· Private foundation
Swanson Cares
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.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2021–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Sanford | $3,500 |
| TNT Kids Fitness | $3,000 |
| Hospice of the Red River Valley | $2,500 |
| Jasmin Childcare & Pre-School | $2,000 |
| Learn 'n Move Childcare | $2,000 |
| Metro Sports Foundation | $2,000 |
| Friends of the Children FM | $1,500 |
| Community Partnership Resource Center | $1,500 |
| HERO | $1,500 |
| Ronald McDonald House Charities | $1,500 |
| Fraser LTD | $1,500 |
| ND Shrine Bowl Games | $1,500 |
| Individual grant recipient | $1,500 |
| Harbor Light Worship Center | $1,500 |
| Veteran's Honor Flight | $1,500 |
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 (FY22–24, $10k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 66% 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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +42% since the first grant, against +19% for the ones you funded once.
14 repeat relationships — 11 still active in FY2024, 3 since wound down; 17 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, 54% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $17k 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
- BGBIO Girls Inc2× · 2022–2023 · $6k · revenue +36%
- MSMetro Sports Foundation Inc3× · 2022–2024 · $5k · revenue +87%
- HOHospice of the Red River Valley2× · 2022–2024 · $5k · revenue +15%
Funded once
- AHAmerican Heart Association Incone grant, 2023 · $5k · revenue +16%
- AAAJC ACADEMYone grant, 2023 · $3k
- NNDSUone grant, 2021 · $3k
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.
Living Well Disability Services transforms the lives of people impacted by disabilities through the delivery of exceptional services.
To improve the lives of people through innovative scientific and engineering research.
The fsmb serves as the voice for state medical boards, supporting them through education, assessment, research and advocacy while providing services and initiatives that promote patient safety, quality health care and regulatory best…
To be the leading voice of medicine to make minnesota the healthiest state and the best place to practice.
Guided by our values, Catholic Charities North Dakota serves people in need and advocates for the common good of all.
The Academy's mission is to enhance member career fulfillment and promote brain health for all.
To provide patient-centered, quality-driven, whole-person healthcare services, accessible to everyone in our community.
Hospice of Michigan, Inc. meets our patients and families where they are with urgency, purpose and compassionate accountability surrounding them with decades of dedicated hospice expertise.
To eliminate hunger in south dakota.
The mission of the foundation for health care continuums is to strengthen each community we serve by providing a wide spectrum of housing and health care services that honor the evolving, aging population.
Trinity health is committed to preserving and improving the quality of health of the people we serve. our mission is to excel at meeting the needs of the whole person through the provision of quality health care and health related services.
UF Health's mission is to promote health through outstanding and high-quality patient care, innovative and rigorous education in the health professions and biomedical sciences, and high-impact research across the spectrum of basic,…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is United Service Organizations Inc and the most unlike its peers is Hope Blooms. 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 31. You back the younger end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 4% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 6% 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 61 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 TNT Kid's Fitness ↗
- Who funds BIO Girls Inc ↗
- Who funds Metro Sports Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds American Heart Association Inc ↗
- Who funds Hospice of the Red River Valley ↗
- Who funds HERO HEALTHCARE EQUIPMENT RECYCLING ORGANIZATION ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds JASMIN SERVICES ↗
- Who funds VITAMIN ANGEL ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds DOWN HOME ↗
- Who funds Great Plains Food Bank ↗
- Who funds FRASER LTD ↗
- Who funds HEALTHRIGHT 360 ↗
- Who funds Teller Senior Coalition Inc ↗
- Who funds JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT NORTH ↗
- Who funds MARINE TOYS FOR TOTS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ALS THERAPY DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds STRENGTHEN OUR SISTERS INC ↗
- Who funds OPERATION ADOPT A SOLDIER INC ↗
- Who funds FM Rotary Foundation ↗
- Who funds Hope Blooms ↗
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: Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota Caring Foundation · Alex Stern Family Foundation · Fargo-Moorhead Area Foundation Corporation · Dakota Medical Foundation · Midcontinent Foundation · Otto Bremer Trust · Offutt Family Foundation · The Barry Foundation · Fred M Hector Jr Charitable Trust · United Way of Cass-Clay · Sanford Group Return · North Dakota 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 Swanson Cares 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.
- Als Therapy Development Foundation 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 Swanson Cares?
Find your warmest path to Swanson Cares 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.