· Private foundation
Penner Family Foundation
Its FY2024 filing reports that it funds preselected organizations and did not take unsolicited requests; check the foundation's own site before ruling it out.
Read this first · the figures below need context
56% of Penner Family Foundation’s FY2024 grant dollars went to Brown University, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2024 names 59 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it. Everything below is therefore FY2019, the last year Penner Family Foundation named its own grantees at scale: 48 organizations, $17M. It is dated, not current.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2018–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2019
- Under $10k17 grants · $50k
- $10k–50k19 grants · $295k
- $50k–250k5 grants · $330k
- $250k+11 grants · $16M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE ASPEN INSTITUTE | $3,598,600 |
| LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY | $2,560,000 |
| FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY | $2,510,000 |
| USA WATER POLO INC | $2,050,000 |
| GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY | $2,045,000 |
| ROBERTS ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT FUND | $1,000,000 |
| ST PAUL'S SCHOOL | $883,000 |
| TEACH FOR ALL INC | $500,000 |
| BROWN UNIVERSITY | $335,000 |
| THE OPPORTUNITY TRUST | $250,000 |
| CALmatters | $250,000 |
| COMMITTEE FOR A RESPONSIBLE FEDERAL BUDGET | $100,000 |
| KIPP FOUNDATION | $80,000 |
| TEACH FOR AMERICA | $50,000 |
| TRUSTEES OF DEERFIELD ACADEMY | $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 (FY21–24, $180k) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 17% 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 43% of Penner Family 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 +37% since the first grant, against +16% for the ones you funded once.
69 repeat relationships — 45 still active in FY2019, 24 since wound down; 19 grantees were first funded in FY2019 (too recent to call). Read against FY2019, the last year this funder named its own grantees directly; its giving has since run through a sponsor, which reports no donor behind each grant.
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, 77% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $3.2M 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
- KFKIPP FOUNDATION5× · 2018–2024 · $11M · revenue +108%
THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC7× · 2018–2024 · $11M · revenue +231%
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY7× · 2018–2024 · $8.3M · revenue +44%
Funded once
- PAPENINSULA ARTS GUILDone grant, 2018 · $1.0M · revenue +16%
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.
The association serves its members by creating resources that enable california school administrators to develop and apply creative leadership and management skills and in turn, improve the educational process for all students.
The mission of mit is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
At san francisco friends school, students learn in a community grounded in the quaker values of reflection, integrity, peaceful problem-solving and stewardship. our teachers challenge students with a dynamic curriculum that inspires…
Golden gate university prepares individuals to lead and serve by providing high quality, practice-based educational programs in law, taxation, business and related professions - as a nonprofit institution - in an innovative and challenging…
Rooted in the liberal arts & sciences & lutheran expression of the christian faith, & is committed to offering a challenging education that develops qualities of mind, spirit, & body necessary for a rewarding life of leadership & service…
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
The mission of the uc davis foundation is to secure, steward and manage private gifts for uc davis.
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
A private school that cultivates and celebrates the intellectual, imaginative, and humanitarian promise of each student in a community that practices mutual respect, embraces diversity, and inspires passion for learning.
The peak school seeks to ignite a passion for learning, to develop students of diverse talents and backgrounds who think critically and act with integrity, and to graduate compassionate, confident, capable students who will embrace their…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Kipp Foundation and the most unlike its peers is American Museum of Natural History. 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 36 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) — 1% 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.
81 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. 81 of the 94 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 BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds KIPP FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds USA WATER POLO INC ↗
- Who funds FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY ↗
- Who funds TEACH FOR ALL INC ↗
- Who funds REDF ↗
- Who funds THE OPPORTUNITY TRUST D/B/A ZEST EDUCATION ↗
- Who funds ST PAUL'S SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF DEERFIELD ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds GREATER WASHINGTON EDUCATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds ASPEN CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES ↗
- Who funds MONTEREY PENINSULA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE WESTERN STOCK SHOW ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds THE JED FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PENINSULA ARTS GUILD ↗
- Who funds MEADOWS MENTAL HEALTH POLICY INSTITUTE FOR TEXAS ↗
- Who funds WEST PALM GOLF COMMUNITY TRUST INC ↗
- Who funds CalMatters ↗
- Who funds BORN THIS WAY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ROCK HEALTH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ENTITLEMENTS HOW INC ↗
- Who funds JUST KEEP LIVIN FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds USA CYCLING INC ↗
- Who funds Teach for America Inc ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PROTECT OUR WINTERS ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL GOVERNORS ASSOCIATION CENTER FOR BEST PRACTICES ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ↗
- Who funds THE ASPEN COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds GOVERNOR DUMMER ACADEMY THE GOVERNOR'S ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds HonorED Foundation ↗
- Who funds AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY SERVICE AGENCY ↗
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: Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · Marin Community Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · The San Francisco Foundation · The Roberts Foundation · The Rob Walton Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · The David and Lucile Packard Foundation · Bright Funds Foundation · The Bessemer Giving Fund
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 Penner Family 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.
- Governor Dummer Academy the Governor's Academy — 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 Penner Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Penner Family 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.