· Public charity
Mountain Association for Community Economic Development Inc
We serve our mission to build a new economy by offering flexible loans and technical support to existing and startup businesses and organizations; helping businesses, nonprofits, public agencies and homeowners find much- needed energy savings; and by engaging in research, communications and advocacy for policy and narrative change.
What you funded, over time
Every grant clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 10 grants below total $973,146 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $1,009,655 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $36,509 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 · FY2025
- Under $10k1 grant · $5k
- $10k–50k3 grants · $59k
- $50k–250k5 grants · $509k
- $250k+1 grant · $400k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| KENTUCKY COALITION | $400,000 |
| APPALACIAN INVESTMENT CORP | $220,000 |
| HOUSING ORIENTED MINISTRIES INC | $134,096 |
| APPALACHIAN VOICES | $55,000 |
| LAUREL COUNTY AFRICAN AMERICAN | $50,000 |
| MARTIN COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENT | $50,000 |
| MARTIN COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT | $20,000 |
| PRESBYTERIAN CHILD WELFARE AGENCY | $20,000 |
| RURAL ACTION | $19,000 |
| LEARNING LANDSCAPES | $5,050 |
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 (FY17–25, $117k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 32% 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.
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 14% of Mountain Association for Community Economic Development Inc’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 +113% since the first grant, against +23% for the ones you funded once.
19 repeat relationships — 5 still active in FY2025, 14 since wound down; 5 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, 65% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $345k 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
- KCKENTUCKY COALITION INC9× · 2017–2025 · $4.3M · revenue +56% · 34% of their budget
- HOHOUSING ORIENTED MINISTRIES ESTABLISHED FOR SERVIC2× · 2024–2025 · $169k · revenue +47%
- ASAPPALACHIAN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT6× · 2017–2022 · $152k · revenue +198%
Funded once
- KCKENTUCKY CENTER FOR ECONOMIC POLICY INCone grant, 2021 · $1.5M · revenue -35% · 59% of their budget
- VEVarious entities receiving less than 5000 eachone grant, 2017 · $179k
- COCITY OF MIDDLESBOROone grant, 2024 · $88k
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 provide economic development to southeastern kentucky.
To help local farms thrive, link farmers to markets and supporters, and build healthy communities through connections to local food.
Our purpose is to educate, advocate and connect with our members on issues that are important to the economic development in the commonwealth of kentucky.
Everything we do is market-focused and proactively promotes and protects the interests of the southeast dairy farm families.
Backroads of appalachia is a non-profit organization with a mission to provide new economic opportunities within the communities of eastern kentucky and southwest virginia.
To facilitate the economic growth and development of the southern kentucky region.
Build a world-class economy in northern kentucky through the expansion of existing businesses and the creation and attraction of high quality, primary industry employers.
Economic Development and Tourism Promotion in Eastern Kentucky
To increase small business lending by providing appalachian member institutions that serve underserved people and communities with new sources of capital.
Kentucky resources council (krc) is a public-interest environmental law and advocacy organization that works to protect and defend the people, communities, and natural resources of kentucky. krc uses legal and strategic advocacy to protect…
To promote and expand the horticultural enterprises in the state of kentucky, and to increase farmer profitability, improve infrastructure and provide technical assistance.
ACLC is a nonprofit law firm that engages in strategic litigation and policy work in the areas of mine safely and health, environmental protection, legacy costs of extractive industries on the people, land and economy of the Central…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Kentucky Center for Agriculture and Rural Development Inc and the most unlike its peers is Ultimate Recycling Center Re Use Industries. 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 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 20% 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 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.
30 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. 30 of the 39 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 KENTUCKY COALITION INC ↗
- Who funds KENTUCKY CENTER FOR ECONOMIC POLICY INC ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR APPALACHIAN KENTUCKY INC ↗
- Who funds APPALACHIAN INVESTMENT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds HOUSING ORIENTED MINISTRIES ESTABLISHED FOR SERVIC ↗
- Who funds APPALACHIAN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT ↗
- Who funds RURAL ACTION INC ↗
- Who funds APPALACHIAN CENTER FOR ECONOMIC NETWORKS INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY FARM ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds APPALACHIAN VOICES ↗
- Who funds PARTNER COMMUNITY CAPITAL INC ↗
- Who funds COALFIELD DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds KENTUCKY VOICES FOR HEALTH INC ↗
- Who funds West Virginia Food & Farm Coalition Inc ↗
- Who funds OFFICE OF KENTUCKY LEGAL SERVICES PROGRAMS INC ↗
- Who funds BEREA COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds TENNESSEE ADVANCED ENERGY BUSINESS COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds KENTUCKY CENTER FOR AGRICULTURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT INC ↗
- Who funds PRESBYTERIAN CHILD WELFARE AGENCY ↗
- Who funds HIGHLANDER RESEARCH & EDUCATION CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds HEART AND HAND HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds HOUSING DEVELOPMENT ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds Solar United Neighbors Inc ↗
- Who funds OHIO HILL COUNTRY HERITAGE ARE ↗
- Who funds FARMERS RURAL ELECTRIC COOPERATIVE CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds STEP BY STEP INC ↗
- Who funds ENERGY EFFICIENT WEST VIRGINIA ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF NORTH ALABAMA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds APPALSHOP INC ↗
- Who funds ULTIMATE RECYCLING CENTER RE USE INDUSTRIES ↗
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 Educational Foundation of America · Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Inc · Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation Incorporated · Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky Inc · Rockefeller Family Fund Inc · Blue Grass Community Foundation Inc · Appalachian Voices · Berea College · Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels Inc · Clif Family Foundation · Appalachian Sustainable Development · Charles M and Mary D Grant Fdn Xxxxx0004
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 Mountain Association for Community Economic Development 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.
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 Mountain Association for Community Economic Development Inc?
Find your warmest path to Mountain Association for Community Economic Development 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.