· Private foundation
Laurel Foundation
Its FY2022 filing reports that it funds preselected organizations and did not take unsolicited requests; check the foundation's own site before ruling it out.
Read this first · the figures below need context
57% of Laurel Foundation’s FY2022 grant dollars went to Greater Horizons, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2022 names 20 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it. Everything below is therefore FY2021, the last year Laurel Foundation named its own grantees at scale: 19 organizations, $1M. It is dated, not current.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2022.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2021
- Under $10k3 grants · $21k
- $10k–50k9 grants · $272k
- $50k–250k11 grants · $945k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| LYMELIGHT FOUNDATION | $200,000 |
| HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | $150,000 |
| MERCY BEYOND BORDERS | $120,000 |
| IGNITE | $100,000 |
| HELEN WOODWARD ANIMAL CENTER | $75,000 |
| TEAM GIVING | $50,000 |
| HELEN WOODWARD ANIMAL CENTER | $50,000 |
| BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF THE PENINSULA | $50,000 |
| SILICON VALLEY URBAN DEBATE LEAGUE | $50,000 |
| PETS IN NEED | $50,000 |
| IGNITE | $50,000 |
| EASTSIDE COLLEGE PREPARATORY SCHOOL | $42,000 |
| CHILDREN'S HEALTH COUNCIL | $40,000 |
| YOUTH ALIVE | $40,000 |
| ADOLESCENT COUNSELING SERVICES | $35,000 |
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 (FY17–22, $2.3M) land where the poverty rate runs at 7%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 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 18% of Laurel 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, 81% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 77% — 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 +53% since the first grant, against +19% for the ones you funded once.
23 repeat relationships — 19 still active in FY2021, 4 since wound down; 4 grantees were first funded in FY2021 (too recent to call). Read against FY2021, the last year this funder named its own grantees directly; its giving has since run through a sponsor, which reports no donor behind each grant.
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 FY2022, 96% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $55k 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
- LFLymeLight Foundation6× · 2017–2022 · $2.3M · revenue +67% · 87% of their budget
- IIGNITE6× · 2017–2022 · $700k · revenue +59%
- MBMERCY BEYOND BORDERS6× · 2017–2022 · $635k · revenue +109%
Funded once
- FOFRIENDS OF THE PALO ALTO JUNIOR MUSEUM & ZOOone grant, 2017 · $70k · revenue -90%
- SMSEPTEMBER'S MISSIONone grant, 2020 · $60k
- VRVICTORY RANCH INCone grant, 2017 · $50k · revenue -59% · 35% 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 humane transforms lives through exceptional animal care, humane education, and advocacy. every day, marin humane inspires compassion and positive relationships between people and animals.
The organization provides professional investment management services for endowed gifts and financial assets entrusted to the ucsf foundation.
The mission of the silicon schools fund is to improve education through supporting the launch of excellent new schools, improving academic instruction in existing schools, and by funding some of the boldest innovations in education…
To educate and inspire girls to become innovators and leaders in stem.
California ocean science trust (ost) is a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating progress towards a healthy and productive ocean future for california. created by state legislation, ost bridges the gap between cutting-edge…
Guided by the principles of academic rigor and diversity, the international school of san francisco offers programs of study in french and english to prepare its graduates for a world in which the ability to think critically and to…
The mission of the uc davis foundation is to secure, steward and manage private gifts for uc davis.
Scu is a catholic and jesuit institution that makes student learning its central focus, promotes faculty and staff learning in its various forms, and exhibits organizational learning.
The waverly school is a nonsectarian, coeducational, college preparatory progressive day school that spans preschool through high school. it is fully accredited by the western association of school and colleges and the california…
To support educational, research and public functions and programs of the riverside campus of the university of california.
The uc santa barbara foundation actively works to further the goals of the university of california, santa barbara. the foundation seeks to maintain and nurture the university's quality and distinction. on behalf of the campus, the…
Our mission is to build a unique institute that bridges basic research and drug discovery, and that attracts the best and brightest scientists, physicians and students to work together synergistically to find cures for neglected human…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Ignite and the most unlike its peers is Team Giving Inc. 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 38 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 23% 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.
33 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. 33 of the 39 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 WINDMILL SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds LymeLight Foundation ↗
- Who funds Greater Horizons ↗
- Who funds ARCTIC ICE PROJECT ↗
- Who funds IGNITE ↗
- Who funds MERCY BEYOND BORDERS ↗
- Who funds Team Giving Inc ↗
- Who funds HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INC ↗
- Who funds HELEN WOODWARD ANIMAL CENTER ↗
- Who funds BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF THE PENINSULA ↗
- Who funds EASTSIDE COLLEGE PREPARATORY SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds Silicon Valley Urban Debate League ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S HEALTH COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds YOUTH ALIVE ↗
- Who funds Pets In Need ↗
- Who funds FEMINIST MAJORITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ADOLESCENT COUNSELING SERVICES ↗
- Who funds TREVOR PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds MISSION BE INC ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE PALO ALTO JUNIOR MUSEUM & ZOO ↗
- Who funds WILDCARE ↗
- Who funds VICTORY RANCH INC ↗
- Who funds THE MARINE MAMMAL CENTER ↗
- Who funds ART WITH IMPACT ↗
- Who funds Side By Side ↗
- Who funds Environmental Volunteers Inc ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR RESEARCH ON SCHIZOPHRENIA AND DEPRESSION ↗
- Who funds GRASSROOTS ECOLOGY ↗
- Who funds SEAL FUTURE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK MEDICAL COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA SCIENCE CENTER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds AUTRY MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN WEST ↗
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: Greater Horizons · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · The Palo Alto Community Fund · Tides Foundation · Philanthropic Ventures Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Gordon E and Betty I Moore Foundation · Stephen S Smith and Paula K Smith Family Foundation · Embarcadero Media Foundation · Atkinson Foundation · The Confidence Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc
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 Laurel 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.
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 Laurel Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Laurel 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.