· Public charity
Sheng-Yen Lu Foundation
SHENG-YEN LU FOUNDATION combines compassion and philanthropy with strategic grant-making to advance quality health and education for all.
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.
The 67 grants below total $2,122,286 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $2,260,541 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $138,255 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k1 grant · $5k
- $10k–50k63 grants · $1.9M
- $50k–250k3 grants · $265k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BYRD BARR PLACE | $125,000 |
| HEALTHPOINT | $90,000 |
| TOGETHER CENTER | $50,000 |
| ASIAN COUNSELING AND REFERRAL SERVICE | $43,000 |
| WORLD RELIEF WESTERN WASHINGTON | $41,600 |
| KIN ON | $41,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY HEALTH SERVICES (ICHS) | $40,000 |
| ONEAMERICA | $40,000 |
| DENISE LOUIE EDUCATION CENTER | $39,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE | $37,640 |
| LUTHERAN COMMUNITY SERVICES NORTHWEST | $37,000 |
| GLOBAL TO LOCAL HEALTH INITIATIVE | $36,896 |
| NORTHWEST HEALTH LAW ADVOCATES | $36,000 |
| CHINESE INFORMATION AND SERVICE CENTER | $36,000 |
| KANDELIA | $36,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $3.6M) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 3% 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.
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 +57% since the first grant, against +27% for the ones you funded once.
70 repeat relationships — 51 still active in FY2024, 19 since wound down; 16 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, 87% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $286k 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
- DLDenise Louie Education center8× · 2017–2024 · $385k · revenue +55%
SOMALI HEALTH BOARD7× · 2018–2024 · $333k · revenue +217%- WAWest African Community Council7× · 2018–2024 · $318k · revenue +546%
Funded once
- AIAGING IN PACE WASHINGTONone grant, 2022 · $250k · revenue -18% · 50% of their budget
- SFScholar Fundgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $60k · revenue +199%
- ECEl Comiteone grant, 2020 · $50k
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.
Asians for Collective Action (ACA) harnesses the strenghts of Asians and Asian Americans to drive systemic change to create a just, healthy, and thriving community for all.
Washington Ethnic Studies Now WAESN is a multigenerational majority POC-led nonprofit advancing Ethnic Studies and racial justice in Washington. We center people of color build youth-centered leadership and learning and organize…
Washington Indian Civil Rights Commission is led by and for Indigenous people, and envisions a just society in which we are treated with honor, fairness and respect. Our mission is to uphold our individual civil rights through education…
Asian Immigrant Women Advocates empowers low-income, limited English speaking immigrant women and youth through education, leadership development and civic participation programs.
To support equitable access to economic opportunities for immigrants, refugees, low-income, marginalized, and underserved communities in king county and the united states.
The jewish coalition builds a jewish voice in the pacific northwest advancing immigrant justice and domestic policy, following the leadership of impacted community.
The Asian Law Caucus's mission is to promote, advance, and represent the legal and civil rights of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, recognizing that social, economic, political and racial inequalities continue to exist…
Washington Community Alliance WCA is a statewide network of over 70 organizations working to advance multiracial social democracy by coordinating values aligned civic engagement
Rainier Beach Action Coalition is a grassroot, Black-led organization devoted to locally driven development. It promotes quality education, living wage jobs, affordable transportation and housing, and building community capacity in…
Sec provides culturally sensitive mental health resources, connects clients to professionals, offers education, emotional support, promotes maternal health, early childhold outcomes, and advocates for housing security for somali…
We are workers, united across different industries to improve our working conditions and our lives. We come together as working people to build power through education, organizing, and enforcement. We work to raise and uphold standards in…
ACL Spokane centers the power of Asians & Asian Americans build a just, healthy, and thriving community for all.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Northwest Immigrant Rights Project and the most unlike its peers is Glover Empowermentoring. 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 24 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 8% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 4% lost their exemption, against 14% 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.
115 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. 115 of the 121 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 BYRD BARR PLACE ↗
- Who funds Denise Louie Education center ↗
- Who funds SOMALI HEALTH BOARD ↗
- Who funds West African Community Council ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY HEALTH SERVICES ↗
- Who funds COLECTIVA LEGAL DEL PUEBLO ↗
- Who funds WORLD RELIEF CORP OF NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF EVANGELICALS ↗
- Who funds HEALTHPOINT ↗
- Who funds Lutheran Community Services Northwest ↗
- Who funds Northwest Health Law Advocates ↗
- Who funds Refugee Womens Alliance ↗
- Who funds AGING IN PACE WASHINGTON ↗
- Who funds ASIAN COUNSELING AND REFERRAL SERVICE ↗
- Who funds KIN ON HEALTH CARE CENTER ↗
- Who funds NORTHWEST IMMIGRANT RIGHTS PROJECT ↗
- Who funds KANDELIA ↗
- Who funds ONEAMERICA ↗
- Who funds Chinese Information and Service Center ↗
- Who funds OPEN ARMS PERINATAL SERVICES ↗
- Who funds LIVING WELL KENT COLLABORATIVE ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY HEALTH WORKER COALITION ↗
- Who funds COLUMBIA LEGAL SERVICES ↗
- Who funds EL CENTRO DE LA RAZA ↗
- Who funds Pacific Islander Community Association of WA ↗
- Who funds East African Community Services ↗
- Who funds ENTRE HERMANOS ↗
- Who funds NEIGHBORCARE HEALTH ↗
- Who funds API CHAYA ↗
- Who funds Neighborhood House INC ↗
- Who funds AFGHAN HEALTH INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds HIGHLINE COLLEGE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Project Access Northwest ↗
- Who funds Para Los Ninos de Highline ↗
- Who funds WHITE CENTER COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds International Rescue Committee INC ↗
- Who funds COLLEGE POSSIBLE INC ↗
- Who funds INDIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY SERVICES ↗
- Who funds EASTSIDE LEGAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAM ↗
- Who funds Washington Academy for International Medical Gradu ↗
- Who funds TOGETHER CENTER ↗
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: Seattle Foundation · Inatai Foundation · United Way of King County · School's Out Washington · Gates Foundation · The Norcliffe Foundation · Medina Foundation · Puget Sound Energy Foundation · Philanthropy Northwest · The Satterberg Foundation Inc · Renton Regional Community Fndn · Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Washington
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 Sheng-Yen Lu 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.
- World Relief Corp of National Association of Evangelicals — 67% of income from government
- Save the Children Federation Inc — 30% of income from government
- Medical Teams International — 14% 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 Sheng-Yen Lu Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Sheng-Yen Lu 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.