· Private foundation
Saunders 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k13 grants · $32k
- $10k–50k11 grants · $110k
- $50k–250k5 grants · $255k
- $250k+2 grants · $6.4M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| University of Rochester | $5,356,057 |
| Saunders Museum | $997,611 |
| Hope Hall School | $55,000 |
| The Healing Connection Residential Trtmt | $50,000 |
| Saranac Lake Civic Center | $50,000 |
| St John Fisher College | $50,000 |
| Education Success Foundation | $50,000 |
| Town of Ossian Historical Society | $10,000 |
| Bivona Child Advocacy Center | $10,000 |
| United Way of Greater Rochester | $10,000 |
| monroe community college foundation | $10,000 |
| monroe community college foundation | $10,000 |
| Nativity Preparatory Academy of Rochester | $10,000 |
| Adirondack Health Foundation | $10,000 |
| Youth for Christ | $10,000 |
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 (FY17–22, $71k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 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.
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.
62 repeat relationships — 20 still active in FY2024, 42 since wound down; 9 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, 84% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1.1M 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
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER4× · 2018–2024 · $5.4M · revenue +65%- ESEDUCATION SUCCESS NETWORK INC6× · 2017–2022 · $300k · revenue +25%
- PSPAUL SMITHS COLLEGE4× · 2018–2021 · $167k · revenue +16%
Funded once
- FLFinger Lakes Museumone grant, 2023 · $1.0M
- PSPAUL SMITHS COLLEGE - CASH DONATIONone grant, 2021 · $141k
- VHVINCENT HOUSE INCgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $34k · revenue +159%
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 rochester general college of health careers is dedicated to preparing adult learners with the knowledge, skills, and competencies necessary to pursue health careers, advanced education, and lifelong learning.
Rochester general health system, provides patient care, senior housing, laboratory services, and community outreach to residents and other clients in monroe county, new york and several surrounding counties.
Northeast college of health sciences (the college) is committed to academic excellence, leadership, and professional best practices in the health sciences.
Rochester academy of science charter school (the school) is a not-for-profit education corporation that operates kindergarten through 12th grades and is dedicated to providing quality education to a diverse body of students in the…
To raise and manage funds in support of united memorial medical center and it's affiliates.
To create dialogue and build community through contemporary art exhibitions and related programs
St. francis college is an independent, coeducational institution of higher education chartered by an act of the regents of the university of the state of new york on april 10, 1957.
Organization's missionas a university with the capacity to attract and engage the best scholars from around the world, yet small enough to support a personalized and academically rigorous student experience, syracuse university faculty and…
To provide high-school age youth with an academically challenging learning environment that prepares them to communicate effectively, think and reason critically, value diversity, engage in service learning, pursue academic excellence,…
Grcc passionately serves, promotes, and advocates for its over 1,200 members in order to bring economic prosperity to the nine-county finger lakes region of new york state. with a focus on business growth and job creation, grcc offers…
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…
New york medical college (nymc), a member of touro university, is a health sciences college whose purpose is to educate clinical and public health professionals as well as researchers, to conduct biomedical and population-based research…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Rochester and the most unlike its peers is Mirabito Philanthropy 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 37 years old; the field is 25. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 14% startups (under 5 years old) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 7% 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.
46 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. 46 of the 113 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 UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER ↗
- Who funds EDUCATION SUCCESS NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds THE YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS ACADEMY INC ↗
- Who funds PAUL SMITHS COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds Veterans Outreach Center Inc ↗
- Who funds ST JOHN FISHER UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds HOPE HALL ↗
- Who funds EDUCATION SUCCESS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds SARANAC LAKE CIVIC CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds GENESEE COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds GENESEE COUNTRY MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds MONROE COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds VINCENT HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds BOYS AND GIRLS CLUBS OF ROCHESTER INC ↗
- Who funds Cornell University ↗
- Who funds YMCA OF GREATER ROCHESTER (4368) ↗
- Who funds Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester Inc ↗
- Who funds FINGER LAKES AREA COMMUNITY ENDOWMENT ↗
- Who funds NATIVITY PREPARATORY ACADEMY OF ROCHESTER ↗
- Who funds COLD CREEK FOUNDATION ↗
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: Rochester Area Community Foundation · Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation · Esl Charitable Foundation · United Way of Greater Rochester and the Finger Lakes Inc · Paychex Charitable Foundation Inc · Daisy Marquis Jones Foundation · Greater Rochester Health Foundation · Rochester Area Community Foundation Depository Inc · The Florence M Muller Foundation · Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust · William & Sheila Konar Foundation · Summers 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 Saunders 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 Saunders Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Saunders 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.