A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 74% of PRAIRIE SPRINGS PAUL FLECKENSTEIN CHARITABLE TRUST’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.

02FY2025 · 10 grants

Where the money goes

Your grants by size, and where they go.

By grant size · FY2025

Under $10k5 grants · $5k
$10k–50k5 grants · $94k

$10,000

Median grant

States reached

$1.4M

Total assets

Largest grants
Recipient	Amount
WISCORPS INC	$49,236
MILWAUKEE PARKS FOUNDATION	$15,000
ALL HANDS BOATWORKS	$10,000
OUTDOOR RECREATION ALLIANCE	$10,000
Individual grant recipient	$10,000
NOTRE DAME SCHOOL OF MILWAUKEE	$1,456
IZAAK WALTON LEAGUE UPPER MISSISSIPPI CHAPTER	$1,000
LAKE PARK FRIENDS	$1,000
JUNEAU PARK FRIENDS	$1,000
LAKE SHORE STATE PARK	$1,000

02The need

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.

show:

Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 92% of your dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Most of your grants land in higher-need ZIPs.

grant to an above-average-need area below average· circle size = grant amount

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.

Where the work is directed

The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.

About 23% of Prairie Springs Paul Fleckenstein Charitable Trust’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. Read by recipient address, 100% of the giving stays in WI; read by stated purpose it is 18% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.

Prairie Springs Paul Fleckenstein Charitable Trustlessmore of its giving

Placed by recipient address · 82% directed abroad (not shown)

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.

03Your edge

repeat funding

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.

99%of every dollar goes to organizations you’ve funded before.

$9.1M · 24 repeat orgs$91k to everyone else

And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +48% since the first grant, against +31% for the ones you funded once.

24 repeat relationships — 9 still active in FY2025, 15 since wound down; 1 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (too recent to call).

How the two cohorts compare

Re-uppedFunded once

Organizations

Total granted

$9.1M

$81k

Median revenue growth · since first grant

+48%

+31%

Still filing today

71%

50%

New vs renewed · share of each year

In FY2025, 90% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $10k went to new ones.

RenewedFirst-time

Where new relationships form · theme of each grantee’s first grant

EnvironmentEducationRecreation & SportsAnimalsCommunity ImprovementHealthOther

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

IA
ICE AGE TRAIL ALLIANCE INC
4× · 2019–2023 · $798k · revenue +136%
CU
CARROLL UNIVERSITY INC
3× · 2017–2019 · $705k · revenue +18%
CC
CENTRAL CONSERVATION INC
6× · 2019–2025 · $123k · revenue +142%

Funded once

IG
Individual grant recipient
one grant, 2017 · $25k
HIGHLAND COMMUNITY SCHOOL INCgraduated
one grant, 2017 · $15k · revenue +58%
GM
Greater Milwaukee Committee for Community Development
one grant, 2018 · $15k · revenue -40%

Repeat = funded in two or more distinct years; growth and survival are read from each grantee’s own subsequent IRS filings.

04Your field

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.

Landmark Conservancy Inc

Landmark conservancy is a nationally accredited, nonprofit conservation organization serving 20 counties across northwest wisconsin. their mission is to conserve wisconsin's natural legacy for everyone...forever.

Environment

Milwaukee Water Commons Inc

Milwaukee water commons is helping catalyze milwaukee as a true model water city-a place where we all have a stake in the health of our waters and all share in their stewardship and benefits. we are advancing our community envisioned water…

Environment

Land Conservancy of West Michigan

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…

Environment

Wisconsin Waterfowl Association Inc

The purpose of the association shall be to restore and conserve wisconsin's waterfowl and wetland resources; to educate state waterfowlers during their progression from natural resource consumer to steward; and to promote governmental…

Environment

Fund for Lake Michigan Inc

Lake Michigan is one of Wisconsin's greatest assets, and its water is critical to the state's future. The Fund for Lake Michigan is here to help sustain the Lake on behalf of the people and places that depend on it. Our goal is to have a…

Environment

Wisconsin Wildlife Federation Inc

The wisconsin wildlife federation has a dual mission to engage in conservation education and to advocate for sound conservation policy.

Environment

Wisconsin Association of Lakes Inc

The mission of the wisconsin association of lakes is to conserve, enhance, and restore wisconsin's 15,000 lakes to ensure their sustainability for the benefit and collective use and enjoyment for this and future generations.

Environment

Natural Resources Foundation of

To protect wisconsin's lands, waters, and wildlife by providing funding, leading partnerships, and connecting all people with nature.

—

Glacial Lakes Conservancy Inc

Glacial Lakes Conservancy, as a land trust, is a nonprofit organization that, as part of its mission, actively works to conserve land by undertaking or assisting in land or conservation easement acquisitions.

Environment

Friends of Wisconsin State Parks Inc

To preserve, promote, protect, and enhance wisconsin state parks, forests, trails, and recreation areas.

Recreation & Sports

Wisconsin Land and Water Conservation Association Inc

To protect, conserve, and enhance wisconsin's natural resources by advocating for and supporting county conservation efforts, for current and future generations.

Environment

Madison LakeWay Partners Inc

Madison LakeWay Partners is a private 501(c)(3) organization partnering with the City of Madison to leverage philanthropic dollars to reimagine the Lake Monona waterfront along John Nolen Drive. The Partners imagine the waterfront as a…

Recreation & Sports

For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Milwaukee Parks Foundation Inc and the most unlike its peers is Earthjustice. 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 35 years old; the field is 21. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.

The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.

Closures · last 5 years

The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 10% of the field you don’t fund.

orgs you fund

0.0%0/27

the rest of the field

10%

1,121/11,061

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.

05the grantee network

26 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. 26 of the 36 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.

Load-bearing (≥25% of a budget)

Early backer (in before they grew)

25/26

Grantees still filing

22/26

Grew since you first funded

Where your money sits — by cause, then by grantee

Other$7,284,436Environment$916,736Education$795,800Philanthropy$586,351Recreation & Sports$103,500Animals$103,000Community Improvement$60,000Health$10,000

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.

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.

Herbert H Kohl Charities IncWI31.5× affinity13 shared granteesties to 11 of 11Hover any node to trace its alignments.Compare side by side →

Open a dossier: Herbert H Kohl Charities Inc · Baird Foundation Inc · Greater Milwaukee Foundation Inc · Green Bay Packers Foundation · Ralph Evinrude Foundation Inc · Evan & Marion Helfaer Foundation · Harley-Davidson Foundation Inc · R a Stevens Family Foundation · Anon Charitable Trust · Joseph and Vera Zilber Family Foundation Inc · United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County Inc · Gardner 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 Prairie Springs Paul Fleckenstein Charitable Trust 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.

2024

’20’21’22’23’24’25

no gov moneyreceives it· size = income

0get no government money at all

8report government grants on their 990 we could not trace to a source (not plotted)

0rely on government for over half their income

typical government reliance, FY20–25

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.

05Through Plinth

Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus

How do I get to Prairie Springs Paul Fleckenstein Charitable Trust?

Find your warmest path to Prairie Springs Paul Fleckenstein Charitable Trust 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.

More from the funding graph

The unnamed billions

grants reported with no recipient in the public record

The regranting layer

51% of grant dollars land in the regranting layer

The DAF merry-go-round

$9.7B circulates between donor-advised funds

The camps

funders cluster by geography, not ideology

By state

where grant money is based, and what stays home

State money flows

the interactive map of money crossing state lines