· Community foundation
Maine Community Foundation Inc
The Maine Community Foundation brings people and resources together to build a better Maine.
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.
The 1,161 grants below total $57,612,395 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $68,027,345 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $10,414,950 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 · FY2024
- Under $10k195 grants · $1.4M
- $10k–50k652 grants · $12M
- $50k–250k278 grants · $26M
- $250k+36 grants · $18M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Maine Farmland Trust | $2,487,900 |
| Northeastern University | $1,733,145 |
| Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund | $801,573 |
| First Nations Development Institute | $600,000 |
| The Nature Conservancy | $558,590 |
| Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness NPC | $554,000 |
| Maine Audubon Society | $546,055 |
| Sustainable Markets Foundation | $536,000 |
| Mitchell Institute | $522,030 |
| Opera House Arts | $520,500 |
| Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences | $519,560 |
| Bement School Inc | $398,947 |
| EarthJustice | $395,000 |
| Maine Public | $387,995 |
| Northern Forest Center | $387,750 |
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 (FY17–24, $13.3M) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 55% 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 +44% since the first grant, against +3% for the ones you funded once.
1463 repeat relationships — 896 still active in FY2024, 567 since wound down; 146 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, 89% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $6.0M 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
- MFMaine Farmland Trust8× · 2017–2024 · $23M · revenue +134% · 61% of their budget
Maine Coast Heritage Trust8× · 2017–2024 · $6.4M · revenue +106%- WSWorthington Scholarship Foundation2× · 2019–2020 · $4.5M · revenue ×15
Funded once
- TRTHE RIVER FUND MAINEone grant, 2020 · $462k · revenue -8%
- SMSaddleback Mountain Foundationone grant, 2020 · $400k · revenue -100%
CENTER FOR COMMUNITY CHANGEgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $250k · revenue +172%
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.
Kennebunk Land Trust's mission is to permanently conserve and steward land to benefit natural and human communities.
The Eastern Maine Conservation Initiative (EMCI) is a non-profit organization with broad conservation interests that seeks to: 1) Foster environmentally sustainable communities of the eastern Maine coast; 2) Encourage an appreciation of…
The Piscataquog Land Conservancy is a nonprofit land conservation organization founded in 1970. Its purpose is to conserve the natural and scenic environment of the Piscataquog, Souhegan and Nashua River watershed communities of southern…
Maine & Company is a private, non-profit business development sales organization. Its purpose is to improve Maine's success in attracting new business and expanding and retaining existing business by providing a focused, statewide sales…
To enrich, educate, and entertain the community through film and art.
To promote the protection and restoration of wetlands and related aquatic resources, to apply sound science to wetland management, and to provide training, education, and capacity building for our members and the public.
The nantucket conservation foundation owns, protects, and stewards over 9,000 acres of land and coastal shoreline, conserves nantucket's rare and significant natural resources, and engages in impactful ecological research to inform…
To support maine physicians, advance the quality of medicine in maine, and promote the health of all maine people.
ClimateWork Maine (CWM) is a private non-profit 501(c)(3) organization based in Maine that serves as a support network for businesses and business leaders that are taking action on climate change, to meet its challenges and to seize the…
The manufacturers association of maine is dedicated to promoting and strengthening manufacturing in maine as an informative voice for the state's manufacturing community.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (See) Inc and the most unlike its peers is New Sandy River and Rangeley Lake Railroad. 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 28 years old; the field is 21. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 16% startups (under 5 years old) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% lost their exemption, against 11% 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.
1545 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. 1545 of the 2,000 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 Maine Farmland Trust ↗
- Who funds Maine Coast Heritage Trust ↗
- Who funds Worthington Scholarship Foundation ↗
- Who funds THE HARRY E DAVIS PARTNERSHIP FOR CHILDREN'S ORAL HEALTH ↗
- Who funds FIDELITY INVESTMENTS CHARITABLE GIFT FUND ↗
- Who funds Good Shepherd Food Bank ↗
- Who funds FIRST NATIONS DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds University of Maine Foundation ↗
- Who funds Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust ↗
- Who funds IMMIGRANT LEGAL ADVOCACY PROJECT ↗
- Who funds GULF OF MAINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds Forest Society of Maine ↗
- Who funds MAINE ORGANIC FARMERS AND GARDENERS ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds WABANAKI HEALTH & WELLNESS NPC ↗
- Who funds PREBLE STREET ↗
- Who funds VANGUARD CHARITABLE ENDOWMENT PROGRAM ↗
- Who funds MaineHealth ↗
- Who funds University of Southern Maine Foundation ↗
- Who funds Homeworthy ↗
- Who funds MAINE INITIATIVESINC ↗
- Who funds Maine Public Broadcasting Corporation ↗
- Who funds Maine Mathematics & Science Alliance ↗
- Who funds DOWNEAST SALMON FEDERATION ↗
- Who funds Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences ↗
- Who funds Natural Resources Council of Maine Inc ↗
- Who funds GREAT POND MOUNTAIN CONSERVATION TR ↗
- Who funds DEFEND OUR HEALTH ↗
- Who funds Ketcha Outdoors ↗
- Who funds Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory ↗
- Who funds The Genesis Fund ↗
- Who funds OPERA HOUSE ARTS ↗
- Who funds SUSTAINABLE MARKETS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MAINE PEOPLE'S RESOURCE CENTER ↗
- Who funds MAINE COAST FISHERMENS ASSN ↗
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: Elmina B Sewall Foundation · Onion Foundation · Davis Family Foundation · John T Gorman Foundation · Fisher Charitable Foundation · Sam L Cohen Foundation · Bangor Savings Bank Foundation · Maine Health Access Foundation Inc · Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation Inc · Morton-Kelly Charitable Trust · Simmons Foundation - PerkinsThompson · Quimby Family 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 Maine Community Foundation Inc 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.
- New England Forestry Foundation Inc — 88% of income from government
- Bluehub Capital Inc — 32% of income from government
- New England Aquarium Corporation — 12% of income from government
- Manomet Inc — 12% of income from government
- Silent Spring Institute Inc — 12% of income from government
- Yale University — 12% of income from government
- Northeastern University — 7% of income from government
- Planned Parenthood of Northern New England Inc — 2% of income from government
- Appalachian Mountain Club — 1% of income from government
- Bennington College Corporation — 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.