· Private foundation
Speller Foundation
Its FY2025 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
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 $10k7 grants · $18k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $25k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| JEWISH FEDERATION OF | $25,000 |
| WEST END SYNAGOGUE | $9,500 |
| Individual grant recipient | $4,660 |
| Individual grant recipient | $3,380 |
| RONALD MCDONALD HOUSE CHARITIES | $500 |
| Individual grant recipient | $180 |
| THE LEUKEMIA AND LYMPHOMA SOC NE | $100 |
| HOSPICE BRAZOS VALLEY | $50 |
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 (FY17–25, $6k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 91% of those 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
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.
15 repeat relationships — 5 still active in FY2025, 10 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, 92% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $4k 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
- JCJEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF NASHVILLE3× · 2017–2022 · $5k · revenue +34%
Vanderbilt University2× · 2019–2020 · $3k · revenue +57%- USUNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF NASHVILLE4× · 2018–2024 · $2k · revenue +31%
Funded once
- UWUS WOMENS AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIPone grant, 2018 · $2k
- NZNASHVILLE ZOO INCone grant, 2021 · $2k · revenue -27%
- NSNORWOOD SCHOOL INCgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $500 · revenue +34%
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 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…
Northeast college of health sciences (the college) is committed to academic excellence, leadership, and professional best practices in the health sciences.
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…
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
To provide an academically exceptional education to students grade 9 through 12 in a warm, supportive, and nurturing environment.
To advance the practice of higher education attorneys for the benefit of the institutions they serve.
Nashville public radio's mission is to be the most trusted & independent nashville voice, connecting our communities through non-partisan journalism, compelling storytelling, civil conversation and music discovery.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Brevard college is committed to an experiential liberal arts education that encourages personal growth and inspires artistic, intellectual, and social action.
The jefferson scholars foundation (foundation) provides academic merit-based scholarship, fellowship and professorship support to students and faculty at the university of virginia (uva).
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is University School of Nashville and the most unlike its peers is Feeding America. 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 42 years old; the field is 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 21% 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.
24 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. 24 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 JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF NASHVILLE ↗
- Who funds Vanderbilt University ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF NASHVILLE ↗
- Who funds THE HOLTON ARMS SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds NASHVILLE ZOO INC ↗
- Who funds LANDON SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THE HARPETH HALL SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds NORWOOD SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds RACH'S HOPE INC ↗
- Who funds BLOOD CANCER UNITED INC ↗
- Who funds Mary Institute and St Louis Country Day School ↗
- Who funds Feeding America ↗
- Who funds NASHVILLE FOOD PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds RENEWAL HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds GRASSLAND SCHOOL COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds SOUTHEAST MISSOURI UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MUSIC HEALTH ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds TEAM GLEASON FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JEWISH WOMEN NASHVILLE SECTION ↗
- Who funds LOWCOUNTRY FOOD BANK 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: Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund · The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee Inc · The John and Heidi Hassenfeld Family Foundation · The Joel C & Bernice W Gordon Family Foundation · Memorial Foundation Inc · The US Charitable Gift Trust · Shell USA Company Foundation · American Endowment Foundation · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · Jewish Communal 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 Speller 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.