· Public charity
Tahoe Fund
To use the power of philanthropy to improve the Lake Tahoe environment for all to enjoy.
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.
The 29 grants below total $1,338,315 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $1,414,241 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $75,926 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k4 grants · $30k
- $10k–50k14 grants · $334k
- $50k–250k11 grants · $974k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Tahoe City PUD | $150,000 |
| Tahoe Rim Trail Association | $137,489 |
| Tahoe Area Mt Biking Assoc | $116,510 |
| Nevada Tahoe Conservaton Dist | $100,000 |
| Lake Tahoe Com College Fndtn | $90,653 |
| Tahoe Backcountry Alliance | $80,000 |
| Tahoe Regional Planning Agenc | $77,783 |
| SOS Outreach | $60,000 |
| Lake Valley Fire Protect Dis | $56,007 |
| Nevada State Parks | $54,690 |
| Achieve Tahoe | $50,461 |
| Tahoe Nordic Search & Rescue | $38,521 |
| CA Dept of Parks & Recreation | $35,000 |
| No Tahoe Public Utility Distr | $35,000 |
| University of NV Reno | $25,907 |
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 (FY23–23, $50k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, 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.
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 10% of Tahoe Fund’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, 49% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 39% — 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 +70% since the first grant, against +41% for the ones you funded once.
31 repeat relationships — 20 still active in FY2025, 11 since wound down; 9 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, 69% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $408k 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
- TATahoe Area Mountain Biking Association6× · 2020–2025 · $595k · revenue +265%
- TRTahoe Rim Trail Association6× · 2020–2025 · $503k · revenue +261%
- LTLAKE TAHOE COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION3× · 2023–2025 · $291k · revenue +29%
Funded once
- ODOlsen&AsscPR dba Goodstandingone grant, 2017 · $156k
- FOFRIENDS OF SKI RUNone grant, 2023 · $118k · revenue -81% · 40% of their budget
- CTCALIFORNIA TAHOE CONSERVANCYone grant, 2024 · $100k
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 Truckee Trails Foundation (TTF) is working towards a system of trails and bikeways in and around Truckee, California that will connect people and places, reduce our community's dependence on automobiles, and improve our physical,…
To improve the visual quality of the Tahoe Basin portion of El Dorado County through community education, citizen involvement and enforcecment of litter and nuisance ordinances.
Sierra watch secures conservation outcomes to protect the natural resources, mountain communities, and timeless values of the tahoe sierra.
The Sierra Fund (TSF) is a non-profit organization with a mission to restore ecosystem and community resiliency in the Sierra Nevada.
To use the power of philanthropy to improve the Lake Tahoe environment for all to enjoy.
The Foundation envisions a thriving community created through meaningful philanthropy, inclusive communication, and the willingness to explore possibilities together.
The truckee river watershed council was founded to implement locally developed public-private collaborative solutions to protect and improve water quality and biological resources for the sustainable environmental and economic health of…
A membership organization dedicated to developing, promoting, and serving your business and community. Our goal is to sustain a high quality of life by achieving economic vitality, with sensitivity and respect for the environment.
To plan, steward, interpret, promote, and sustain a system of four-season trails and public access to natural areas in the Mammoth Lakes and Eastern Sierra Nevada region in the state of California while protecting its natural resources.
At Yosemite Rivers Alliance, we unite conservation and community to protect and restore the three rivers that ?ow through the Yosemite Regionthe Tuolumne, Stanislaus, and Merced.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Tahoe Rim Trail Association and the most unlike its peers is Earthviews Conservation Society. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 27 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 23% startups (under 5 years old) — 8% of your grantees by number, and just 3% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
44 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. 44 of the 71 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 Tahoe Area Mountain Biking Association ↗
- Who funds Tahoe Rim Trail Association ↗
- Who funds LAKE TAHOE COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CLEAN UP THE CAYES dba CLEAN UP THE LAKE ↗
- Who funds ACHIEVE TAHOE ↗
- Who funds LAKE TAHOE BICYCLE COALITION ↗
- Who funds TAHOE BACKCOUNTRY ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds SOS OUTREACH ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF SKI RUN ↗
- Who funds ADVENTURE RISK CHALLENGE ↗
- Who funds GATEWAY MOUNTAIN CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds Nevada Conservation League Ed Fund ↗
- Who funds SIERRA NEVADA ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds TAHOE INSTITUTE FOR NATURAL SCIENCE ↗
- Who funds GREAT BASIN INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL FOREST FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds LAKE VALLEY FIREFIGHTERS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GLENBROOK UNDERGROUND INC ↗
- Who funds TAHOE TRUCKEE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds VP DATA COMMONS ↗
- Who funds Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care Inc ↗
- Who funds INCLINE VILLAGE-CRYSTAL BAY VISITOR & CONV BUREAU ↗
- Who funds TAHOE NORDIC SEARCH & RESCUE INC ↗
- Who funds Stephen J Wampler Foundation Camp WAMP ↗
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: Tahoe Community Foundation · Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation · Martis Camp Community Foundation Dba Martis Camp Foundation · The Lundrigan Walker Family Foundation · El Dorado Community Foundation · Pipkin Charitable Foundation · Community Foundation of Northern Nevada · Park L Loughlin Charitable Foundation · The Corrigan-Walla Foundation · Truettner Family Foundation · NV Energy Charitable Foundation · Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority 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 Tahoe Fund 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.