· Private foundation
Robert Jensen Dau Foundation
Its FY2025 filing reports that it funds preselected organizations and did not take unsolicited requests; check the foundation's own site before ruling it out.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k7 grants · $23k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $53k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $52k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| GREAT LAKES CENTER FOR THE ARTS | $51,500 |
| PEN AMERICA | $33,000 |
| CHICAGO BOTANIC GARDEN | $20,000 |
| CITY KIDS WILDERNESS PROJECT | $5,000 |
| CHURCH OF THE HOLY COMFORTER | $5,000 |
| BAY VIEW CHAMBER MUSIC | $4,000 |
| BAY VIEW ASSOCIATION | $3,250 |
| PETOSKEY HARBOR SPRINGS COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $3,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $1,855 |
| ST MARGARETS CHURCH | $1,000 |
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 (FY20–20, $2k) land where the poverty rate runs at 7%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 0% 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.
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 +24% since the first grant, against +17% for the ones you funded once.
19 repeat relationships — 9 still active in FY2025, 10 since wound down; 1 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, 97% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $4k 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
- PAPEN AMERICAN CENTER INC7× · 2017–2025 · $306k · revenue +110%
- CHCHICAGO HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY9× · 2017–2025 · $180k · revenue +37%
- GLGreat Lakes Center for the Arts5× · 2019–2025 · $143k · revenue +14%
Funded once
- FFFERRIS FOUNDATIONone grant, 2022 · $50k · revenue -3%
- LLEWAone grant, 2019 · $41k
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2017 · $29k
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 of washington cities builds connections between our state's diverse cities and towns, while providing our members with the support needed to thrive through delivery of data-driven education, nationally recognized pooling…
Council for court excellence's (cce's) mission is to bring people together to conduct research, educate, and advocate to make d.c.'s unique legal systems more just, equitable, and accountable to the community.
The mission of denver botanic gardens is to connect people with plants, especially plants from the rocky mountain region and similar regions around the world, providing delight and enlightenment to everyone.
Strengthening baltimore's communities through education, skills development and community service.
A non-profit established in 1998, the cultural landscape foundation (tclf) connects people to places. tclf educates and engages the public to make our shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its stewards.…
To inform and enrich the intellectual lives of 20,000 alumni of harvard university in the washington, dc area and to assist harvard university with respect to applicants and undergraduates from the dc area.
Create a more accessible, sustainable, prosperous and livable national capital region by being a discussion forum, expert resource, issue advocate, and catalyst for action.
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…
Central indiana corporate partnership (cicp) is an alliance of indiana's business and research university leaders coming together to foster long-term prosperity for the region. cicp's mission is to transform the economy of indiana in order…
To attract, recruit, advance, and retain attorneys of color in the twin cities through education and collaboration with member organizations.
Preservation of civil liberties through advocacy and lobbying.
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.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Council of Michigan Foundations and the most unlike its peers is KEEPSMILIN4ABBIE 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 33 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 2% 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.
31 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. 31 of the 49 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 PEN AMERICAN CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds Great Lakes Center for the Arts ↗
- Who funds Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice ↗
- Who funds FERRIS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE BAY VIEW ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH ↗
- Who funds City Kids to Wilderness Project Inc ↗
- Who funds Little Traverse Conservancy Inc ↗
- Who funds ARLINGTON FREE CLINIC INC ↗
- Who funds BRIDGES TO INDEPENDENCE ↗
- Who funds CULPEPPER GARDEN I INC ↗
- Who funds DONORSCHOOSEORG ↗
- Who funds CITY BLOSSOMS INC ↗
- Who funds LIVING DESERT THE ↗
- Who funds FIRST SHIFT JUSTICE PROJECT ↗
- Who funds DENISON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds DESERT COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Animal Welfare League of Arlington ↗
- Who funds HORTON'S KIDS INC ↗
- Who funds TRUE GROUND HOUSING PARTNERS INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHERN VIRGINIA ALLIANCE LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds COUNCIL OF MICHIGAN FOUNDATIONS ↗
- Who funds BAY HARBOR FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MICHIGAN DYSLEXIA INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds ALIVE 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 Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation · United Way of the National Capital Area · Philip L Graham Fund co Graham Holdings Company · Greater Washington Community Foundation · Arlington Community Foundation · The Community Foundation for Northern Virginia Inc · Reinsch Pierce Family Foundation Inc · Act for Alexandria · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Mightycause Charitable Foundation · Verizon Foundation · Raymond James Charitable Endowment 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 Robert Jensen Dau 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.
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 Robert Jensen Dau Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Robert Jensen Dau 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.