· Private foundation
Mertz Gilmore Foundation
Its FY2024 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k94 grants · $282k
- $10k–50k134 grants · $3.6M
- $50k–250k57 grants · $3.6M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| OPENSECRETS | $200,000 |
| PROTEUS FUND | $135,000 |
| COLOR OF CHANGE EDUCATION FUND | $100,000 |
| APPALACHIAN VOICES | $100,000 |
| NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS | $98,000 |
| PUBLIC POLICY AND EDUCATION FUND OF NEW YORK | $75,000 |
| VIRGINIA INTERFAITH POWER & LIGHT | $75,000 |
| BVM CAPACITY BUILDING INSTITUTE | $75,000 |
| SUSTAINABLE MARKETS FOUNDATION | $75,000 |
| US CLIMATE ACTION NETWORK | $75,000 |
| CENTER FOR POPULAR DEMOCRACY | $75,000 |
| NEW GEORGIA PROJECT INC | $75,000 |
| VIRGINIA ORGANIZING | $75,000 |
| ROCKEFELLER PHILANTHROPY ADVISORS | $75,000 |
| WILLIAM J BRENNAN JR CENTER FOR JUSTICE INC | $75,000 |
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 (FY20–24, $2.0M) land where the poverty rate runs at 16%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 80% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 5% of Mertz Gilmore Foundation’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.
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 +22% since the first grant, against +14% for the ones you funded once.
272 repeat relationships — 185 still active in FY2024, 87 since wound down; 32 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; $782k 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
- OOPENSECRETS5× · 2020–2024 · $875k · revenue +103%
- PPPUBLIC POLICY AND EDUCATION FUND OF NEW YORK INC5× · 2020–2024 · $860k · revenue +9%
- VOVIRGINIA ORGANIZING INC5× · 2020–2024 · $695k · revenue +28%
Funded once
- NINational Institute on Money inone grant, 2020 · $165k · revenue -47%
- CACLIMSTE AND CLEAN ENERGY EQUITY FUNDone grant, 2023 · $150k
- A4ACTIVATE 48 EDUCATION FUNDgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $125k · revenue ×12
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.
To produce bold theatre experiences that reach across artistic, physical and social boundries. We aim to increase empathy and open-mindedness by illuminating nuanced perspectives and unspoken truths behind the salient issues of our time.…
The mission of new york city center is to be new york city's leading center for dance and musical theater. dedicated to making the arts accessible to the broadest possible audience, city center seeks to create a welcoming environment and…
To invest in america's finest artists and illuminate the value of artists to society.
CITY REPORT, INC. serves the people of New York through independent journalism that answers their information needs and holds the powerful to account.
The american theatre guild is dedicated to providing the experience of live theatre to foster passion, inspire creativity and empower youth within our communities.
A national non partisan public policy forum to illuminate issues of public policy.
To facilitate collaboration, innovation, strategic growth and cultural impact for the media arts field. We are a network of networks; we embolden creative media organization and artists and connect them with the world.
The Theater of the Emerging American Moment, Inc. (The TEAM), is a Brooklyn-based theatre ensemble whose mission is to collaboratively create new works about the experience of living in America today, and to generate dialogue about our…
As the leader in its field, public art fund brings dynamic contemporary art to a broad audience in new york city and beyond by mounting ambitious free exhibitions of international scope and impact that offer the public powerful experiences…
Ccr is a non-profit legal and educational organization dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the united states constitution the universal declaration of human rights. ccr stands with social justice movements…
A center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists since 1977, which continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.
Provision of pro bono legal and consulting services to qualifying individuals/companies in the creative arts.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Voices of Community Activists & Leaders (Vocal-Ny) Inc and the most unlike its peers is Jerome Robbins 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 28 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% 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.
373 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. 373 of the 421 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 NEW YORK FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PROTEUS FUND INC ↗
- Who funds PROJECT SOUTH INC ↗
- Who funds OPENSECRETS ↗
- Who funds PUBLIC POLICY AND EDUCATION FUND OF NEW YORK INC ↗
- Who funds NEW VENTURE FUND ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA ORGANIZING INC ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR POPULAR DEMOCRACY INC ↗
- Who funds APPALACHIAN VOICES ↗
- Who funds NEO Philanthropy Inc ↗
- Who funds Smartmeme DBA Center for Story-based Strategy ↗
- Who funds DANCE SERVICE NEW YORK CITY INC ↗
- Who funds Taproot Earth ↗
- Who funds THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL POWER ↗
- Who funds BVM CAPACITY BUILDING INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds WILLIAM J BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE INC ↗
- Who funds COLOR OF CHANGEORG EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds PUBLIC CITIZEN FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds West Harlem Environmental Action Inc ↗
- Who funds 9TO5 NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF WORKING WOMEN INC ↗
- Who funds KENTUCKY COALITION INC ↗
- Who funds CLIMATE JUSTICE ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds NEW GEORGIA PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds Make the Road New York ↗
- Who funds CHESAPEAKE CLIMATE ACTION NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA NEW MAJORITY EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds THE CAMPAIGN LEGAL CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds SALT LAKE CIVIL NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds NORTH STAR FUND INC ↗
- Who funds TIDES CENTER ↗
- Who funds COMMON CAUSE EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds TIDES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Action Center on Race & the Economy Institute ↗
- Who funds Southeast Climate & Energy Network ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK LIVE ARTS INC ↗
- Who funds DEMOS A NETWORK FOR IDEAS AND ACTION LTD ↗
- Who funds ReThink Media ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE FOR ENERGY ECONOMICS AND FINANCIAL ANALYSIS 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: The Howard Gilman Foundation Inc · The Scherman Foundation Inc · The Harkness Foundation for Dance Inc · Rockefeller Brothers Fund Inc · Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc · The Ford Foundation · Booth Ferris Foundation Xxxxx4008 · The Andrew W Mellon Foundation · The Fan Fox and Leslie R Samuels Foundation Inc · New York Foundation · Freedom Together Foundation · Surdna 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 Mertz Gilmore 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.
- Casa Inc — 8% of income from government
- Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to Mertz Gilmore Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Mertz Gilmore 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.