· Public charity
Southern Environmental Law Center
The mission of the SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENTAL LAW CENTER is to protect the basic right to clean air, clean water, and a livable climate; to preserve our region's natural treasures and rich biodiversity; and to provide a healthy environment for all.
What you funded, over time
Every grant clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 4 grants below total $67,250 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $86,416 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $19,166 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.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| NORTH CAROLINIANS FOR PASSENGER RAIL | $23,750 |
| CONSERVATION ALABAMA | $20,000 |
| ASIAN AMERICAN ADVOCACY FUND INC | $13,500 |
| VIRGINIA WILDERNESS COMMITTEE | $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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 81% 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.
Grants abroad, by region — $12k on the FY2025 return
Schedule F, as filed: 1 region. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: TO SUPPORT PUBLIC EDUCATION AND ADVOCACY EFFORTS FOCUSED ON BIOMASS ENERGY POLICY IN THE UK
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. Grants abroad on Schedule F are filed by region, purpose and amount with no recipient name, so they are shown by region and cannot be placed on the country map or matched to a grantee.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 9% of Southern Environmental Law Center’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. Read by recipient address, 13% of the giving stays in VA; read by stated purpose it is 10% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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.
3 repeat relationships — 1 still active in FY2025, 2 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, 15% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $57k 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
- VWVIRGINIA WILDERNESS COMMITTEE6× · 2017–2025 · $112k · revenue -79%
- AVAPPALACHIAN VOICES2× · 2017–2023 · $73k · revenue +189%
- GFGEORGIA FORESTWATCH INC4× · 2018–2021 · $59k · revenue -20%
Funded once
- SASOUTHERN ALLIANCE FOR CLEAN ENERGYone grant, 2017 · $47k · revenue +3%
NORTH CAROLINA CONSERVATION NETWORKgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $41k · revenue +117%- WSWild Southgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $40k · revenue +28%
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.
NCLCVF engages people to protect our environment and promote the well-being of our communities. We work to turn environmental values into NC priorities by engaging people in the democratic process, organizing in communities first and worst…
To protect, restore, and inspire appreciation of the natural world.
The corporation is organized for the purpose of conducting public interest research, policy development, analysis, and education to protect the environment and people of Georgia, including, but not limited to, the quality of Georgia's air,…
The mission of the South Fork Conservancy is to restore and preserve habitat along the tributaries of Peachtree Creek. We give the community access to these healthy, restored greenspaces by designing, building and maintaining nature trails.
The alabama association of conservation districts (aacd) is the unified voice of alabama's 67 conservation districts. organized as a 501(c)3, aacd works in cooperation with the alabama soil & water conservation committee, federal, state,…
A nonpartisan grassroots communication organization that works to raise awareness and increase engagement around community issues in alabama by working directly with civic organizations advocating civic participation in communities across…
The american conservation coalition inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to building the conservative environmental movement.
Working with the community to conserve the rivanna river and its watershed through water quality monitoring, education, restoration, and stewardship.
Georgia rivers works to protect and connect people with georgia's rivers.
The mission of the atlantic coast conservancy is to provide 21st century solutions and sound scientific applications for conservation of critical natural resources in the face of a changing climate, focusing on the southeasthern united…
To tackle the accelerating crisis of climate change by working to transition nc to clean, efficient energy & by watch-dogging utility practices. we pursue this work through grassroots activism, technical analysis, legal challenges and…
SAWS sets standards of excellence that inspire, connect, and equip people to steward wild public lands. SAWS provides trail maintenance, restoration, construction, ranger patrols, and disaster recovery in remote and wilderness areas;…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is North Carolina Conservation Network and the most unlike its peers is Protect Our Aquifer. 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 31 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) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% 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.
23 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. 23 of the 26 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 TIDES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA WILDERNESS COMMITTEE ↗
- Who funds APPALACHIAN VOICES ↗
- Who funds GEORGIA FORESTWATCH INC ↗
- Who funds SOUTHERN ALLIANCE FOR CLEAN ENERGY ↗
- Who funds NORTH CAROLINA CONSERVATION NETWORK ↗
- Who funds Wild South ↗
- Who funds The University of North Carolina at Asheville Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA ORGANIZING INC ↗
- Who funds Protect Our Aquifer ↗
- Who funds Alabama Rivers Alliance Inc ↗
- Who funds North Carolinians for Passenger Rail ↗
- Who funds COOSA RIVERKEEPER INC ↗
- Who funds Conservation Alabama ↗
- Who funds PROPEL ATL INC ↗
- Who funds ASIAN AMERICAN ADVOCACY FUND INC ↗
- Who funds The Partnership Project Action Fund ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY FOUNDATION OF GREATER MEMPHIS INC ↗
- Who funds NORTH CAROLINA CENTRAL UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds University of Georgia Research Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA CONSERVATION NETWORK ↗
- Who funds SIERRA CLUB ↗
- Who funds Cahaba River Society 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: Patagoniaorg · Charlottesville Area Community Foundation · The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta Inc · Foundation for the Carolinas · The Energy Foundation · Environmental Defense Fund Incorporated · United States Energy Foundation · Westwind Foundation · Stephens Foundation · Natural Resources Defense Council Inc · Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc · The Pfizer 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 Southern Environmental Law Center 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.