· Private foundation
John M Rivers Jr Foundation
Its FY2025 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2020–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k32 grants · $84k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $10k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Charleston Parks Conservancy | $10,000 |
| Charleston Library Society | $5,000 |
| Confederate Home and College | $5,000 |
| Charleston Museum | $5,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $5,000 |
| Church of the Good Shepherd | $5,000 |
| First Tee of Greater Charleston | $5,000 |
| Historic Charleston Foundation | $5,000 |
| Charleston Symphony Orchestra | $5,000 |
| BYN Mellon Charitable Gift Fund - | $5,000 |
| Camden Military Academy | $5,000 |
| Preservation Society of Charleston | $5,000 |
| Drayton Hall Foundation | $2,750 |
| Middleton Place Foundation | $2,500 |
| Charleston Gaillard Center - Student Access Fund | $2,500 |
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 (FY23–24, $6k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 0% 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.
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 5% of John M Rivers Jr 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, 87% of the giving stays in SC; read by stated purpose it is 80% — 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 +29% since the first grant, against +11% for the ones you funded once.
40 repeat relationships — 22 still active in FY2025, 18 since wound down; 10 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, 74% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $24k 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
- CACAROLINA ART ASSOCIATION DBA GIBBES MUSEUM OF ART5× · 2020–2024 · $60k · revenue +108%
- SFSPOLETO FESTIVAL USA INC5× · 2020–2024 · $50k · revenue +102%
- CMCAMDEN MILITARY ACADEMY6× · 2020–2025 · $42k · revenue +5%
Funded once
- CCCHATTOOGA CLUB EMPLOYEE SCHOLARSHIPone grant, 2021 · $10k
- COCOLLEGE OF CHAS TENNIS FACILITYone grant, 2022 · $10k
- FOFRIENDS OF THE MUNI-CHS MUNI GOLFone 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 schs mission is to expand, preserve, and make accessible our invaluable collection, and to encourage interest and pride in the rich history of our state.
Charleston stage's vision is to be a leading professional theater company, engaging the broad community through high quality productions, with leading artists, and excellent production values. the organization provides the community access…
(See Schedule O)
Charleston Collegiate Schools mission is to inspire students to become passionate, lifelong learners by empowering them with knowledge, creativity, curiosity and confidence to mindfully embrace the opportunities of tomorrow.
Chamber Music Charleston is dedicated to developing the audience for classical music through chamber music concerts and educational programs of the highest caliber.
Brookgreen gardens was formed in 1931 to collect, preserve and exhibit american sculpture, and the flora and fauna native to south carolina.
To protect and preserve buildings of architectural and historial significance in South Carolina.
The mission of the charleston school of law foundation inc is to encourage and assist the study, teaching, promoting and research of the rule of law in charleston, south carolina and all related subject areas as determined by the board of…
The Mission of the College of Charleston Foundation is to promote programs of education, research, student development, and faculty development for the exclusive benefit of the College of Charleston.
The Charleston Academy of Music is committed to providing access to exceptional music education, performance and community outreach to all, regardless of age, skill, gender, ethnicity or income.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Lowcountry Land Trust Inc and the most unlike its peers is Bny Mellon Charitable Gift Fund. 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 51 years old; the field is 21. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 21% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
31 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. 31 of the 73 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 CAROLINA ART ASSOCIATION DBA GIBBES MUSEUM OF ART ↗
- Who funds SPOLETO FESTIVAL USA INC ↗
- Who funds TRIDENT UNITED WAY ↗
- Who funds CAMDEN MILITARY ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds The Charleston Parks Conservancy ↗
- Who funds The Preservation Society of Charleston Inc ↗
- Who funds HISTORIC CHARLESTON FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BNY MELLON CHARITABLE GIFT FUND ↗
- Who funds VISION TO LEARN ↗
- Who funds Charleston Library Society ↗
- Who funds The Charleston Promise Neighborhood ↗
- Who funds CHARLESTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ↗
- Who funds Middleton Place Foundation ↗
- Who funds FIRST TEE GREATER CHARLESTON ↗
- Who funds Boys & Girls Club of The Plateau Inc ↗
- Who funds Colour of Music ↗
- Who funds The Charleston Museum ↗
- Who funds CONFEDERATE HOME AND COLLEGE ↗
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: Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina Inc · Post and Courier Foundation · Henry & Sylvia Yaschik Foundation Inc · Guffey Family Foundation · The Joanna Foundation · John Winthrop Charitable Trust · Patrick Family Foundation · Pathfinder Foundation Inc · Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation · Richard and Susan Leadem Family · Atlantic Services of Charleston Cha · Roy and Amanda Maybank 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 John M Rivers Jr 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.
- Shelburne Museum Inc — 9% of income from government
- Choate Rosemary Hall Foundation Incorporated — 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 John M Rivers Jr Foundation?
Find your warmest path to John M Rivers Jr 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.