· Public charity
Lena Foundation
LENA FOUNDATION's mission is to transform children's futures through early talk technology and data-driven programs.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2023.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 15 grants below total $481,455 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $499,047 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $17,592 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 · FY2023
- Under $10k2 grants · $13k
- $10k–50k11 grants · $238k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $230k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BIRMINGHAM TALKS | $149,946 |
| INSTITUTE FOR CHILD SUCCESS | $80,000 |
| WHEDCO | $44,600 |
| ACELERO LEARNING | $32,768 |
| GRAND STREET SETTLEMENT | $30,000 |
| LITTLE EINSTEIN'S ACADEMY | $22,246 |
| CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF DENVER | $22,235 |
| SAN JOSE PUBLIC LIBRARY | $20,000 |
| GUNNISON-HINSDALE EARLY CHILDHOOD COUNCIL | $19,439 |
| DENVER'S EARLY CHILDHOOD COUNCIL | $13,241 |
| ARAPAHOE EARLY CHILDHOOD COUNCIL | $12,492 |
| EARLY CHILDHOOD PARTNERS | $11,003 |
| EPISCOPAL CHILDREN'S SERVICES | $10,000 |
| EARLY CHILDHOOD COUNCIL OF YUMA | $7,406 |
| NEW DEAL DESIGN LLC | $6,079 |
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 (FY19–23, $748k) land where the poverty rate runs at 16%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 95% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 13% of Lena 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.
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 +49% since the first grant, against +22% for the ones you funded once.
16 repeat relationships — 5 still active in FY2023, 11 since wound down; 10 grantees were first funded in FY2023 (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 FY2023, 47% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $257k 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
- SMSMALL MAGIC3× · 2020–2023 · $421k · revenue +370% · 32% of their budget
BRILLIANT DETROIT3× · 2019–2021 · $227k · revenue +101%- NCNATIONAL CENTER FOR FAMILIES LEARNING INC3× · 2019–2021 · $191k · revenue +49%
Funded once
- BTBIRMINGHAM TALKSone grant, 2019 · $62k
- GCGUILFORD COUNTY PARTNERSHIP FOR CHILDREN INCone grant, 2017 · $59k · revenue +12%
- SCSTUDER COMMUNITY INSTITUTE INCgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $59k · revenue +34%
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.
Educare dc's mission is to eliminate the opportunity gap for young children living in poverty and give them the skills necessary for success in kindergarten and beyond. we work at the intersection of practice, policy, and research to…
Start early advances quality early learning for families with children, before birth through their earliest years, to help close the opportunity gap.
The partnership's mission is to be the driving force to engage partners to achieve lasting positive outcomes for all children, beginning at birth.
Per south carolina code section 59-152-30: "the goals for south carolina first steps to school readiness are to: (1) provide parents with access to the support they might seek and want to strengthen their families and to promote the…
Cpcd's programs are based on the comprehensive head start model and are child and family-focused. cpcd adopts a two-generation approach that focuses on creating opportunities for, and addressing the needs of, both vulnerable young children…
To ensure every child in durham enters school ready to succeed, we lead community strategies for children birth to 5, and their families that promote healthy development and learning and echance access to high quality care.
Early years leads efforts to strengthen accessible and affordable quality early care and education by providing support for families, communities and the workforce. early years 's primary purpose is to provide services, research and…
Csc prepares young children and their families to succeed in learning and life through innovative, comprehensive, leading edge services.
The Learning Collaborative's mission is to instill children with curiosity, confidence, and a love of learning while embracing and strengthening their families. This is accomplished through tuition-free, high-quality Preschool and Pre-K…
By advocating for quality early care and education, empowering families with information and financial support, and building the capabilities of educators, Children's Council of San Francisco ensures that every child in San Francisco has…
Children's institute's mission is to leverage research, practice, policy, and advocacy to shift systems toward justice for families so that all of oregon's children, prenatal to grade 5, have access to opportunity.
The north carolina partnership for children (ncpc) is the lead organization and backbone of the smart start network, setting statewide vision, policy, and funding priorities. while local partnerships translate the statewide vision into…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Nebraska Early Childhood Collaborative and the most unlike its peers is North Central Texas Council of Governments Foundation 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 29 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.9% 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.
66 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. 66 of the 100 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 SMALL MAGIC ↗
- Who funds BRILLIANT DETROIT ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL CENTER FOR FAMILIES LEARNING INC ↗
- Who funds ARAPAHOE COUNTY EARLY CHILDHOOD COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE FOR CHILD SUCCESS INC ↗
- Who funds MARYLAND FAMILY NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds GUILFORD COUNTY PARTNERSHIP FOR CHILDREN INC ↗
- Who funds STUDER COMMUNITY INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds CENTERS FOR FAMILY DEVELOPMENT INC ↗
- Who funds APPLETREE INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATION INNOVATION ↗
- Who funds TURN THE PAGE KC INC ↗
- Who funds SEEDING SUCCESS ↗
- Who funds DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY FRIENDS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GRAND STREET SETTLEMENT INC ↗
- Who funds WOMEN'S HOUSING & ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds CATHOLIC CHARITIES & COMMUNITY SERV OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF DENVER ↗
- Who funds The Centers for Families and Children ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA BEACH GROWSMART FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PHOENIX PUBLIC LIBRARY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Collaborative Support Services Inc ↗
- Who funds LITERACY VOLUNTEERS OF CENTRAL CONNECTICUT INC ↗
- Who funds PIKES PEAK LIBRARY DISTRICT FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ADELPHI UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds READ-ALOUD DELAWARE INC ↗
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: Temple Hoyne Buell Foundation · Early Milestones Colorado · The Colorado Health Foundation · Caring for Colorado Foundation · Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund Inc · Colorado Gives Foundation · Mile High United Way Inc · Results for America · WK Kellogg Foundation · Rose Community Foundation · National Council on Aging Inc · Gary Philanthropy
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 Lena 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.
- Children and Families First — 87% of income from government
- Maryland Family Network Inc — 66% of income from government
- Hopes Community Action Partnership — 47% of income from government
- Read-Aloud Delaware Inc — 45% of income from government
- Episcopal Children's Services Inc — 42% of income from government
- Garrett County Maryland Community Action Committee — 32% of income from government
- Easter Seals Serving Dc Md Va Inc — 29% 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.