· Private foundation
The Candelaria Fund
Its FY2025 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
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 $10k5 grants · $23k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $55k
- $50k–250k6 grants · $600k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| EAST BROAD TOP FOUNDATION | $200,000 |
| BAY AREA ELECTRIC RAILROAD ASSOCIATION | $100,000 |
| RAILROADERS MEMORIAL MUSEUM | $100,000 |
| WISCASSET WATERVILLE & FARMINGTON RR | $75,000 |
| CENTER OF SOUTHWEST CULTURE | $75,000 |
| FRIENDS OF THE EAST BROAD TOP | $50,000 |
| SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE SEASON OF SHARING | $20,000 |
| NEVADA NORTHERN RAILWAY FOUNDATION | $15,000 |
| OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA | $10,000 |
| THE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION OF MENDOCINO COUNTY | $10,000 |
| AMERICAN RED CROSS GOLD COUNTRY REGION | $5,000 |
| THE SALVATION ARMY DEL ORO DIVISION | $5,000 |
| THINK NEW MEXICO | $5,000 |
| THE SALVATION ARMY GOLDEN GATE DIVISION | $5,000 |
| CALIFORNIA BUDGET & POLICY CENTER | $2,500 |
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 (FY17–25, $82k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, 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.
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.
32 repeat relationships — 13 still active in FY2025, 19 since wound down; 1 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, 98% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $15k 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
- NSNASHVILLE STEAM PRESERVATION SOCIETY6× · 2017–2023 · $723k · revenue +0% · 42% of their budget
CENTER OF SOUTHWEST CULTURE INC9× · 2017–2025 · $510k · revenue +537%- WWWISCASSET WATERVILLE & FARMINGTON RAILWAY MUSEUM3× · 2022–2025 · $200k · revenue +16%
Funded once
- COCONGRESS OF COUNTRY MUSICone grant, 2024 · $100k
- OROREGON RAIL HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONone grant, 2021 · $50k
- PLPacific Locomotive Association Inc Niles Canyon Railwaygraduatedone grant, 2021 · $30k · revenue +228%
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 Museums mission is the collection, preservation,restoration and operation of vintage railroad equipment at its own facility and on the historic SD&A Railway for the education.
Acquisition preservation and Restoration of Railroad Artifacts Showing the History of Arizona
Encouragement of the interest in railway history, the preservation of railway artifacts and equipment, documents and records, and to enable members to study railroad operations.
Oklahoma Railway Museum allows you to experience history in motion, with an educational experience of railroads and how they shaped Oklahoma and the Nation.
To research, collect, preserve and present the heritage of american railroading using educational programs, displays, toy trains, and scale models of california railroads.
The railroad museum of new england, inc. is a educational and historical organization. it is dedicated to educating the public about new england's rich railroad hertiage by preserving and restoring railroad artifacts.
The mission of the northwest railway museum is to develop and operate an outstanding railway museum that provides the public a place to experience the excitement of a working railroad and to see and understand the significance of railroads…
FNSRM provides resources and services for the NeVada State RailRoad Museum, including fund raising, advocacy, and volunteer work ranging from visitor service to restoration and operation of the equipment in its collection.
Educate the public on the operations of a railroad and its equipment.
To acquire, preserve, maintain, operate and display, in the public interest, documents, artifacts and equipment associated with transportation, and in the course thereof to operate one or more museums where members of the public may obtain…
Railway Museum operated to preserve historical artifacts and provide information on the history of railways.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Friends of the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad Inc and the most unlike its peers is Heyday. 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 34 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) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% 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.
33 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. 33 of the 52 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 STEAM PRESERVATION SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds CENTER OF SOUTHWEST CULTURE INC ↗
- Who funds WISCASSET WATERVILLE & FARMINGTON RAILWAY MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds RAILROADERS HERITAGE CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY FOUNDATION OF MENDOCINO COUNTY ↗
- Who funds NEW MEXICO STEAM LOCOMOTIVE & RAILROAD HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds WINSLOW ARTS TRUST ↗
- Who funds OREGON RAIL HERITAGE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HISTORIC PULLMAN FOUNDATION DBA FRIENDS OF PULLMAN ↗
- Who funds CHINESE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE CUMBRES & TOLTEC SCENIC RAILROAD INC ↗
- Who funds THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds THINK NEW MEXICO ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA BUDGET & POLICY CENTER ↗
- Who funds Durango Railroad Historical Society ↗
- Who funds Pacific Locomotive Association Inc Niles Canyon Railway ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds SAN BERNARDINO RAILROAD HISTORICAL SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds RAILROADING HERITAGE OF MIDWEST AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds Catching the Dream ↗
- Who funds TUCUMCARI MAIN STREET CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds HISTORIC WATERTOWN INC ↗
- Who funds FORNEY MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds NEVADA NORTHERN RAILWAY 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: The Rail Heritage Trust First Option Bank Trustee · Bnsf Railway Foundation · Ibm International Foundation · Walter and Elise Haas Fund · Xcel Energy Foundation · The San Francisco Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · The James Irvine Foundation · Ge Aerospace Foundation · Marin Community Foundation · Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Inc · National Philanthropic Trust
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 Candelaria 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to The Candelaria Fund?
Find your warmest path to The Candelaria 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.