· Private foundation
Lee 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k1 grant · $5k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $90k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| FU-JEN UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| THE J PAUL GETTY TRUST | $25,000 |
| CALTECH | $20,000 |
| DOOR OF HOPE | $20,000 |
| HARBOR DAY ENDOWMENT CORPORATION | $5,000 |
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, $550) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 100% 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 +48% since the first grant, against +34% for the ones you funded once.
15 repeat relationships — 4 still active in FY2024, 11 since wound down; 1 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; $25k 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
- TJTHE J PAUL GETTY TRUST4× · 2019–2024 · $400k · revenue +48%
- AAAMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES2× · 2019–2022 · $301k · revenue +1%
- PHPasadena Hospital Association Ltd6× · 2017–2022 · $230k · revenue +25%
Funded once
- AQAugies Quest to Cure ALS Incgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $5k · revenue +34%
- THTHE HARPSWELL FOUNDATIONgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $5k · revenue +131%
- ICInterVarsity Christian FellowshipUSAone grant, 2023 · $3k · revenue +9%
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 mission of the uc davis foundation is to secure, steward and manage private gifts for uc davis.
The Television Academy is dedicated to celebrating excellence, innovation and the advancement of the telecommunications arts and sciences through recognition, education and leadership, while fostering a diverse, inclusive and accessible…
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…
The AIA California, in collaboration with local components, is the voice of the architectural profession.
The association serves its members by creating resources that enable california school administrators to develop and apply creative leadership and management skills and in turn, improve the educational process for all students.
The organization provides professional investment management services for endowed gifts and financial assets entrusted to the ucsf foundation.
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…
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
Los angeles pacific university exists to deliver high quality, accessible christ-centered education to learners everywhere.
The mission of the university of california, irvine foundation (uc irvine foundation) is to raise and manage private funds to support uc irvine's broader mission of excellence in teaching, research and public service. to this end, the uc…
See schedule oustelecom exists to ensure members can compete, grow and thrive to build a world where families, enterprises and communities are connected through the power of broadband.our member companies have committed a considerable…
HMC seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities, social sciences and the arts so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Make-a-Wish Foundation of America and the most unlike its peers is The Harpswell Foundation. 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 47 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) — 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 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.
35 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. 35 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 THE CALTECH Y ↗
- Who funds THE J PAUL GETTY TRUST ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES ↗
- Who funds Pasadena Hospital Association Ltd ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds DOOR OF HOPE ↗
- Who funds HENRY E HUNTINGTON LIBRARY AND ART GALLERY ↗
- Who funds FU-JEN UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PUBLIC MEDIA GROUP OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds Harbor Day Endowment Corporation ↗
- Who funds PERFORMING ARTS CENTER OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY ↗
- Who funds MUSIC CENTER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds Augies Quest to Cure ALS Inc ↗
- Who funds FLINTRIDGE PREPARATORY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds UCLA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE HARPSWELL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds InterVarsity Christian FellowshipUSA ↗
- Who funds FRACTURED ATLAS INC ↗
- Who funds SOUTH COAST CHINESE CULTURAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds METAWAKE REVIVAL & EVANGELISM INC ↗
- Who funds THE PEGASUS SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THRIVE ANIMAL RESCUE INC ↗
- Who funds San Marino Schools Foundation ↗
- Who funds WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds THE JEWISH FEDERATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds Foothill Family Service ↗
- Who funds MAKE-A-WISH FOUNDATION OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds United States Association for UNHCR ↗
- Who funds FRESH AIR FUND ↗
- Who funds UNION RESCUE MISSION ↗
- Who funds UNION STATION HOMELESS SERVICES ↗
- Who funds UNITED SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds PASADENA HUMANE ↗
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: Gail G Ellis Foundation Inc · The Rose Hills Foundation · Pasadena Community Foundation · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · Edmund and Mary Shea Family Foundation · Wm Keck Foundation · The Ahmanson Foundation · Orange County Community Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Greater Horizons · California Community Foundation · American Endowment 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 Lee 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.
- American Academy of Arts & Sciences — 3% of income from government
- Wounded Warrior Project Inc — 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 Lee Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Lee 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.