· Private foundation
Sunflower 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.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| NEW HAMPSHIRE DEMOCRACY FUND | $5,000 |
| MERRIMACK VALLEY PROJECT INC | $5,000 |
| FRIENDS OF HELSINKI FOUNDATION | $5,000 |
| HOPEWELL FUND | $5,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $5,000 |
| WORKER POWER INSTITUTE | $5,000 |
| TOXICS ACTION CENTER | $5,000 |
| CLEMENTE COURSE IN THE HUMANITIES INC | $3,000 |
| FRIENDS OF SABEEL NORTH AMERICA | $3,000 |
| EPISCOPAL DIOCESE OF LOS ANGELES | $3,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $11k) land where the poverty rate runs at 19%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 100% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 8% of Sunflower 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.
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 +8% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
31 repeat relationships — 5 still active in FY2025, 26 since wound down; 4 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, 64% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $14k 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
- NHNew Hampshire Democracy Fund3× · 2023–2025 · $15k · revenue +64%
NEW GEORGIA PROJECT INC3× · 2017–2022 · $13k · revenue ×22
Midwest Academy2× · 2018–2020 · $10k · revenue +443%
Funded once
- CCASEone grant, 2023 · $5k
- CFCenter for Common Groundone grant, 2022 · $5k · revenue -66%
- CPCITIZENSHIP PROJECTone grant, 2017 · $5k
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.
A long-term, strategic alliance of labor, community, faith-based, and student organizations working together to build greater economic power for workers and community members through employee rights at work and access to good jobs,…
Fund for Justice is a nationally connected social impact research and advocacy organization that works to achieve fundamental, systemic reform by addressing policies and practicies that prevent individuals from reaching their full…
The Guernica Centre for International Justice represents the interests of victims in national and international legal proceedings, putting in place transnational accountability strategies that seek to maximize the protection of victims'…
Fuerza Laboral is a workers' rights center whose mission is to shift the balance of power in our economy in favor of workers by educating, training, and organizing workers to become community leaders; taking direct action to recover unpaid…
To provide high quality civil legal assistance and other services to indigent individuals and families.
The organization serves as a coalition of labor organizations, community groups, faith-based organizations, and student groups dedicated to protecting the rights of working people. To this end, the corporation shall engage in organizing…
Building support for the rights of working people through coalitions of labor and community and through public education.
Advance democracy, equity, and self-determination in U.S. territories through participatory advocacy, narrative and cultural change, and ecosystem building.
The puente human rights movement is a migrant worker justice foundation based in phoenix, az. we develop, educate, and empower migrant communities to protect and defend our families and ourselves.
To champion human dignity by designing the solutions to the social problems that infringe upon it.
Justice Action Center JAC pilots an innovative model that advances the rights of immigrant communities by connecting cutting-edge impact litigation and compelling narrative and communications content. The purpose of JAC is to advance the…
We are workers, united across different industries to improve our working conditions and our lives. We come together as working people to build power through education, organizing, and enforcement. We work to raise and uphold standards in…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Families for Justice As Healing Inc and the most unlike its peers is The Cambridge Foundation for Peace. 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 27 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) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 6% 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.
32 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. 32 of the 56 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 INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT ↗
- Who funds WORKER POWER INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds New Hampshire Democracy Fund ↗
- Who funds NEW GEORGIA PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds AMOS RESOURCES ↗
- Who funds TOGETHER COLORADO ↗
- Who funds Midwest Academy ↗
- Who funds KCBX INC ↗
- Who funds MASSPOETRY INC ↗
- Who funds VETERANS EDUCATION SUCCESS INC ↗
- Who funds TOXICS ACTION CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds COALITION FOR HUMANE IMMIGRANT RIGHTS ↗
- Who funds KIPP MASSACHUSETTS INC ↗
- Who funds RESTAURANT OPPORTUNITIES CENTERS UNITED INC ↗
- Who funds JITEGEMEE INC ↗
- Who funds THE HOPI FOUNDATION LOMASUMI'NANGWTUKWSIWMANI ↗
- Who funds Center for Common Ground ↗
- Who funds TIDES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MERRIMACK VALLEY PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds CASA INC ↗
- Who funds HOPEWELL FUND ↗
- Who funds FREE THE SLAVES ↗
- Who funds PIONEER VALLEY PROJECT 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: NEO Philanthropy Inc · Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc · Tides Foundation · The San Francisco Foundation · Boston Foundation Inc · Ben & Jerry's Foundation Inc · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Impactassetsinc · National Philanthropic Trust · Network for Good · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Donor Advised Charitable Giving 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 Sunflower 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Casa Inc — 8% 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 Sunflower Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Sunflower 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.