· Private foundation
The Armstrong Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k39 grants · $168k
- $10k–50k25 grants · $512k
- $50k–250k6 grants · $438k
- $250k+3 grants · $967k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BLAIR ACADEMY | $396,992 |
| WILLIAMSON COLLEGE OF THE TRADES | $320,000 |
| PENN MEDICINE | $250,000 |
| BRYN MAWR PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH | $135,000 |
| NATURAL LANDS TRUST | $78,000 |
| PENNSYLVANIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY | $75,000 |
| GOL HOWIES HOUSE | $50,000 |
| ADIRONDACK NATURE CONSERVANCY | $50,000 |
| PENNSYLVANIA HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY | $50,000 |
| ADIRONDACK COUNCIL | $37,500 |
| PROJECT HOME | $35,000 |
| ADIRONDACK LAND TRUST | $30,000 |
| BAKER INDUSTRIES | $30,000 |
| PHILABUNDANCE | $30,000 |
| BANCROFT | $25,000 |
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 (FY23–25, $193k) land where the poverty rate runs at 17%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 87% 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 54% of The Armstrong 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, 78% of the giving stays in PA; read by stated purpose it is 46% — 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 +3% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
57 repeat relationships — 49 still active in FY2025, 8 since wound down; 22 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, 91% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $184k 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
- BABLAIR ACADEMY4× · 2021–2025 · $1.3M · revenue +27%
- TPTHE PENNSYLVANIA HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY4× · 2021–2025 · $240k · revenue +37%
- ABA BETTER CHANCE IN LOWER MERION INC2× · 2023–2024 · $150k · revenue +1%
Funded once
- BMBryn Mawr Presbyterian Churchone grant, 2021 · $100k
PHILADELPHIA MURAL ARTS ADVOCATES INCgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $50k · revenue +86%- BMBryn Mawr Hospitalone grant, 2021 · $25k
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 University of New Haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts and professional education. Our mission is to prepare our students to lead purposeful and fulfilling lives in a…
The philadelphia school educates children for a future that is impossible to know but not impossible to shape. learn here. go anywhere.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Wilson college empowers students to be confident and critical thinkers, creative visionaries, effective communicators, honorable leaders, and agents of justice.
To bring quality public television programs and resources to communities throughout new jersey and its tri-state neighbors. its content, both on-air and online, aims to reflect the diverse
Provides innovative education in a dynamic urban setting. dedicated to academic excellence and community engagement,we prepare students of diverse backgrounds with the knowledge, skill,and experience to lead meaningful lives as informed…
Gettysburg college is a residential, undergraduate college of the liberal arts and sciences.
The organization's mission is to conserve and promote new england's native plants to ensure healthy, biologically diverse landscapes.
The western pennsylvania conservancy protects and restores exceptional places to provide our region with clean waters and healthy forests, wildlife and natural areas for the benefit of present and future generations. the conservancy…
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.
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
Northeast college of health sciences (the college) is committed to academic excellence, leadership, and professional best practices in the health sciences.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Team Impact Inc and the most unlike its peers is Lower Merion Conservancy. 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 33 years old; the field is 19. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% lost their exemption, against 9% 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.
85 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. 85 of the 120 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 BLAIR ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds WILLIAMSON COLLEGE OF THE TRADES ↗
- Who funds THE PENNSYLVANIA HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds Natural Lands Trust Inc ↗
- Who funds A BETTER CHANCE IN LOWER MERION INC ↗
- Who funds PENNSYLVANIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ↗
- Who funds ADIRONDACK LAND TRUST INC ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds PROJECT HOME ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN INDIAN COLLEGE FUND ↗
- Who funds THE ADIRONDACK COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds KENT SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THE TIMOTHY SCHOOL CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds BAKER INDUSTRIES INC ↗
- Who funds ADIRONDACK EXPLORER INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds Philabundance ↗
- Who funds TEAM IMPACT INC ↗
- Who funds PHILADELPHIA MURAL ARTS ADVOCATES INC ↗
- Who funds BANCROFT A NEW JERSEY NON PROFIT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds THE GESU SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation ↗
- Who funds Vanderbilt University ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds NEIGHBORHOOD GARDENS TRUST ↗
- Who funds MIGHTY WRITERS ↗
- Who funds PRO PUBLICA INC ↗
- Who funds THE COBBS CREEK RESTORATION AND COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds EAGLES AUTISM CHALLENGE 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: The Philadelphia Foundation · The William Penn Foundation · Connelly Foundation · United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey · Claneil Foundation Inc · Lincoln Financial Foundation Inc · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · Henry Dolfinger 2 Trust Uw · Impact100 Philadelphia Inc · The Leo and Peggy Pierce Family Foundation Inc · The Gordon Charter Foundation · Phillies Charities 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 The Armstrong 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.
- Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Palm Beach Inc — 12% of income from government
- Connecticut College — 0% of income from government
- Blair Academy — 0% 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 The Armstrong Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Armstrong 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.