· Private foundation
Surly Gives a Damn
Its FY2024 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 FY2017–2023.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| COMMUNITY EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE PROGRAM | $5,000 |
| BRIDGING | $2,500 |
| PLYMOUTH CHRISTIAN YOUTH CENTER | $1,000 |
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 (FY17–23, $58k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 0% 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.
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 +66% since the first grant, against +24% for the ones you funded once.
9 repeat relationships — 2 still active in FY2023, 7 since wound down; 1 grantees were first funded in FY2023 (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 FY2023, 88% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1k 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
- OAOPEN ARMS OF MINNESOTA5× · 2017–2022 · $26k · revenue +309%
- BIBridging Inc5× · 2018–2023 · $21k · revenue +23%
- CECOMMUNITY EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS INC2× · 2017–2023 · $17k · revenue +9%
Funded once
- NANORTHSIDE ACHIEVEMENT ZONEone grant, 2017 · $10k · revenue -5%
- MMATTERgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $6k · revenue +173%
- MOMINNESOTA OFF ROAD CYCLISTS-MORCgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $5k · revenue +43%
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 minnesota business partnership's mission is to maintain a high quality of life for all minnesotans by ensuring that the state's economy remains strong, globally competitive and its prospects for growth bright by working with elected…
Move minnesota leads the movement for an equitable and sustainable transportation system that puts people first. we are passionate about connecting communities, ending the climate crisis, expanding access to jobs and resources, and…
MCF is a vibrant philanthropic community connecting, strengthening and mobilizing the power of philanthropy to advance prosperity and equity.
The minnesota chamber of commerce proactively leads the business community statewide to: advance pro-business, responsible minnesota public policy that creates jobs and grows the econony; provde member services to address evolving business…
Creating powerful advocacy to enhance economic vitality in the minneapolis-st. paul region.
End hunger together.
The alliance is a coalition of community-based organizations and advocacy groups with a mission to build power across the intersections of geography, race, culture, and issues in the twin cities region to eliminate systems of oppression…
Mn community measurement empowers stakeholders with meaningful information to drive improvement.
United way of northeastern minnesota invests in nonprofits, programs, and collaborations that equip and empower, creating opportunities for people to thrive in our communities.
Mission: to inspire and nurture a healthy community by building a local, sustainable, and organic food economy in a vibrant experiential marketplace.vision: to be a nationally recognized marketplace model that connects, educates, and…
To be the leading voice of medicine to make minnesota the healthiest state and the best place to practice.
Minneapolis Climate Action is a 501c(3) nonprofit founded in 2007 by a group of dedicated individuals committed to addressing climate change in their community. After almost 10 years of working at the neighborhood level and piloting the…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Minneapolis Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual Transgender Pride-T. 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 17. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 20% 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 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.
34 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. 34 of the 43 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 OPEN ARMS OF MINNESOTA ↗
- Who funds Bridging Inc ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS INC ↗
- Who funds FRASER ↗
- Who funds THE MINNEAPOLIS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NORTHSIDE ACHIEVEMENT ZONE ↗
- Who funds MISSISSIPPI PARK CONNECTION ↗
- Who funds MATTER ↗
- Who funds MINNESOTA OFF ROAD CYCLISTS-MORC ↗
- Who funds FOOD GROUP MINNESOTA INC THE ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Tree Trust ↗
- Who funds OUTFRONT MINNESOTA ↗
- Who funds SISTERS CAMELOT ↗
- Who funds PANCREATIC CANCER ACTION NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds THE JUNGLE THEATER ↗
- Who funds DANE COUNTY HUMANE SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds WORLD BICYCLE RELIEF NFP ↗
- Who funds GAY-LESBIAN-BISEXUAL TRANSGENDER PRIDE-T ↗
- Who funds Juntos y Unidos por Puerto Rico Inc ↗
- Who funds THE SANNEH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds EVERY MEAL ↗
- Who funds PLYMOUTH CHRISTIAN YOUTH CENTER ↗
- Who funds PROSPECT PARK 2020 ↗
- Who funds PEOPLE RESPONDING IN SOCIAL MINISTRY ↗
- Who funds SPARE KEY ↗
- Who funds FEEDING AREA CHILDREN TOGETHER ↗
- Who funds ANNA MARIE'S ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds HEART OF THE CITY RACE ↗
- Who funds Living Well Disability Services ↗
- Who funds MIDTOWN GREENWAY COALITION ↗
- Who funds Keystone Community Services ↗
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: Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation · The Minneapolis Foundation · Pohlad Family Foundation · Mightycause Charitable Foundation · Xcel Energy Foundation · Ch Robinson Worldwide Foundation · The Richard M Schulze Family Foundation · Otto Bremer Trust · The Jamf Nation Global Foundation · Bame Foundation · The Walser Foundation · Target 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 Surly Gives a Damn 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 Surly Gives a Damn?
Find your warmest path to Surly Gives a Damn 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.