· Private foundation
Betsy Gordon 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
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 65% of BETSY GORDON FOUNDATION’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k20 grants · $29k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $20k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $178k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES | $63,000 |
| TIBETAN ASSOCIATION OF NO CALIFORNIA | $60,000 |
| GRIP-TRAINING INSTITUTE | $54,951 |
| INSTITUTE FOR HEALTH AND HEALING | $10,000 |
| WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN | $10,000 |
| THE SRAMANI INSTITUTE | $5,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL INST FOR HUMANISTIC STUDIES | $5,000 |
| THRESHHOLD FOUNDATION | $2,495 |
| MOUNTAIN PLAY ASSOCIATION | $1,000 |
| BREAST CANCER PREVENTION PARTNERS | $1,000 |
| NARADA M WALDEN FOUNDATION | $1,000 |
| GLIDE | $1,000 |
| HEIFER INTERNATIONAL | $1,000 |
| PLANNED PARENTHOOD | $1,000 |
| CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL & RESEARCH CNTR FNDN DBA UCSF BENIOFF CHILDREN'S HOSPIT | $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 (FY17–25, $31k) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 16% 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.
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 +43% since the first grant, against +11% for the ones you funded once.
45 repeat relationships — 20 still active in FY2025, 25 since wound down; 5 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, 94% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $13k 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
- GTGRIP TRAINING INSTITUTE6× · 2020–2025 · $315k · revenue +227%
- LFLumina Foundation for Education Inc3× · 2018–2020 · $97k · revenue +28%
- BCBREAST CANCER PREVENTION PARTNERS7× · 2017–2025 · $76k · revenue +25%
Funded once
- LHLSU HEALTH SCIENCES CENTERone grant, 2020 · $60k
- CICinnamongirl Incone grant, 2021 · $50k · revenue +1% · 25% of their budget
- UPUCLA PSYCHODELIC STUDIES INITIATIVEone grant, 2022 · $50k
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 Deep Medicine Circle is a nonprofit organization dedicated to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story and learning. Starting from a place of correcting relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people,…
We promote reciprocity in the psychedelic community, and support the protection of sacred plants and cultural traditions. We advance psychedelic justice through curating critical conversations and uplifting the voices of women, queer…
The Breakthrough Institute is a research center that identifies and promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges.
Empowering diverse communities by fostering transformational change through integrating indigenous wisdom teachings and cross-cultural mindfulness practices.
The Oakland Institute, an independent policy think tank, works to support global struggles for Indigenous rights, human rights, and land rights and to promote public participation and fair debate on critical social, economic, and…
Engage in educational, charitable and research activities which contribute to the health of individuals, to public health and to the health of the global environment.
Bay Nature connects the people of the San Francisco Bay Area to our natural world and motivates people to solve problems with nature in mind. Our vision is that all people have a close relationship with theirnatural world.
Create and publish educational materials, conduct professional development, promote awareness, and sponsor research on the spectacular biological diversity of the State of CA.
The resource renewal institute facilitates the creation, development and implementation of practical strategies to solve the entire complex environmental problem by addressing it comprehensively.
One Earth's mission is to empower everyone, everywhere, with the knowledge, inspiration, and opportunity to heal the Earth and reclaim our future.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Winnarainbow Inc Dba Camp Winnarainbow and the most unlike its peers is Narada Michael Walden Foundation. 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 24 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 1% 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.
66 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. 66 of the 127 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 GRIP TRAINING INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES ↗
- Who funds Heffter Research Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds Lumina Foundation for Education Inc ↗
- Who funds BREAST CANCER PREVENTION PARTNERS ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds CULTURAL SURVIVAL INC ↗
- Who funds Cinnamongirl Inc ↗
- Who funds Destiny Arts Center ↗
- Who funds TIBETAN NUNS PROJECT ↗
- Who funds THRESHOLD FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Hamakua Youth Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds LIMINA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NEPAL YOUTH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CANAL ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds Oasis Legal Services ↗
- Who funds RIVERSTYX FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GLOBAL TIES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BECKLEY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CREATIVE VISIONS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE ASSOCIATION FOR CULTURAL EQUITY INC ↗
- Who funds FRAME OF MIND FILMS INC ↗
- Who funds Vivalon ↗
- Who funds NARADA MICHAEL WALDEN FOUNDATION ↗
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: Marin Community Foundation · The San Francisco Foundation · East Bay Community Foundation · McNabb Foundation · The Fred Gellert Family Foundation · Tides Foundation · Impactassetsinc · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Rsf Social Finance Inc · The Morris Stulsaft Foundation · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · Furthur 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 Betsy Gordon 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.
- White Phoenix Acupuncture — 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 Betsy Gordon Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Betsy Gordon 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.