· Private foundation
Stephenson 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.
Read this first · the figures below need context
71% of Stephenson Foundation’s FY2024 grant dollars went to The Board Of Trustees Of The Leland Stanford Junior University, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2024 names 18 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k16 grants · $33k
- $10k–50k10 grants · $165k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $200k
- $250k+1 grant · $850k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| HOOVER INSTITUTION | $850,000 |
| FOLDS OF HONOR | $100,000 |
| FOLDS OF HONOR | $50,000 |
| AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | $50,000 |
| HARVARD UNIVERSITY | $25,000 |
| CAL MATTERS | $25,000 |
| LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY (SIEPR) | $25,000 |
| CURE ALZHEIMER'S FUND | $25,000 |
| KIPP BAY AREA SCHOOLS | $15,000 |
| ANTI CORRUPTION FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| POSTPARTUM SUPPORT CENTER | $10,000 |
| THE DAWN REDWOODS TRUST | $10,000 |
| SPIRIT OF AMERICA | $10,000 |
| UCLA CANCER CENTER FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| SINSA | $5,000 |
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 (FY20–24) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 34% of your 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 49% of Stephenson Foundation’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, 61% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 48% — 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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +68% since the first grant, against +41% for the ones you funded once.
36 repeat relationships — 16 still active in FY2024, 20 since wound down; 8 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, 90% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $37k 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
- FOFOLDS OF HONOR FOUNDATION5× · 2020–2024 · $531k · revenue +75%
- ADALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RESEARCH FOUNDATION5× · 2020–2024 · $150k · revenue +147%
- CLCLIMATE LEADERSHIP COUNCIL INC3× · 2021–2023 · $125k · revenue +18%
Funded once
Texas 2036graduatedone grant, 2020 · $200k · revenue +68%
CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATIONgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $50k · revenue +64%- AWANGEL WINGS NETWORK INCgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $40k · 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.
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
Help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis.
The National Academy of Public Administration is an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit, non partisan Organization established in 1967 and chartered by Congress in 1984. See Schedule O
Organization mission the observer research foundation america orf america is an independent, non-partisan, and nonprofit organization in washington dc dedicated to addressing policy challenges facing the united states, india, and their…
Cna is a non-profit research organization that operates the center for naval analyses, a federally funded research center that has supported the navy and marine corps for nearly seventy years, and the institute for public research that…
American foreign service association (afsa) is both the principal advocate for the long-term institutional wellbeing of the professional career foreign service and responsible for safeguarding the interest of afsa members. (continued on…
To provide accurate, objective information and analysis on international strategic issues for legislators, diplomats, foreign affairs analysts, international business leaders, economists, the military, defense commentators, journalists,…
The open markets institute works to help people relearn how to use competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.
Making our government work better is a daunting task, and we are a small organization seeking to transform a government that employs millions of civilians and manages trillions of dollars in taxpayer revenue needed to protect public…
The foreign policy research institute (frpi) is dedicated to producing the highest quality scholarship and nonpartisan policy analysis focused on crucial foreign policy and national security challenges facing the united states. we educate…
The mission of the uc davis foundation is to secure, steward and manage private gifts for uc davis.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Teach for America Inc and the most unlike its peers is Grace Science Foundation. 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 20 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
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 65 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 BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds FOLDS OF HONOR FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Texas 2036 ↗
- Who funds ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RESEARCH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CLIMATE LEADERSHIP COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds KIPP BAY AREA SCHOOLS ↗
- Who funds CalMatters ↗
- Who funds ALL STARS HELPING KIDS INC ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION INC ↗
- Who funds CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Bay Area Womens Sports Initiative ↗
- Who funds STOP THE ADDICTION FATALITY EPIDEMIC (SAFE) PROJECT US ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN INNOVATION ↗
- Who funds ANGEL WINGS NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds Delta Waterfowl Foundation ↗
- Who funds Spirit of America Worldwide ↗
- Who funds Ducks Unlimited Inc ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds Josephy Center for Arts and Culture ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN 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: Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Marin Community Foundation · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · The Stanley S Langendorf Foundation · Gordon E and Betty I Moore Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · The San Francisco Foundation · Greater Houston Community Foundation
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 Stephenson 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.
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Josephy Center for Arts and Culture — 7% 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 Stephenson Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Stephenson 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.