· Private foundation
The Butler Family Fund
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 $10k16 grants · $40k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $25k
- $50k–250k17 grants · $925k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| HouseUS | $100,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $75,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $50,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $50,000 |
| Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco | $50,000 |
| Equity and Transformation | $50,000 |
| ACT 4 SA | $50,000 |
| VOCAL-NY | $50,000 |
| Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia | $50,000 |
| CAAAV- Organizing Asian Communities | $50,000 |
| For the Many | $50,000 |
| National Homelessness Law Center | $50,000 |
| CHISPA OC Education Fund | $50,000 |
| Bozeman Tenants Education Fund | $50,000 |
| SOS Fund | $50,000 |
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 (FY20–25, $487k) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 64% 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 7% of The Butler Family 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.
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.
49 repeat relationships — 6 still active in FY2025, 43 since wound down; 26 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, 16% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $805k 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
- NONASHVILLE ORGANIZED FOR ACTION AND HOPE3× · 2022–2024 · $150k · revenue +23%
- AJAustin Justice Coalition3× · 2022–2024 · $150k · revenue +5%
NEO Philanthropy Inc2× · 2020–2023 · $125k · revenue +27%
Funded once
- WOWomen on the Rise Fiscal Sponsor Social and Environmental Entrepreneursone grant, 2020 · $100k
- HFHouseUS Fundone grant, 2024 · $100k
- HHousingNOLAgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $90k · revenue +33%
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.
A long-term, strategic alliance of labor, community, faith-based, and student organizations working together to build greater economic power for workers and community members through employee rights at work and access to good jobs,…
Fund for Justice is a nationally connected social impact research and advocacy organization that works to achieve fundamental, systemic reform by addressing policies and practicies that prevent individuals from reaching their full…
Detention Watch Network seeks to end the cruel system of immigration detention via programs of grassroots organizing, strategic communications, and collective advocacy.
The Black Organizing Project is a Black, member-led community organization working for racial, social, and economic justice through grassroots organizing and community building across the Bay Area.
Oregon Justice Network is an alliance built and staffed by criminal legal system impacted people advocating for the well-being of people affected or at-risk of being affected by carceral systems. Our work centers around restorative…
Forward Together is a national reproductive justice organization that centers people, families, and communities who experience reproductive oppression. They prioritize queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and other peoples of color and utilize…
Southern coalition for social justice partners with communities of color and economically disadvantaged communities across the south to defend and advance their political, social, and economic rights. through an intersectional and…
The Equal Justice Society (EJS) is transforming the nations consciousness on racethrough law, social science, and the arts. EJS works to dismantle structural andinstitutional racism to advance robust equal protection under the Fourteenth…
The Organization challenges over-criminalizationand mass incarceration through research, advocacyand organizing.
Forward Justice Action Network is a nonprofit with the purpose to engage in educational and advocacy activities to promote political and grassroots support for public policies that advance racial social and economic justice in North…
In 2024, Inner City Law Center, ICLC, served over 3,400 people, helping vulnerable Angelenos to remain in their homes and recover nearly $20.5 million in financial benefits.
Building support for the rights of working people through coalitions of labor and community and through public education.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Voices of Community Activists & Leaders (Vocal-Ny) Inc and the most unlike its peers is Wesleyan University. 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 20 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 6% of your grantees by number, and just 7% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 13% 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.
80 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. 80 of the 159 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 NASHVILLE ORGANIZED FOR ACTION AND HOPE ↗
- Who funds Austin Justice Coalition ↗
- Who funds NEO Philanthropy Inc ↗
- Who funds VOICES OF COMMUNITY ACTIVISTS & LEADERS (VOCAL-NY) INC ↗
- Who funds WE ARE DOWN HOME ↗
- Who funds Faith in Indiana ↗
- Who funds Miami Workers Center Inc ↗
- Who funds HousingNOLA ↗
- Who funds ELLA BAKER CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ↗
- Who funds KC TENANTS ↗
- Who funds Community Resource Initiative ↗
- Who funds TEXAS ORGANIZING PROJECT ↗
- Who funds ACTION ST LOUIS ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEURS (SEE) INC ↗
- Who funds PROJECT SOUTH INC ↗
- Who funds ORGANIZING NEIGHBORHOOD EQUITY ↗
- Who funds PUBLIC ADVOCATES INC ↗
- Who funds Detroit Justice Center ↗
- Who funds AFRICAN COMMUNITIES TOGETHER INC ↗
- Who funds A NEW WAY OF LIFE REENTRY PROJECT ↗
- Who funds Southern Center for Human Rights ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR COMMUNITY CHANGE ↗
- Who funds YOUTH SENTENCING & REENTRY PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds Act 4 SA ↗
- Who funds EQUITY AND TRANSFORMATION ↗
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: Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc · The Ford Foundation · Tides Foundation · New Venture Fund · Foundation to Promote Open Society · NEO Philanthropy Inc · Borealis Philanthropy · Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Inc · Tides Center · Wellspring Philanthropic Fund Inc · Common Counsel Foundation · Public Welfare Foundation 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 Butler Family 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.
- Freedom Reads Inc — 12% of income from government
- Wesleyan University — 1% of income from government
- Bennington College Corporation — 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 Butler Family Fund?
Find your warmest path to The Butler Family Fund 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.