNIV OF WASHINGTON FOUNDATION | $140,000 |
| WOODLAND PARK ZOO | $85,000 |
| FOSS WATERWAY SEAPORT | $65,000 |
| BELLEVUE COMMUNITY COLLEGE | $50,000 |
| WSU FOUNDATION | $35,000 |
| THE ZOO SOCIETY | $30,000 |
| SCHOOL STEM AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMS | $10,488 |
| RAISBECK AVIATION HIGH SCHOOL | $10,000 |
| TACOMA YOUTH MARINE FDN | $3,000 |
| ST JAMES CATHEDRAL | $3,000 |
| ARCHBISHOP MURPHY HIGH SCHOOL | $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 (FY19–23, $555k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 8%. 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 26% of James M Lea 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 WA; read by stated purpose it is 74% — 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 +36% since the first grant, against +20% for the ones you funded once.
20 repeat relationships — 13 still active in FY2023, 7 since wound down; 3 grantees were first funded in FY2023 (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 FY2023, 95% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $63k 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 WASHINGTON FOUNDATION5× · 2019–2023 · $990k · revenue +28%
- WNWASHINGTON'S NATIONAL PARK FUND5× · 2019–2023 · $775k · revenue +142%
- WTWASHINGTON TRAILS ASSOCIATION5× · 2019–2023 · $649k · revenue +124%
Funded once
- TSTHE SEATTLE AQUARIUM SOCIETYgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $150k · revenue +156%
- WCWASHINGTON CONSERVATION ACTION EDUCATION FUNDone grant, 2020 · $35k · revenue +14%
- BRBRAIDED RIVERgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $35k · revenue +93%
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.
Washington wild protects and restores wild lands and waters in washington state through advocacy, education and civic engagement.
Creating a greener, healthier, more equitable, and better Washington for all through community outreach, network building, and advocacy for conservation and outdoor recreation funding.
To bring people, communities, and resources together to ensure waterfront park thrives as a vibrant gathering space - uplifting locals, fostering connections and honoring seattle's natural beauty and stories.
Fsc i&p promotes environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world's forests. this mission aligns with the forest stewardship council (fsc), its network of offices, and other organizations.…
Advocate for tax policy in Washington State
The Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust leads and inspires action to conserve and enhance the landscape of the Mountains to Sound Greenway, ensuring a long-term balance between people and nature.
Preserve in perpetuity the natural habitats, rural landscapes, and open spaces of the great peninsula of washington's puget sound.
The council of western state foresters (cwsf) promotes the conservation, protection, and sustainable management of forests for today and generations to come by leading collective action, fostering learning, facilitating resource sharing,…
We collaborate with diverse partners to drive sustainable outdoor recreation initiatives in north central washington. tread is committed to protecting and sustaining north central washington's outdoor spaces so future generations can…
Discover Your Northwest promotes the discovery of northwest public lands, enriches the experience of visitors and builds community stewardship of these special places today and for generations to come.
To restore habitat, water quality and native species in the puget sound
Wildearth guardians works to protect and restore the wildlife, wild places, wild rivers, and health of the american west.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Western Rivers Conservancy and the most unlike its peers is Invest in Youth. 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 41 years old; the field is 15. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% 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 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.
19 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. 19 of the 36 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 WASHINGTON FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON'S NATIONAL PARK FUND ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON TRAILS ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds CONSERVATION NW ↗
- Who funds THE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION OF GREATER SEATTLE (6871) ↗
- Who funds WOODLAND PARK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds WESTERN RIVERS CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds FOSS WATERWAY SEAPORT ↗
- Who funds THE SEATTLE AQUARIUM SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds POINT DEFIANCE ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds Techbridge Girls ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON CONSERVATION ACTION EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds BRAIDED RIVER ↗
- Who funds INVEST IN YOUTH ↗
- Who funds NISQUALLY RIVER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FOOD LIFELINE ↗
- Who funds WOLF HOLLOW WILDLIFE REHABILITATION CENTRE ↗
- Who funds SEATTLE MILK FUND INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHWEST HARVEST EMM ↗
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: Seattle Foundation · The Norcliffe Foundation · Moccasin Lake Foundation · The GreerSolien Fund · The Russell Family Foundation · Puget Sound Energy Foundation · Mightycause Charitable Foundation · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · American Endowment Foundation
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 M Lea 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.
- Western Rivers Conservancy — 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 M Lea Foundation?
Find your warmest path to James M Lea 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.