· Public charity
Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County
We use the law to make the social safety net work for everyone in San Mateo County.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2019–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 10 grants below total $1,157,333 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $1,279,237 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $121,904 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2025
- $10k–50k2 grants · $30k
- $50k–250k7 grants · $866k
- $250k+1 grant · $261k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Immigration Institute of the Bay Area | $260,710 |
| Catholic Charities | $222,554 |
| Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto | $172,958 |
| Pangea Legal Services | $124,539 |
| University of San Francisco School of Law | $124,539 |
| Faith in Action Bay Area | $84,409 |
| Immigrant Legal Resource Center | $74,861 |
| Nuestra Casa de East Palo Alto | $62,455 |
| Coastside Hope | $18,580 |
| El Concilio of San Mateo County | $11,728 |
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 (FY19–25, $1.6M) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 7%. 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.
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 +57% since the first grant, against +7% for the ones you funded once.
13 repeat relationships — 9 still active in FY2025, 4 since wound down; 1 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, 99% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $12k 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
- IIIMMIGRATION INSTITUTE OF THE BAY AREA6× · 2019–2025 · $1.3M · revenue +132%
- CLCommunity Legal Services in East Palo Alto Inc6× · 2019–2025 · $970k · revenue +5%
- CCCATHOLIC CHARITIES CYO OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF SAN FRANCISCO4× · 2021–2025 · $885k · revenue +35%
Funded once
- MAMISSION ASSET FUNDone grant, 2021 · $950k · revenue -83%
- NCNuestra Casaone grant, 2019 · $75k
- NLNIHONMACHI LEGAL OUTREACH DBA ASIAN PACIFIC ISLANDER LEGAL OUTREACHgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $74k · revenue +31%
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.
La Raza Centro Legal San Francisco provides high quality, highly trusted, free legal services to low-income or immigrant clients in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Our mission is to reflect Gods intent for humanity, to live as a reconciled and and restored community. We stand in solidarity with immigrants by providing high quality, affordable immigration legal services and advocating for just…
We use the law to make the social safety net work for everyone in San Mateo County. We represent clients, empower people to advocate for themselves, and fix broken systems through policy change.
Centro Legal De La Raza is a comprehensive legal services agency protecting and advancing the rights of low-income immigrant communities throguh culturally competent bilingual legal representation, education, and advocacy.
A long-term, strategic alliance of labor, community, faith-based, and student organizations working together to build greater economic power for workers and community members through employee rights at work and access to good jobs,…
LAE's mission is to protect and advance the right of San Franciscos seniors and adults with disabilities to be housed, healthy, financially stable, and safe. We provide free legal services to San Francisco seniors and adults with…
Social justice collaborative is californias leading provider of compassionate full scope deportation defense legal services to low income non-citizens in northern and central california. we boldly provide post-convition relief to…
San Francisco CASA transforms the lives of children and youth traumatized and displaced in the foster care and related systems by providing one consistent, caring volunteer advocate, trained to address each childs needs in the court and…
The Asian Law Caucus's mission is to promote, advance, and represent the legal and civil rights of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, recognizing that social, economic, political and racial inequalities continue to exist…
The California Center for Movement Legal Services (Movement Legal) provides legal services in the pursuit of improving the lives of California's traditionally underserved residents, carrying out legal work that fosters community led policy…
Canal alliance has been the leading service provider and community advocate for marin's extremely low-income immigrant community for 39 years. each year, the organization collaborates with over 60 agencies and engages hundreds of…
Immigrant legal services of the central coast (ilscc) provides immigration-related legal services and information to the immigrant community of the central coast region of california, primarily santa cruz, san benito, and monterey…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Catholic Charities Cyo of the Archdiocese of San Francisco and the most unlike its peers is The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
19 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. 19 of the 23 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 IMMIGRATION INSTITUTE OF THE BAY AREA ↗
- Who funds Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto Inc ↗
- Who funds MISSION ASSET FUND ↗
- Who funds CATHOLIC CHARITIES CYO OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF SAN FRANCISCO ↗
- Who funds University of San Francisco ↗
- Who funds Pangea Legal Services ↗
- Who funds Faith In Action Bay Area ↗
- Who funds IMMIGRANT LEGAL RESOURCE CENTER ↗
- Who funds Catholic Charities San Bernardino & Riverside Counties ↗
- Who funds Nuestra Casa de East Palo Alto ↗
- Who funds COASTSIDE HOPE ↗
- Who funds NIHONMACHI LEGAL OUTREACH DBA ASIAN PACIFIC ISLANDER LEGAL OUTREACH ↗
- Who funds JOBTRAIN INC ↗
- Who funds PUENTE DE LA COSTA SUR ↗
- Who funds SAMARITAN HOUSE ↗
- Who funds BAY AREA LEGAL AID ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds EL CONCILIO OF SAN MATEO COUNTY ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO TENANTS UNION ↗
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 San Francisco Foundation · Sunlight Giving · The Grove Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Sand Hill Foundation · Atkinson Foundation · The Sobrato Family Foundation · Kaiser Foundation Hospitals · Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc · Give Forward Foundation · Immigrant Legal Resource Center · Philanthropic Ventures 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 Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County 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 Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County?
Find your warmest path to Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County 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.