· Private foundation
Kenneth Rainin Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k64 grants · $225k
- $10k–50k134 grants · $2.9M
- $50k–250k74 grants · $7.6M
- $250k+22 grants · $11M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ROXIE THEATER | $1,300,000 |
| COMMUNITY ARTS STABILIZATION TRUST | $1,000,000 |
| COMMUNITY ARTS STABILIZATION TRUST | $1,000,000 |
| EDUCATION FOR CHANGE | $900,000 |
| OAKLAND UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT | $832,432 |
| SAN FRANCISCO FILM SOCIETY | $750,000 |
| UNITED STATES ARTISTS INC | $600,000 |
| TRUSTEES OF UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA | $500,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO | $500,000 |
| CENTER FOR THE COLLABORATIVE CLASSROOM | $400,000 |
| ASPIRE PUBLIC SCHOOLS | $380,000 |
| CALIFORNIANS FOR THE ARTS | $318,000 |
| TEACHING WELL INC | $315,000 |
| REACH UNIVERSITY | $300,000 |
| OAKLAND UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT | $264,156 |
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 (FY20–24, $5.1M) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 20% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 10% of Kenneth Rainin 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, 65% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 69% — more 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 +28% since the first grant, against +4% for the ones you funded once.
204 repeat relationships — 124 still active in FY2024, 80 since wound down; 69 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (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 FY2024, 74% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $5.1M 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
- SFSan Francisco Film Society5× · 2020–2024 · $4.7M · revenue +40% · 31% of their budget
- EFEDUCATION FOR CHANGE5× · 2020–2024 · $4.5M · revenue +42%
- CACOMMUNITY ART STABILIZATION TRUST3× · 2020–2022 · $4.0M · revenue +6% · 27% of their budget
Funded once
- SOSEEDS OF LEARNING LLCone grant, 2020 · $344k
CEDARS-SINAI MEDICAL CENTERgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $284k · revenue +31%- OAOASIS ARTS INCone grant, 2023 · $250k · revenue -38% · 48% of their budget
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.
Marin open studios is a non-profit visual arts organization dedicated to engaging and supporting marin county artists and their audiences through events, programs and services. marin open studios champions a diverse and inclusive community…
As creative producers, we are devoted to the production and presentation of groundbreaking experiences in contemporary performance that use innovative approaches to collaboration, technology, and social engagement. As a service…
On the Boards' mission is to invest in leading contemporary performing artists near and far and connect them to a diverse range of communities interested in forward-thinking art and ideas.
SFP presents internationally acclaimed and emerging performing artists, introduces innovative programs, and builds new and diversified audiences for the arts through education and outreach activities.
Bay Area community and increases access to literature locally and globally. The Centers publications, events, and educational programming build audiences for literature in translation, enrich the library of vital literary works, nurture…
California college of the arts educates students to shape culture and society through the practice and critical study of art, architecture, design, and writing. benefitting from its san francisco bay area location, the college prepares…
Contra-tiempo is a bold, multilingual los angeles-based activist dance theater company creating physically intense and politically astute performance work that moves audience to imagine what is possible. We create a new physical, visual…
BAYCAT addresses racial, gender and economic inequity by creating powerful, authentic media while diversifying the creative industry. Through the education and employment of low-income youth, young people of color, and young women in the…
The San Francisco Arts Education Project provides participatory experiences in the arts to the children of San Francisco so they are better equipped to make use of their creative abilities in all aspects of their lives.
MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana is an inclusive contemporary arts space grounded in the Chicano/Latino experience that incubates new visual, literary and performance art in order to engage people in civic dialogue and…
Opera Parallle presents compelling performances of contemporary operas with high musical and dramatic standards, embracing modern aesthetics, creative use of technology, and social relevance as essential to the future of the art form.…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Center for Cultural Power and the most unlike its peers is Big Smiles. 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 26 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.8% lost their exemption, against 14% 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.
382 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. 382 of the 451 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 San Francisco Film Society ↗
- Who funds EDUCATION FOR CHANGE ↗
- Who funds CARES FOR LEARNING ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY ART STABILIZATION TRUST ↗
- Who funds United States Artists Inc ↗
- Who funds ASPIRE PUBLIC SCHOOLS ↗
- Who funds Center for Cultural Innovation ↗
- Who funds The Roxie Theater ↗
- Who funds DANCERS GROUP ↗
- Who funds THE OAKLAND PUBLIC EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL GOOD FUND INC ↗
- Who funds Oakland Literacy Coalition Inc ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL OPINION RESEARCH CENTER ↗
- Who funds ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds CounterPulse ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds The Oakland REACH ↗
- Who funds The Teaching Well Inc ↗
- Who funds Cornell University ↗
- Who funds LOTUS BLOOM ↗
- Who funds THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds ROCKEFELLER PHILANTHROPY ADVISORS INC ↗
- Who funds FRED HUTCHINSON CANCER RESEARCH CENTER ↗
- Who funds Children's Hospital Corporation ↗
- Who funds PHILANTHROPIC VENTURES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ↗
- Who funds Intersection for the Arts ↗
- Who funds TANDEM PARTNERS IN EARLY LEARNING ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL MEDICAL CENTER ↗
- Who funds Lead Liberated ↗
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 Zellerbach Family Foundation · Phyllis C Wattis Foundation · Walter and Elise Haas Fund · Fleishhacker Foundation · East Bay Community Foundation · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · The San Francisco Foundation · Center for Cultural Innovation · Gerbode Foundation · The Sam Mazza Foundation · The Map Fund Inc · The Oakland Public Education 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 Kenneth Rainin 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
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Children's Hospital Corporation — 10% of income from government
- Reach Out and Read Inc — 9% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- The Center for Independent Documentary Inc — 6% of income from government
- Oregon Health & Science University Foundation — 1% of income from government
- Cotuit Center for the Arts Inc — 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 Kenneth Rainin Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Kenneth Rainin 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.