· Public charity
Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation
To implement an informed, consensus-based national outreach strategy that will increase participation in recreational angling and boating and thereby increase public awareness and appreciation of the need to protect, conserve and restore this nation's aquatic natural resources.
What you funded, over time
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 95% of RECREATIONAL BOATING AND FISHING FOUNDATION’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.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 8 grants below total $109,066 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $197,923 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $88,857 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 $10k5 grants · $37k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $22k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $50k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| SOUTHEASTERN ASSOCIATION OF FISH AND WILDLIFE AGENCIES (SEAFWA) | $50,000 |
| COLORADO DIVISION OF WILDLIFE | $12,000 |
| TEXAS PARKS AND WILDLIFE DEPARTMENT | $10,000 |
| NORTH CAROLINA WILDLIFE RESOURCES COMMISSION | $9,275 |
| CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF FISH AND WILDLIFE | $8,154 |
| VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF GAME AND INLAND FISHERIES | $7,600 |
| FLORIDA FISH AND WILDLIFE CONSERVATION COMMISSION | $6,537 |
| RHODE ISLAND DEPT OF ENVIRONMENTAL MGMT DIVISON OF FISH AND WILDLIFE | $5,500 |
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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 85% of your 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 17% of Recreational Boating and Fishing 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 +99% since the first grant, against +44% for the ones you funded once.
32 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2025, 24 since wound down.
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, 100% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $0 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
- CDCALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF FISH & WILDLIFE9× · 2017–2025 · $265k
- TWTENNESSEE WILDLIFE RESOURCES AGENCY4× · 2020–2023 · $161k
- IDIOWA DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES6× · 2017–2023 · $156k
Funded once
- MDMICHIGAN DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES3× · 2022–2025 · $55k
- SOState of Arizona4× · 2021–2024 · $55k
- WAWESTERN ASSOCIATION OF FISH AND WILDLIFE AGENCIESgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $35k · revenue +44%
Repeat = funded in two or more distinct years; growth and survival are read from each grantee’s own subsequent IRS filings.
7 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. 7 of the 43 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.
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: National Fish and Wildlife Foundation · American Bar Association · Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists Inc · Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation Inc · Investor Protection Trust · Association of State and Territorial Health Officials · The Pew Charitable Trusts · Association of Public Health Laboratories Inc · The Nature Conservancy · National Assembly of State Arts Agencies Inc · National Association of State Procurement Officals Inc · Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs
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 Recreational Boating and Fishing 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.
- Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida I — 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.