· Private foundation
Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund Inc
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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- $10k–50k24 grants · $528k
- $50k–250k40 grants · $4.6M
- $250k+54 grants · $115M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ARMAND HAMMER UNITED WORLD COLLEGE OF THE AMERICAN | $26,000,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA FOUNDATION INC | $13,130,000 |
| SANTA FE PREPARATORY SCHOOL | $9,219,000 |
| PRESIDENT & TRUSTEES OF COLBY COLLEGE | $6,000,000 |
| SONOMA ACADEMY | $5,580,000 |
| MACALESTER COLLEGE | $5,520,556 |
| THE BRIGHAM & WOMENS HOSPITAL INC | $5,000,000 |
| CONEY ISLAND PREP BUILDERS INC | $3,500,000 |
| HUDSON VALLEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL INC | $3,500,000 |
| LANDPATHS | $2,500,000 |
| PETALUMA RIVER PARK FOUNDATION INC | $2,500,000 |
| THE COLLEGE OF IDAHO INC | $2,210,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO | $2,000,000 |
| AMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE OCEAN CLEANUP FOUNDATION | $2,000,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS AMERICAN FOUNDATION INC | $2,000,000 |
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 (FY20–24, $1.5M) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 33% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 50% of Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund Inc’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 +31% since the first grant, against +30% for the ones you funded once.
114 repeat relationships — 80 still active in FY2024, 34 since wound down; 15 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, 91% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $10M 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
THE ARMAND HAMMER UNITED WORLD COLLEGE OF THE AMER5× · 2020–2024 · $138M · revenue +33% · 77% of their budget- HHHUDSON HIGHLANDS FJORD TRAIL INC2× · 2021–2022 · $45M · revenue +566% · 67% of their budget
- SFSANTA FE PREPARATORY SCHOOL5× · 2020–2024 · $38M · revenue +47% · 84% of their budget
Funded once
- TSThe Scenic Hudson Land Trust Incone grant, 2020 · $8.7M · revenue -20% · 57% of their budget
- YUYALE UNIVERSITYone grant, 2020 · $5.0M
- SOST OLAF COLLEGEgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $4.6M · revenue +38%
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 bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Bates is a college of the liberal arts and sciences, and is a coeducational, nonsectarian, residential college with special commitments to academic rigor, and to assuring in all of its efforts the dignity of each individual, and access to…
Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.
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…
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…
The university's goal in the coming decade is to advance learning through the integration of teaching, research and service to others. the core of this goal is to prepare graduates to engage with the world and lead lives of meaning. to do…
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
At sarah lawrence college, our mission is to graduate citizens of the world who are diverse in every definition of the word, who take intellectual and creative risks, and who are able to focus exceptional intellectual discipline (continued…
Western new england university, a comprehensive private institution with a tradition of excellence in teaching and scholarship and a commitment to service, awards undergraduate, master's, and doctoral degrees in various departments from…
Wilson college empowers students to be confident and critical thinkers, creative visionaries, effective communicators, honorable leaders, and agents of justice.
As a diverse community of learners, we cultivate integrity, curiosity, connection and resilience.
Dickinson college provides a useful, innovative and interdisciplinary education in the liberal arts and sciences to prepare students to lead rich and fulfilling lives of engaged global citizenship
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Groundwork Hudson Valley Inc and the most unlike its peers is Federated Conservationists of Westchester County 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 53 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) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.6% 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.
154 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. 154 of the 175 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 THE ARMAND HAMMER UNITED WORLD COLLEGE OF THE AMER ↗
- Who funds HUDSON HIGHLANDS FJORD TRAIL INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds SANTA FE PREPARATORY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds SONOMA ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds CENTRAL PARK CONSERVANCY INC ↗
- Who funds The President and Trustees of Colby College ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK-PRESBYTERIAN FUND INC ↗
- Who funds COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC ↗
- Who funds MACALESTER COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds PECONIC LAND TRUST INC ↗
- Who funds CONEY ISLAND PREP BUILDERS INC ↗
- Who funds HOLDERNESS SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds The Scenic Hudson Land Trust Inc ↗
- Who funds Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences ↗
- Who funds Scenic Hudson Inc ↗
- Who funds PETALUMA RIVER PARK FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Lake Forest College ↗
- Who funds THE SOUTHAMPTON HOSPITAL FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds American Museum of Natural History ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS ↗
- Who funds LAND TRUST ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds ST OLAF COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds LandPaths ↗
- Who funds FUTURE GENERATIONS UNIVERSITY CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE OCEAN CLEANUP FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE LAWRENCEVILLE SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds United States Ski Team Foundation ↗
- Who funds BROOKS SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds LEWIS & CLARK COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds HUDSON VALLEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL 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 New York Community Trust · The Abeles Foundation · Santa Fe Community Foundation · Maine Community Foundation Inc · The Bessemer Giving Fund · Marin Community Foundation · Albuquerque Community Foundation · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Jewish Communal Fund · Garfield Street Foundation · Gale Family Foundation · Ibm International 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 Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund Inc 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.
- Albertina Kerr Centers — 74% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 13% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- The Farm School Inc — 12% of income from government
- Lever Inc — 10% of income from government
- Brandeis University — 9% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Lewis & Clark College — 2% of income from government
- Appalachian Mountain Club — 1% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Middlebury College — 1% of income from government
- Berklee College of Music Inc — 1% of income from government
- Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival Inc — 1% of income from government
- Year Up Inc — 0% of income from government
- Amherst College Trustees — 0% of income from government
- Wheaton College — 0% of income from government
- Bennington College Corporation — 0% of income from government
- Milton Academy — 0% of income from government
- Williams College — 0% of income from government
- Catlin Gabel School — 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.
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How do I get to Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund Inc?
Find your warmest path to Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund Inc 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.