· Private foundation
Joe L & Hester Sims Family Foundation
Its FY2025 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 46% of JOE L & HESTER SIMS FAMILY FOUNDATION’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k40 grants · $86k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $10k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF | $10,000 |
| ROWAN HELPING MINISTRIES | $5,000 |
| LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF | $5,000 |
| MEALS ON WHEELS FOREVER HOME | $5,000 |
| MEALS ON WHEELS OF ROWAN INC | $5,000 |
| ST JOHN LUTHERAN CHURCH | $4,691 |
| ST JOHN LUTHERAN CHURCH | $4,000 |
| LUTHERAN SERVICES CAROLINAS | $4,000 |
| GOSHEN VALLEY BOYS RANCH | $3,000 |
| COMMUNITY CARE CLINIC OF ROWAN | $3,000 |
| MALARIA CONSORTIUM US | $3,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $2,500 |
| AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION | $2,500 |
| HABITAT FOR HUMANITY ROWAN CO | $2,000 |
| AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY | $2,000 |
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, $49k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 52% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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 +12% since the first grant, against +3% for the ones you funded once.
47 repeat relationships — 30 still active in FY2025, 17 since wound down; 9 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, 82% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $18k 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
- LWLUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF INC9× · 2017–2025 · $68k · revenue +34%
- RHROWAN HELPING MINISTRIES9× · 2017–2025 · $45k · revenue +78%
- MOMEALS ON WHEELS OF ROWAN8× · 2017–2025 · $35k · revenue +365%
Funded once
- BTBELL TOWER GREEN INCone grant, 2019 · $5k · revenue -83%
- LILUTHERAN IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEEone grant, 2022 · $5k
- RMROWAN MEDICAL CENTER FOUNDATIONone grant, 2020 · $5k
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 Children's Home Society of North Carolina's mission is to promote the right of every child to a permanent, safe, and loving family.
Care share health alliance is a north carolina-based nonprofit organization advancing community health and wellbeing through systems change. guided by the mission of collaborating for health and a vision of communities that are healthy and…
WNC Health Network, Inc supports people and organizations to improve community health and wellbeing across Western North Carolina.
Carolina Family Health Centers, Inc. provides accessible and affordable health care with excellence...where patients come FIRST
To provide support to lowcountry children with birth defects and/or childhood diseases.
The food bank for central & northeast missouri is a regional disaster and hunger relief network that acquires and distributes millions of meals each year to help neighbors get the food they need to thrive. (continued on schedule o)the…
The mission of the Organization is to coordinate, support, and advocate for member Food Banks across the Carolinas to create lasting solutions to address hunger.
A collaborative network that increases access and improves health outcomes for safety net populations in western north carolina
The mission of hospice & community care is to give hope, comfort, and compassion to those that need it most. hospice & community care is a nonprofit healthcare organization providing hospice and palliative care to residents of york,…
To provide comprehensive primary health care and preventative health services to underserved communities. to serve individuals regardless of their ability to pay.
Empowering south carolina communities and children's advocacy centers to deliver a best practice response to child abuse
The community development corporation will create equitable and accessible whole-person solutions for every resident of north carolina through community collaboration and investment made possible by the community development corporation.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Nazareth Children's Home Inc and the most unlike its peers is Meals On Wheels of Rowan. 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 44 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) — 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 15% 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 78 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 LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF INC ↗
- Who funds ROWAN HELPING MINISTRIES ↗
- Who funds MEALS ON WHEELS OF ROWAN ↗
- Who funds FOOD FOR THOUGHT INC ↗
- Who funds GOSHEN VALLEY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY CARE CLINIC OF ROWAN COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds ROWAN COUNTY UNITED WAY INC ↗
- Who funds THE SHRINERS' HOSPITAL FOR CHILDREN ↗
- Who funds MALARIA CONSORTIUM US INC ↗
- Who funds SMART START ROWAN INC ↗
- Who funds BRIGADE BOYS & GIRLS CLUB INC ↗
- Who funds MAIN STREET MISSION OF CHINA GROVE ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds HISTORIC SALISBURY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ROWAN COUNTY LITERACY COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds CHILDFUND INTERNATIONAL USA ↗
- Who funds HARVEST HOPE FOOD BANK ↗
- Who funds FAMILY CRISIS COUNCIL OF ROWAN INC ↗
- Who funds BREAD RIOT ↗
- Who funds NAZARETH CHILDREN'S HOME INC ↗
- Who funds BELL TOWER GREEN 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: Foundation for the Carolinas · Margaret C Woodson Foundation Inc · Rowan County United Way Inc · The Hurley-Trammell Foundation · Duke Energy Foundation · The Cannon Foundation Inc · The Leon Levine Foundation · The Bernheim Foundation Inc · Novant Health Inc · The Wallace Family Foundation Inc · Clifford a & Lillian C Peeler Foundation Inc · The Wilson L Smith Family Foundation the Smith 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 Joe L & Hester Sims 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.
- Lutheran World Relief Inc — 47% of income from government
- The Shriners' Hospital for Children — 6% 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.