· Private foundation
Joel Dean 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 $10k73 grants · $217k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $87k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $235k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| OPERA SAN JOSE | $112,000 |
| JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY | $71,000 |
| BEREA COLLEGE | $52,000 |
| COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | $27,000 |
| FRIENDS AND BENEFACTORS OF MARYMOUNT INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF PARIS | $26,500 |
| AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION FOUNDATION | $12,500 |
| CAMP JOY FOUNDATION | $11,050 |
| INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART | $10,000 |
| WHITMAN COLLEGE | $9,000 |
| DISABILITY RIGHTS EDUCATION DEFENSE FUND | $7,500 |
| AGAINST MALARIA FOUNDATION | $7,500 |
| HUMANE SOCIETY OF THE UNITED STATES | $7,500 |
| FRIENDS OF ACADIA | $7,000 |
| HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON UNION FREE SCHOOL DISTRICT | $6,500 |
| WAYNFLETE SCHOOL | $6,000 |
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 (FY24–25, $25k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 60% 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 +21% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
79 repeat relationships — 56 still active in FY2025, 23 since wound down; 18 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, 87% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $65k 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
- OSOPERA SAN JOSE INCORPORATED6× · 2020–2025 · $611k · revenue +62%
Oberlin College6× · 2020–2025 · $382k · revenue +19%
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY4× · 2020–2025 · $157k · revenue +42%
Funded once
- JHJOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY WHITING SCHOOL OF ENGINEERINGone grant, 2021 · $75k
- TLTHE LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE ON CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS INCone grant, 2023 · $10k · revenue +18%
- TITHE ISB FOUNDATIONone grant, 2020 · $7k
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 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…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Bates is a college of the liberal arts and sciences, and is a coeducational, nonsectarian, residential college with special commitments to academic rigor, and to assuring in all of its efforts the dignity of each individual, and access to…
Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
Williams College strives to achieve educational excellence by fostering a community of learning in collaboration with students, faculty, staff, devoted alumni and parents.
Education and Research
Depauw university develops leaders the world needs through an uncommon commitment to the liberal arts. depauw's diverse and inclusive learning and living experience, distinctive in its rigorous intellectual engagement and its global and…
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
Rooted in the liberal arts & sciences & lutheran expression of the christian faith, & is committed to offering a challenging education that develops qualities of mind, spirit, & body necessary for a rewarding life of leadership & service…
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Leadership Conference On Civil and Human Rights Inc and the most unlike its peers is Inside Books Project. 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 46 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 3% 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.
73 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. 73 of the 119 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 OPERA SAN JOSE INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds Oberlin College ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds BEREA COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds THEATREWORKS SILICON VALLEY ↗
- Who funds SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds SWARTHMORE COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds Harvey Mudd College ↗
- Who funds MONTALVO ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds THE STUDENT CONSERVATION ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds Joy Outdoor Education Center Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL OF PHILADELPHIA ↗
- Who funds BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF WHITMAN COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds NAMI National ↗
- Who funds San Jose Jazz ↗
- Who funds Humane World for Animals Inc ↗
- Who funds UNTERMYER GARDENS CONSERVANCY INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds GREEN ACRES SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds CITY LIGHTS THEATER CO OF SAN JOSE INC ↗
- Who funds JAZZ FORUM ARTS INC ↗
- Who funds Appalachian Mountain Club ↗
- Who funds FREEDOM READS INC ↗
- Who funds DOWNTOWN COLLEGE PREP 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: Ibm International Foundation · The Applied Materials Foundation · The David and Lucile Packard Foundation · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Silicon Valley Creates · Los Altos Mountain View Community Foundation · The Kent and Rita Norton Foundation · Farrington Historical Foundation · Leo M Shortino Family Foundation · Rotary Club of San Jose Foundation · The Ayco Charitable 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 Joel Dean 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.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Freedom Reads Inc — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Family Promise Inc — 2% of income from government
- Appalachian Mountain Club — 1% of income from government
- Massachusetts Audubon Society Inc — 1% of income from government
- Wesleyan University — 1% 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 Joel Dean Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Joel Dean 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.