· Private foundation
Robertson 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.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2019–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k114 grants · $318k
- $10k–50k82 grants · $1.4M
- $50k–250k17 grants · $1.3M
- $250k+43 grants · $102M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY | $21,000,000 |
| SUCCESS ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOLS | $10,000,000 |
| ROBERTSON SCHOLARS LEADERSHIP PROGRAM | $9,660,077 |
| ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND INC | $7,000,000 |
| THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY | $5,000,000 |
| THE NEW YORK STEM CELL FOUNDATION INC | $4,925,022 |
| ROCKEFELLER PHILANTHROPY ADVISORS INC | $4,875,000 |
| THE NEW YORK STEM CELL FOUNDATION INC | $3,837,850 |
| INSTITUTO CLIMA E SOCIEDADE | $3,375,000 |
| FOUNDATION FOR INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE ENVIRONMENT (FILE) | $3,000,000 |
| CANCER RESEARCH INSTITUTE | $2,625,000 |
| WINDWARD FUND | $2,500,000 |
| MEMORIAL SLOAN-KETTERING CANCER CENTER | $2,400,000 |
| METHANE SAT LLC | $2,000,000 |
| TRANSFORMA | $1,500,000 |
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 (FY19–24, $11.9M) land where the poverty rate runs at 17%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 100% of those 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 10% of Robertson 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. Read by recipient address, 67% of the giving stays in NY; read by stated purpose it is 55% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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 +26% since the first grant, against +23% for the ones you funded once.
214 repeat relationships — 121 still active in FY2024, 93 since wound down; 99 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (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 FY2024, 64% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $27M 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
- SASUCCESS ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOLS INC6× · 2019–2024 · $56M · revenue +137%
ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND INCORPORATED6× · 2019–2024 · $51M · revenue +139%- TRTHE ROBERTSON SCHOLARS LEADERSHIP PROGRAM5× · 2019–2023 · $41M · revenue +38% · 84% of their budget
Funded once
- TETHE ENERGY FOUNDATIONone grant, 2019 · $3.0M · revenue -13%
- CFC F FOUNDATION INCgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $2.3M · revenue +168%
- MLMETHANESAT LLC-930 USDone grant, 2019 · $2.0M
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 University of New Haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts and professional education. Our mission is to prepare our students to lead purposeful and fulfilling lives in a…
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.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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 clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
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…
Northeast college of health sciences (the college) is committed to academic excellence, leadership, and professional best practices in the health sciences.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Queens Library Foundation Inc and the most unlike its peers is Richard Hampton Jenrette 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 32 years old; the field is 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 19% startups (under 5 years old) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.3% lost their exemption, against 10% 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.
368 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. 368 of the 505 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 NEW YORK STEM CELL FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds SUCCESS ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOLS INC ↗
- Who funds ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds THE ROBERTSON SCHOLARS LEADERSHIP PROGRAM ↗
- Who funds THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds EARTHJUSTICE ↗
- Who funds UNITED STATES ENERGY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CANCER RESEARCH INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds HARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICANS FOR OXFORD INC ↗
- Who funds MEMORIAL SLOAN-KETTERING CANCER CENTER ↗
- Who funds THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds THE BRIDGESPAN GROUP INC ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds Rocky Mountain Institute ↗
- Who funds The Broad Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds IMENTOR INC ↗
- Who funds ROCKEFELLER PHILANTHROPY ADVISORS INC ↗
- Who funds OCEAN CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds OCEANA INC ↗
- Who funds Wildlife Conservation Society ↗
- Who funds REGULATORY ASSISTANCE PROJECT ↗
- Who funds SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENTAL LAW CENTER ↗
- Who funds CLASSICAL CHARTER SCHOOLS ↗
- Who funds TEACH FOR ALL INC ↗
- Who funds Teach for America Inc ↗
- Who funds PANTHERA CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL HIGH SCHOOL IN VIRGINIA ↗
- Who funds THE ENERGY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Mary's Meals USA Inc ↗
- Who funds WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds WINDWARD FUND ↗
- Who funds C F FOUNDATION 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 Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · The New York Community Trust · The Hyde and Watson Foundation · The Chase and Stephanie Coleman Foundation · Robin Hood Foundation · The Bessemer Giving Fund · The Moore Charitable Foundation Inc · Indian River Community Foundation Inc · Ainslie Foundation · Acquavella Family Foundation · Triangle Community Foundation Inc · North Carolina Community 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 Robertson 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — 63% of income from government
- Family Centers Inc — 20% of income from government
- The Broad Institute Inc — 19% of income from government
- New Haven Reads Community Book Bank Inc — 13% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Education Resource Strategies Inc — 4% of income from government
- International Game Fish Association Inc — 2% of income from government
- Greenwich Hospital — 0% of income from government
- Lynn University Inc — 0% of income from government
- The Learning Alliance Inc — 0% 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 Robertson Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Robertson 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.