· Private foundation
Shugar Magic 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 FY2018–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k2 grants · $10k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $45k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $250k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| VOTER PARTICIPATION CENTER | $200,000 |
| AMERICAN SOLAR ENERGY SOCIETY | $50,000 |
| NATIONAL CAUCUS OF ENVIRONMENTAL LEGISLATORS | $12,500 |
| VOTE SOLAR | $12,500 |
| ENVIRONMENTAL LAW POLICY CENTER | $10,000 |
| EARTH JUSTICE | $10,000 |
| BEND THE ARC | $7,500 |
| UNITE TO LIGHT | $2,500 |
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 (FY18–22, $21k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 47% 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.
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 +44% since the first grant, against +26% for the ones you funded once.
22 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2024, 14 since wound down.
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, 100% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $0 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
- VSVote Solar4× · 2019–2024 · $65k · revenue +41%
- ACAtma Connect3× · 2019–2022 · $40k · revenue +103%
Rocky Mountain Institute2× · 2021–2023 · $33k · revenue +52%
Funded once
- BVBLACK VOTERS MATTER FUND INC DBA BVM CAPACITY BUILDING INSTITUTEone grant, 2020 · $60k
- NVNEW VENTURE FUND DBA VOTER ENGAGEMENT FUNDone grant, 2020 · $60k
- WSWIND SOLAR ALLIANCEone grant, 2019 · $50k · revenue -78%
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 union of concerned scientists puts rigorous, independent science into action, developing solutions and advocating for a healthy, safe, and just future.
The Climate Center is a climate and energy policy nonprofit working to rapidly reduce climate pollution at scale, starting in California.
Shape and drive bold policy solutions to achieve equitable carbon-neutral economies.
Climate group advances climate action by mobilizing business and government leadership to drive systemic decarbonization across energy, transport, and industry, while engaging the public through large-scale convenings and global platforms.…
Working with our world-class network of innovators, business and industry leaders, and policy experts, we accelerate the innovation of climate technologies at every stage - from discovery to development to deployment.
Climate catalyst sparks collective action to tackle the biggest climate challenges we face today: cutting emissions in heavy industries.
The NW Energy Coalition is an alliance of over 100 environmental, civic, and human service organizations, utilities, and businesses in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia, plus many individual members. The NW Energy…
To research and develop centrist policy ideas.
Seia is the driving force behind solar energy and storage, building a stronger solar industry to power america through advocacy and education. representing organizations that promote, manufacture, install and support the development of…
The alliance for just deliberation on solar geoengineering (dsg) is a charitable, scientific and educational organization dedicated to building just and inclusive deliberation about research and potential use of solar geoengineering. solar…
To raise awareness about the potential to reduce environmental harm by shifting electricity use to particular times; to encourage the development and spread of common protocols for this practice.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is As You Sow and the most unlike its peers is Epic Institute. 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 18 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) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
40 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. 40 of the 60 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 VOTER PARTICIPATION CENTER ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL REDISTRICTING FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SIERRA CLUB ↗
- Who funds Vote Solar ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN SOLAR ENERGY SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds WIND SOLAR ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds ACCELERATE CHANGE INC ↗
- Who funds Atma Connect ↗
- Who funds Rocky Mountain Institute ↗
- Who funds EARTHJUSTICE ↗
- Who funds AS YOU SOW ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR DISABILITY SERVICESINC ↗
- Who funds ENVIRONMENTAL LAW AND POLICY CENTER OF THE MIDWEST ↗
- Who funds POWER SHIFT NETWORK ↗
- Who funds BETTER FUTURE PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds YELLOWSTONE TO YUKON ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL CAUCUS OF ENVIRONMENTAL LEGISLATORS ↗
- Who funds CYCLE CONNECT INC ↗
- Who funds Pacifica Resource Center ↗
- Who funds STANFORD HEALTH CARE ↗
- Who funds Epic Institute ↗
- Who funds Honnold Foundation ↗
- Who funds Shelter Tech ↗
- Who funds GridLab Inc ↗
- Who funds THE SOLAR FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FREE AND FAIR LITIGATION GROUP INC ↗
- Who funds California Clean Energy Fund ↗
- Who funds CONFLUENCE PHILANTHROPY INC ↗
- Who funds THE WHITE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL ST MARY'S IN THE MOUNTAINS ↗
- Who funds UNITE TO LIGHT 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 Energy Foundation · The McKnight Foundation · United States Energy Foundation · Wallace Global Fund II · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Impactassetsinc · Gordon E and Betty I Moore Foundation · Patagoniaorg · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · The Overbrook Foundation · The Goldman Sachs 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 Shugar Magic 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 Shugar Magic Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Shugar Magic 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.