· Private foundation
Sanders 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 $10k62 grants · $300k
- $10k–50k9 grants · $119k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MANNA FOOD CENTER | $26,000 |
| JEWISH SOCIETY SERVICE AGENCY | $17,881 |
| WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN | $13,500 |
| HEBREW IMMIGRANT AID SOCIETY - HIAS | $11,000 |
| SIBLEY FOUNDATION | $11,000 |
| AMFRIENDS OF NIR-OZ ISRAEL | $10,000 |
| ADL ANTI DEFAMATION LEAGUE | $10,000 |
| HOMES FOR OUR TROOPS-HOFT | $10,000 |
| A WIDER CIRCLE CENTER FOR COMMUNITY SERVICE | $10,000 |
| PROJECT ZAWADI | $9,000 |
| JESUIT REFUGEE SERVICE USA | $9,000 |
| CONGREGATION BETH EL | $8,926 |
| BCCHS EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION | $8,000 |
| BETHESDA CARES | $8,000 |
| GREATER DC DIAPER BANK | $7,500 |
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.
Your human-services grants (FY17–25, $241k) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 55% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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 7% of Sanders 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 +39% since the first grant, against +1% for the ones you funded once.
88 repeat relationships — 63 still active in FY2025, 25 since wound down; 6 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, 94% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $25k 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
- MFMANNA FOOD CENTER INC9× · 2017–2025 · $183k · revenue +82%
- BCBETHESDA CARES INC9× · 2017–2025 · $65k · revenue +150%
- PZPROJECT ZAWADI INC9× · 2017–2025 · $63k · revenue +271%
Funded once
- FCFAIRFIELD CENTER - THE LISTENING CORPSone grant, 2017 · $5k
- GYGRYC YOUTH CHORUSone grant, 2024 · $5k
- NSNATIONALITIES SERVICE CENTER OF PHILADELPHIAone grant, 2022 · $5k · revenue +9%
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 mission of the george washington university (gw) is to educate individuals in liberal arts, languages, sciences, learned professions, and other courses and subjects of study, and to conduct scholarly research and publish the findings…
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.
The organization provides medical care to improve, maintain, and restore the health of the people in the communities we serve.
As the parent entity of a blended health organization, highmark health seeks to improve the health and well-being of the people and communities it serves by providing affordable, accessible and high-quality healthcare.
Under the medical service plan of the university of maryland, school of medicine, administrative support services are provided to the physician practices of the university of maryland, including but not limited to information technology,…
Mjhs health system is a charitable not-for-profit established to support the activities of affiliated organizations. mjhs is built on the core values of compassion, dignity and respect, first established by the four brooklyn ladies in…
Primary functions are the coordination and delivery of health care resources and services, health care education for the hospital service area, long range analysis of health care needs and development of programs, and arranging for…
As the central community relations agency of the organized jewish community in our nation's capital, the jcrc of greater washington endeavors to foster a society based on freedom, justice and democratic pluralism for it is such a society…
The mission of upmc western maryland is to serve our community by providing outstanding patient care and to shape tomorrow's health system through clinical & technological innovation, research and education.
Under the medical service plan of the university of maryland school of medicine, medical services are rendered by the members of the faculty on behalf of the school of medicine in connection with their duties to provide clinical…
To provide multi-specialty surgical care, humanitarian aid and educational support to people in low- and middle-income countries.
A nonprofit scientific research organization that develops vaccines and antibodies for hiv, tuberculosis, and emerging infectious diseases.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Homes for Our Troops Inc and the most unlike its peers is Reaching Out to Youth Inc. 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 35 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) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 3% 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.
70 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. 70 of the 123 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 MANNA FOOD CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds A WIDER CIRCLE INC ↗
- Who funds BETHESDA CARES INC ↗
- Who funds PROJECT ZAWADI INC ↗
- Who funds JEWISH NATIONAL FUND (KEREN KAYEMETH LEISRAEL) INC ↗
- Who funds Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds TRUENORTH COMMUNITY SERVICES ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S INN AT NIH INC ↗
- Who funds LUNGEVITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds INOVA HEALTH SYSTEM FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds The Foundation for the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam Inc ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE JEWISH FEDERATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds PUPPIES BEHIND BARS INC ↗
- Who funds VAN ANDEL INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds SAFE HARBOR OF CHESTER COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds SOME INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY VOLUNTEERS IN MEDICINE ↗
- Who funds HOMES FOR OUR TROOPS INC ↗
- Who funds GREATER DC DIAPER BANK ↗
- Who funds SUBURBAN HOSPITAL FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Creighton University ↗
- Who funds FOLDS OF HONOR FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds OPERATION RENEWED HOPE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ENDLESS OPPORTUNITIES ↗
- Who funds RISE INC ↗
- Who funds BRIDGES TO INDEPENDENCE ↗
- Who funds BETHESDA-CHEVY CHASE HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATIONAL 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: Greater Washington Community Foundation · United Way of the National Capital Area · The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation · Philip L Graham Fund co Graham Holdings Company · Clark-Winchcole Foundation · The Community Foundation for Northern Virginia Inc · American Gift Fund · Nora Roberts Foundation · Adventist Healthcare Inc · Spm Foundation Inc · The Gary and Pennie Abramson Charitable Foundation · William S Abell Foundation Inc
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 Sanders 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.
- Bethesda Cares Inc — 100% of income from government
- Imagination Stage Inc — 13% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Inc — 11% of income from government
- Children's Inn at Nih Inc — 10% of income from government
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc — 7% of income from government
- A Wider Circle Inc — 6% of income from government
- Round House Theatre Inc — 5% of income from government
- Interfaith Works — 4% of income from government
- Manna Food Center Inc — 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.