· Private foundation
Merrill Family Foundation Inc
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
- $50k–250k4 grants · $675k
- $250k+1 grant · $300k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| SUNY COBLESKILL FOUNDATION | $300,000 |
| TURNING POINT PROGRAM | $225,000 |
| HABITAT FOR HUMANITY | $200,000 |
| OSU FOUNDATION | $200,000 |
| LIFEWORKS NORTHWEST | $50,000 |
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 (FY18–21, $10k) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 0% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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.
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.
21 repeat relationships — 4 still active in FY2025, 17 since wound down; 1 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, 77% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $225k 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
Oregon State University Foundation9× · 2017–2025 · $1.7M · revenue +42%
Portland YouthBuilders4× · 2019–2022 · $403k · revenue +31%
OREGON PUBLIC BROADCASTING6× · 2017–2022 · $315k · revenue +53%
Funded once
- BUBUSHNELL UNIVERSITY FKA NORTHWEST CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITYone grant, 2022 · $39k · revenue -14%
- FOFRIENDS OF NW FUSIONone grant, 2019 · $8k
- SFSMALL FRIENDS SCHOOLone grant, 2017 · $8k
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.
Seattle University is dedicated to educating the whole person, to professional formation, and to empowering leaders for a just and humane world.
The university of portland, an independently governed catholic university guided by the congregation of holy cross, addresses significant questions of human concern through interdisciplinary studies of the arts, sciences, and humanities…
Portland state university foundation is responsible for raising and managing private resources to advance psu's priorities and mission to be a leading urban university.
Portland playhouse's mission is to celebrate the complexity of the human experience. each season we produce 4-5 professional plays and community programs to serve 12,000 people. our free education programs have made space for 10,000+ young…
The mission of oak hill school is to provide the best pre-kindergarten through 8th grade education, creating caring and responsible critical thinkers.
The oregon community foundation trust is a supporting organization of the oregon community foundation (ocf). the trust makes grants that further the mission of ocf which is to improve the lives of all oregonians through the power of…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Lifeworks Nw and the most unlike its peers is Archer Glen Elementary School. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 44 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 23% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
16 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. 16 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 Oregon State University Foundation ↗
- Who funds WILLAMETTE WEST HABITAT FOR HUMANITY ↗
- Who funds Portland YouthBuilders ↗
- Who funds OREGON PUBLIC BROADCASTING ↗
- Who funds LIFEWORKS NW ↗
- Who funds TURNING POINT PROGRAM ↗
- Who funds Sherwood Education Foundation ↗
- Who funds BUSHNELL UNIVERSITY FKA NORTHWEST CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds ST MARY'S HOME ↗
- Who funds Sherwood Foundation for the Arts ↗
- Who funds OREGON SYMPHONY ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds Theatre in the Grove ↗
- Who funds ST JUDE CHILDREN'S RESEARCH HOSPITAL INC ↗
- Who funds NEW AVENUES FOR YOUTH INC ↗
- Who funds SHERWOOD 4 KIDS SAKE ↗
- Who funds Archer Glen Elementary School ↗
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: The Reser Family Foundation · The Oregon Community Foundation · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · Amazonsmile 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 Merrill Family 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- New Avenues for Youth Inc — 12% of income from government
- Portland YouthBuilders — 10% of income from government
- Lifeworks Nw — 7% of income from government
- Bushnell University Fka Northwest Christian University — 5% of income from government
- Oregon Symphony Association — 5% of income from government
- Oregon Public Broadcasting — 0% of income from government
- Oregon State University Foundation — 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 Merrill Family Foundation Inc?
Find your warmest path to Merrill Family Foundation Inc 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.