· Private foundation
Seeding the Future 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 $10k1 grant · $2k
- $10k–50k3 grants · $50k
- $50k–250k9 grants · $1.1M
- $250k+1 grant · $762k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| INSTITUTE OF FOOD TECHNOLOGISTS INC | $761,741 |
| INSTITUTE OF FOOD TECHNOLOGISTS INC | $200,000 |
| MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY | $200,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $160,000 |
| EXTREME TECH CHALLENGE | $135,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $100,000 |
| TRUSTEES OF TUFTS COLLEGE | $100,000 |
| PROJECT DRAWDOWN | $100,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $75,000 |
| POTSDAM-INSTITUT FUR KLIMAFOLGENFORSCHUNG E V | $58,000 |
| GDP RESEARCH ALLIANCE | $30,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR FOOD ONTOLOGY OPERABILITY | $10,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $10,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $1,500 |
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 US giving — 87% of grant dollars ($9.7M). The need read here covers only this US portion; the 13% that went abroad ($1.5M) is mapped below.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 77% 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
Beyond the US — 13% of all-years giving ($1.5M)
3 countries, by the recipient’s country on the filing.
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. International giving is mapped by the recipient’s country from the same 990 filings; comparable need data isn’t available at that grain.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 11% of Seeding the Future 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 +27% since the first grant, against +20% for the ones you funded once.
19 repeat relationships — 5 still active in FY2025, 14 since wound down; 3 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, 87% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $223k 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
- IOINSTITUTE OF FOOD TECHNOLOGISTS6× · 2020–2025 · $4.8M · revenue +68%
- SHSECOND HARVEST HEARTLAND3× · 2020–2022 · $1.0M · revenue +31%
Trustees of Tufts College6× · 2020–2025 · $790k · revenue +39%
Funded once
- TUTHE UC DAVIS FOUNDATIONone grant, 2021 · $150k · revenue +6%
- CCCATHOLIC CHURCH OF ST ANDREASone grant, 2019 · $150k
- LCLEIBNIZ CENTER FOR AGRICULTURAL LANDSCAPE RESEARCHone grant, 2024 · $90k
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.
Improve the food value chain in developing countries by mobilizing corporate volunteers to share knowledge and expertise with small and growing food processors.
To effectively communicate science based information on food safety, nutrition, and health for the public good.
Foundation for food and agriculture research connects funders, researchers and farmers through public-private partnerships to support audacious research addressing the biggest food and agriculture challenges.
Isf advisors is the leading strategic and financial advisory group committed to mobilizing capital for a more sustainable, equitable, and productive global food system.
To nourish the world's hungry through uniting and advancing food banks.
Food forward fights hunger and prevents food waste by rescuing fresh surplus produce, connecting this abundance with people experiencing food insecurity, and inspiring others to do the same.
Essential impact creates breakthrough solutions to tackle malnutrition and transform food systems in sub-saharan africa. we leverage advances in fermentation to create affordable, accessible, and climate-resilient proteins that can be…
The union of concerned scientists puts rigorous, independent science into action, developing solutions and advocating for a healthy, safe, and just future.
The agriculture & food systems institute (afsi) is a non-profit organization that advances and disseminates science for public benefit. our mission is to achieve safe and sustainable agri-food systems by providing thought leadership and…
To engage and catalyze global seafood supply chains in rebuilding depleted fish stocks and reducing the environmental impacts of fishing and fish farming.
International food policy research institute's (ifpri) vision is a world free of hunger and malnutrition. ifpri's mission is to provide research-based policy solutions that sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition.
To harness the power of food innovation and markets to make the global food system better for the planet, people, and animals by supporting efforts to make alternative proteins accessible, affordable, and delicious.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is 4 Access Partners and the most unlike its peers is Gdp Research Alliance. 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 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 8% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
36 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. 36 of the 50 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 INSTITUTE OF FOOD TECHNOLOGISTS ↗
- Who funds SECOND HARVEST HEARTLAND ↗
- Who funds Trustees of Tufts College ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL PHILANTHROPIC TRUST ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds UCLA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PROJECT DRAWDOWN ↗
- Who funds THE UC DAVIS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds EXTREME TECH CHALLENGE ↗
- Who funds FOOD SYSTEM 6 ACCELERATOR INC ↗
- Who funds BOUNTIFIELD INTERNATIONAL ↗
- Who funds FOODSHOT GLOBAL INC ↗
- Who funds 4 ACCESS PARTNERS ↗
- Who funds North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems ↗
- Who funds International Center for Food Ontology Operability Data and Semantics ↗
- Who funds HUMANE AMERICA ANIMAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE CLEAR FUND ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ENDOWMENT FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds INQUIRING SYSTEMS INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds RURAL HEALTH CARE INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds REFED INC ↗
- Who funds Philabundance ↗
- Who funds BLYTHEDALE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL ↗
- Who funds MAKE-A-WISH FOUNDATION OF MINNESOTA ↗
- Who funds GARDEN SCHOOL 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 Minneapolis Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Windward Fund · Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Charities Aid Foundation America · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift 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 Seeding the Future 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.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 14% of income from government
- Elijahs Promise 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to Seeding the Future Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Seeding the Future 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.