· Private foundation
Stephens' Christian Trust
Its FY2025 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- $50k–250k1 grant · $100k
- $250k+1 grant · $1.3M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| DAVID LIPSCOMB UNIVERSITY | $1,334,792 |
| NASHVILLE INNER CITY MINISTRY | $100,000 |
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 (FY18–24, $23k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 22% 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 +59% since the first grant, against +20% for the ones you funded once.
20 repeat relationships — 2 still active in FY2025, 18 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 FY2025, 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
- LULIPSCOMB UNIVERSITY9× · 2017–2025 · $6.3M · revenue +44%
- NINASHVILLE INNER CITY MINISTRY INC3× · 2017–2025 · $103k · revenue +123%
- WCWORLD CHRISTIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION2× · 2017–2018 · $44k · revenue +17%
Funded once
- OVOHIO VALLEY UNIVERSITY INCone grant, 2019 · $250k · revenue 0%
- OAOPERATION ANDREW GROUP INCgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $10k · revenue +257%
- MDMOUNT DORA CHILDREN'S HOMEone grant, 2019 · $10k
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.
Education - private christian school grades k-12
Heritage Christian University equips servants through undergraduate and graduate and continuing education. HCU produces effective communicators, preachers, teachers and missionaries for real world ministry with a focus on evangelism and a…
To educate, train, and develop ministers, evangelists, missionaries, and other people who are going to enter the Christian ministry. Educate ministers and missionaries to serve the Lord.
Prepare individuals to become pastors, evangelists, missionary workers, christian education teachers, and to assist the local church in carrying out its mission.
The mission of houston christian university is to provide a learning experience that instills in students a passion for academic, spiritual, and professional excellence as a result of our central confession, "jesus christ is lord."
Providing guality Christian education to the network generation
Asbury Theological Seminary is a community called to prepare theologically educated, sanctified, Spirit-filled men and women to evangelize and to spread scriptural holiness throughout the world through the love of Jesus Christ, in the…
Educate preschool through twelfth grade children in a Christian environment while developing them spiritually,academically, emotionally, and physically with Jesus Christ as their standard and the Bible as their foundation.
UTC is a religious educational non-profit institution who's main mission is to offer Christian education through mayor programs such as associates, bachelor and master degrees in Bible Interpretation, Christian Education, Counseling, Child…
Equip women and men to be ministers and messengers of God's mission of reconciliation through academic excellence, personal transformation, and leadership development.
The college's mission is to train christians to serve god and his church.
God's bible school and college seeks to glorify god and to serve his church by providing higher education centered in holy scripture and shaped by wesleyan conviction, thus preparing faithful servants to proclaim jesus christ and spread…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Nashville Christian Schools Inc and the most unlike its peers is Mountain States Children's Home. 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 32 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) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 4% 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.
43 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. 43 of the 80 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 LIPSCOMB UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds OHIO VALLEY UNIVERSITY INC ↗
- Who funds NASHVILLE INNER CITY MINISTRY INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD CHRISTIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds OPERATION ANDREW GROUP INC ↗
- Who funds NASHVILLE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS INC ↗
- Who funds CHRISTIAN SCHOLARS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds The Joseph School Inc ↗
- Who funds Mountain States Children's Home ↗
- Who funds TUSKEGEE HUMAN & CIVIL RIGHTS MULTICULTURAL CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds HEALING HANDS INTERNATIONAL INC ↗
- Who funds MORNING STAR SANCTUARY INC ↗
- Who funds BAREFOOT REPUBLIC INC ↗
- Who funds STONES RIVER MANOR INC ↗
- Who funds GRACEWORKS MINISTRIES INC ↗
- Who funds GODS WORD FOR WARRIORS ↗
- Who funds IN SEARCH OF THE LORD'S WAY INC ↗
- Who funds FRANK TOWN OPEN HEARTS MINISTRY INC ↗
- Who funds CHURCHES OF CHRIST DISASTER RELIEF EFFORT INC ↗
- Who funds MOBILE CHRISTIAN SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds TENNESSEE BAPTIST ADULT HOMES INC ↗
- Who funds CHRISTIAN HOMES FOR CHILDREN INC ↗
- Who funds NEW HOPE ACADEMY ↗
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: Washington Foundation · Ezell Foundation Inc · The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee Inc · Servant Foundation · Hca Healthcare Foundation · The Harrison-Robbie Dearing Foundation · Memorial Foundation Inc · Dorothy Cate and Thomas F Frist Foundation · The Frist Foundation · United Way of Middle Tennessee Inc · Christian Community Foundation Inc · Raymond James Charitable Endowment 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 Stephens' Christian Trust 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 Stephens' Christian Trust?
Find your warmest path to Stephens' Christian Trust 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.