· Public charity
Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture
The MASSACHUSETTS SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING AGRICULTURE was incorporated on march 7, 1792 by an act of the senate and the house of representatives in general court assembled in the commonwealth of massachusetts.
What you funded, over time
Every grant clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2020–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k8 grants · $22k
- $10k–50k11 grants · $249k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE CARROT PROJECT | $35,000 |
| COASTAL FOODSHED | $30,000 |
| LAND FOR GOOD INC | $25,000 |
| BERKSHIRE AGRICULTURAL VENTURES | $25,000 |
| CONSERVATION LAW FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| MARION INSTITUTE | $25,000 |
| ECO AG COLLABORATIVE (MOMENTUM AG) | $24,122 |
| MA FOOD SYSTEM COLLABORATIVE (MFSC) | $20,000 |
| BOSTON FARMS COMMUNITY LAND TRUST INC | $20,000 |
| REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL COUNCIL | $10,000 |
| AMERICAN FARMLAND TRUST | $10,000 |
| FREED SEED FEDERATION INC | $5,000 |
| MA SHEEP AND WOOLCRAFT FAIR | $2,980 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS JUNG LAB (206 PAIGE LABORATORY) | $2,595 |
| MA FOOD SYSTEM COLLABORATIVE (MFSC) | $2,500 |
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 (FY24–24, $25k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 8%. 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 9% of Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture’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. Read by recipient address, 97% of the giving stays in MA; read by stated purpose it is 84% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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 +31% since the first grant, against +11% for the ones you funded once.
12 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2025, 4 since wound down; 9 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, 64% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $97k 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
THIRD SECTOR NEW ENGLAND INC4× · 2020–2025 · $158k · revenue +31%- THTHE HAROLD GRINSPOON FOUNDATION2× · 2023–2024 · $150k · revenue +203%
CONSERVATION LAW FOUNDATION INC5× · 2021–2025 · $100k · revenue +4%
Funded once
- WCWORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETYone grant, 2021 · $25k · revenue +11%
- TLTHE LIVESTOCK INSTITUTE OF SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND INCgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $25k · revenue +77%
- TLTHE LIVESTOCK INSTITUTE SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND MEAT PROCESSINGone grant, 2020 · $25k
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.
Support the development and enhancement of sustainable farming systems through farmer-to-farmer networking, innovation, demonstration, and education.
Mass farmers markets partners wtih farmers, consumers, and communities to improve the health of individuals, strenghten community vitality, and enhance local farm viability through farmers markets.
To build lasting prosperity without sacrificing the quality of life that defines maine.
To engage and catalyze global seafood supply chains in rebuilding depleted fish stocks and reducing the environmental impacts of fishing and fish farming.
NOFA-NH actively promotes organic, regenerative, ecologically sound farming, gardening, eating, and land care practices for healthy communities. NOFA-NH helps people build local, just, and sustainable food systems.
The northeast organic farming association of vermont promotes organic practices to build an ecomnomically viable, ecologically sound and socially just vermont agricultural system that benefits all living things.
Marbleseed educates, inspires, and empowers farmers to thrive in a sustainable, organic system of agriculture.
To educate the public in the methods of organic farming, gardening, and homesteading.
Iatp works locally and globally at the intersection of policy and practice to ensure fair and sustainable food, farm and trade systems.
To build resillient communities in central New Hampshire by providing access to sustainable local energy and local food leading to economic stability, a clean environment and healthy living.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Third Sector New England Inc and the most unlike its peers is University of Massachusetts Massachusetts 4-H Dairy. 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 23 years old; the field is 17. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 20% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 3% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 3% 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.
27 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. 27 of the 33 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 THIRD SECTOR NEW ENGLAND INC ↗
- Who funds THE HAROLD GRINSPOON FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CONSERVATION LAW FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Trustees of Tufts College ↗
- Who funds LAND FOR GOOD INC ↗
- Who funds BERKSHIRE AGRICULTURAL VENTURES INC ↗
- Who funds BOSTON FARMS COMMUNITY LAND TRUST INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY INVOLVED IN SUSTAINING AGRICULTURE INC ↗
- Who funds MILL CITY GROWS INC ↗
- Who funds COASTAL FOODSHED ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FARMLAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds THE LIVESTOCK INSTITUTE OF SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND INC ↗
- Who funds SOUTHEASTERN MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURAL PARTNERSHIP INC ↗
- Who funds THE MARION INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds ECOAG COLLABORATIVE INC ↗
- Who funds MASSACHUSETTS AQUACULTURE ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds Just Roots Inc ↗
- Who funds SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS NETWORK OF MASSACHUSETTS INC ↗
- Who funds Freed Seed Federation Inc ↗
- Who funds MARTHA'S VINEYARD SHELLFISH GROUP INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds NEW ENGLAND SHEEP AND WOOL GROWERS ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS Massachusetts 4-H Dairy ↗
- Who funds ESSEX NORTH SHORE AGRICULTURAL TECHNICAL FOUNDATION 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: Wild Geese Foundation Inc · Southcoast Community Foundation Inc · Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation Inc · Clif Family Foundation · Boston Foundation Inc · Eastern Bank Foundation · The David S Howe Foundation · Henry P Kendall Foundation · Farm Aid Inc · Project Bread-The Walk for Hunger Inc · Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund Trust · Point32health Foundation Inc
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 Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Coastal Foodshed — 66% of income from government
- Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture Inc — 35% of income from government
- Just Roots Inc — 15% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 13% of income from government
- Mill City Grows Inc — 7% of income from government
- Regional Environmental Council Inc — 6% of income from government
- Third Sector New England Inc — 3% of income from government
- Worcester County Horticultural Society — 2% of income from government
- The Marion Institute Inc — 1% of income from government
- Berkshire Agricultural Ventures Inc — 1% 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.
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Find your warmest path to Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture through trustees and officers whose names appear on both boards. Search for your organization and Plinth traces the shortest route it can evidence.
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