· Private foundation
Lowell Berry Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k109 grants · $471k
- $10k–50k25 grants · $540k
- $50k–250k8 grants · $822k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| The Bay Area Urban Network | $188,000 |
| Fuller Theological Seminary | $168,000 |
| School of Urban Missions | $129,000 |
| City Team Ministries | $81,500 |
| WellSpring | $80,000 |
| The Leadership Connection | $63,000 |
| Hawaiian Islands Ministries | $60,000 |
| Young Life - Diablo Valley | $52,000 |
| Intervarsity Christian Fellowship | $48,000 |
| Harbor House Ministries Inc | $47,000 |
| Joni & Friends - SF Bay Area | $47,000 |
| Faith Network of the East Bay Inc | $42,000 |
| Diocese of Oakland | $42,000 |
| Todays Youth Matter | $41,000 |
| Bay Area REscue Mission | $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 (FY17–25, $2.4M) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 79% 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 +39% since the first grant, against +19% for the ones you funded once.
233 repeat relationships — 119 still active in FY2025, 114 since wound down; 21 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, 95% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $82k 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
- TBTHE BAY AREA URBAN NETWORK INC9× · 2017–2025 · $1.6M · revenue +55% · 38% of their budget
- CMCITYTEAM MINISTRIES9× · 2017–2025 · $668k · revenue +50%
- WWELLSPRING9× · 2017–2025 · $527k · revenue +214%
Funded once
- YLYoung Life of Berkeleyone grant, 2017 · $73k
- BCBayside Church of Placervilleone grant, 2021 · $50k
- CFCHICO FOURSQUARE CHURCHone grant, 2018 · $50k
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.
For more than 70 years, East Bay Agency for Children continues to improve the well-being of children, youth and families by reducing the impact of trauma and social inequalities.
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…
Enterprise for youth empowers under-resourced san francisco youths to reach their potential through transformative paid internship experiences supported by a community of employers, caring adults, and peers.
The California School-Age Consortium (CalSAC) builds professional networks that provide training, leadership development and advocacy to ensure that all young people have access to high quality out-of-school time programs and to create a…
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,…
The mission of Oakland Kids First is to increase youth voice, leadership and power to create engaging and equitable public schools where all students learn and lead.
To create and support one-to-one mentoring relationships that ignite the power and promise of youth.
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…
To support children, youth, and their families in healing from past trauma, developing social, emotional, and functional life skills to cope and build resilience, and accessing necessary resources now and in the future. The Agency does so…
Unitedly is a nonprofit organization based in San Mateo County, California. Unitedly was established to ensure Asian families and communities have access to equitable opportunities and resources to thrive in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Impacting generational change by empowering youth who are facing the greatest obstacles through relationships with professional mentors - 12+ years, no matter what.
GO Public Schools builds and supports a multi-city network of local coalitions, whose members parents, educators, and community allies work together to expand access to quality education in Californias most historically underserved…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Teen Challenge of East Bay Inc and the most unlike its peers is Vine 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 30 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) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% 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.
237 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. 237 of the 360 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 THE BAY AREA URBAN NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY ↗
- Who funds SCHOOL OF URBAN MISSIONS ↗
- Who funds CITYTEAM MINISTRIES ↗
- Who funds WELLSPRING ↗
- Who funds HAWAIIAN ISLANDS MINISTRIES INC ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN RISING INC ↗
- Who funds Harbor House Ministries Inc ↗
- Who funds BAY AREA RESCUE MISSION ↗
- Who funds TODAYS YOUTH MATTER ↗
- Who funds Teen Esteem ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE RENEWAL PROJECT INC DBA THE LEADERSHIP CONNECTION ↗
- Who funds Q PLACE ↗
- Who funds Loaves and Fishes of Contra Costa ↗
- Who funds OAKLAND DIGITAL ARTS AND LITERACY CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds ARIEL OUTREACH MISSION ↗
- Who funds ARM OF CARE INC ↗
- Who funds MONUMENT CRISIS CENTER ↗
- Who funds Camps in Common ↗
- Who funds PROJECT PEACE EAST BAY ↗
- Who funds University of the Pacific ↗
- Who funds THE BREAD PROJECT ↗
- Who funds SOAR For Youth ↗
- Who funds TEEN CHALLENGE OF EAST BAY INC ↗
- Who funds JOHN F KENNEDY UNIVERSITY ↗
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: East Bay Community Foundation · Bernard E & Alba Witkin Charitable Foundation · Dean and Margaret Lesher Foundation · West Davis & Bergard Foundation · The Barrios Trust · The San Francisco Foundation · Quest Foundation · San Jose Mercury News Wish Book Fund Inc · Kaiser Foundation Hospitals · Sunlight Giving · Fremont Bank Foundation · United Way of the Bay Area
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 Lowell Berry 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.
- 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 Lowell Berry Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Lowell Berry 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.