· Private foundation
McDowell 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 $10k1 grant · $5k
- $250k+1 grant · $500k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| AMERICAN RIVERS ANGLERS FUND | $500,000 |
| CENTER FOR THE ARTS | $5,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $10k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, 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.
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 +45% since the first grant, against +25% for the ones you funded once.
35 repeat relationships — 2 still active in FY2025, 33 since wound down.
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, 100% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $0 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
- BBREAKTHROUGH7× · 2018–2024 · $41k · revenue +159%
- HHAVEN8× · 2017–2024 · $26k · revenue +91%
- GVGALLATIN VALLEY LAND TRUST7× · 2017–2024 · $18k · revenue +234%
Funded once
WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INCone grant, 2022 · $30k · revenue -40%- MLMN LAND TRUSTone grant, 2020 · $25k
- UBURBAN BOATBUILDERS INCgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $15k · revenue +26%
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.
Inspire people to enjoy and protect birds through recreation, education, conservation, and restoration of the environment, upon which we all depend.
Protecting our shrub-steppe and connecting people to this vanishing landscape.
Conservation legacy engages future leaders who protect, restore, and enhance our nation's lands through community-based service.in 2024, conservation legacy engaged 2,524 participants who completed over 1.5 million service hours on public…
Preserve in perpetuity the natural habitats, rural landscapes, and open spaces of the great peninsula of washington's puget sound.
Los padres forestwatch protects the los padres national forest and the carrizo plain national monument through education, advocacy, and when necessary, legal action for the benefit of our communities, climate and future generations.
Balboa Park Conservancy (the Conservancy) was organized on November 3, 1923. The Conservancy is the City of San Diegos (the City) partner and advocated for the greater good of Balboa Park (the Park). The Conservancy collaborated with and…
The mission of the South Fork Conservancy is to restore and preserve habitat along the tributaries of Peachtree Creek. We give the community access to these healthy, restored greenspaces by designing, building and maintaining nature trails.
Our mission is conserving West Michigans ecologically critical land. We protect land by creating public nature preserves, providing support to communities and local governments in creating natural areas, and helping private landowners…
To protect, enhance and connect the Ann and Roy Butler Trail at Lady Bird Lake for the benefit of all.
Cuenca los ojos works to preserve and restore the biodiversity of the us/mexican borderlands through land protection, habitat restoration and wildlife reintroduction.
The Coastal Prairie Conservancy (CPC) works to sustain a resilient Texas by preserving coastal prairies, wetlands, farms, and ranches to benefit people and wildlife forever. Continued on Schedule OCPC conserves land, restores and enhances…
The mission of wildcoast is to conserve coastal and marine ecosystems and address climate change through natural solutions. our staff is dedicated to conserving threatened and endangered coastlines and wildlife in california and mexico.…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Save the Manatee Club Inc and the most unlike its peers is Northside Boxing Club 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 33 years old; the field is 18. 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 7% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
53 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. 53 of the 69 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 BREAKTHROUGH ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds HAVEN ↗
- Who funds GALLATIN VALLEY LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds URBAN BOATBUILDERS INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHSIDE BOXING CLUB INC ↗
- Who funds Santa Barbara Education Foundation ↗
- Who funds WILDERNESS INQUIRY INC ↗
- Who funds City Kids Adventures ↗
- Who funds Mission Scholars ↗
- Who funds PROTECT OUR WATER JACKSON HOLE INC ↗
- Who funds Pennys Flight Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds ONE VALLEY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GASPARILLA ISL CONSER & IMPROVE ASSN ↗
- Who funds Pease Park Conservancy ↗
- Who funds THE FIT KIDS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds HELPING HAND HOME FOR CHILDREN INC ↗
- Who funds BOCA GRANDE HEALTH CLINIC FNDTN INC ↗
- Who funds THE LAND TRUST FOR SANTA BARBARA COUNTY ↗
- Who funds THE TRUST FOR PUBLIC LAND ↗
- Who funds Community Center for the Arts ↗
- Who funds DANCERS WORKSHOP ↗
- Who funds FRANKLIN CENTER ↗
- Who funds STRIPPING FOR A CURE ↗
- Who funds AUSTIN EXPLORE INC ↗
- Who funds HEARTGIFT FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SCHOOL YEAR ABROAD INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY SAFETY NETWORK ↗
- Who funds SPARK RESCUE SANTA BARBARA ↗
- Who funds LEMON BAY CONSERVANCY 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: Austin Community Foundation Inc · Gulf Coast Community Foundation Inc · Vick Foundation Inc · The Cruz Family Foundation Inc · McCrea Foundation · Otto Bremer Trust · The Seidler Foundation · The Webber Family Foundation · Longview Foundation · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · Community Foundation of Greater Memphis Inc · The Dorothy and Jim Kronzer 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 McDowell 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% 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.