· Private foundation
The Christensen Family 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 FY2018–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k14 grants · $74k
- $10k–50k23 grants · $390k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $60k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| EASTSIDE COLLEGE PREP | $60,000 |
| EPATT | $33,000 |
| LAUGHING PONY RESCUE | $32,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $30,000 |
| ALL ABOUT EQUINE ANIMAL RESCUE | $22,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $21,000 |
| MARIN CHARITABLE | $20,000 |
| HOMEWARD BOUND | $20,000 |
| CASA EL DORADO COUNTY | $18,000 |
| SF MARIN FOOD BANK | $16,000 |
| EPISCOPAL IMPACT FUND | $15,000 |
| MEALS ON WHEELS | $15,000 |
| THE GUARDSMEN | $15,000 |
| CANAL ALLIANCE | $15,000 |
| MARSHALL COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $15,000 |
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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY18–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 33% of your 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.
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.
62 repeat relationships — 29 still active in FY2025, 33 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, 86% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $71k 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
- LPLAUGHING PONY RESCUE7× · 2018–2025 · $259k · revenue +120%
- CACANAL ALLIANCE7× · 2018–2025 · $95k · revenue +190%
- SFSAN FRANCISCO FOOD BANK6× · 2020–2025 · $88k · revenue +10%
Funded once
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2022 · $45k
- EPEAST PALO ALTO TENNIS & TUTORINGgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $24k · revenue +317%
- AMAVE MARIA ACADEMYone grant, 2024 · $20k · revenue -2%
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.
Marin humane transforms lives through exceptional animal care, humane education, and advocacy. every day, marin humane inspires compassion and positive relationships between people and animals.
The SPCA Monterey County's Mission is assuring compassionate treatment of all animals through rescue, rehabilitation, protection and education. The SPCA shelters homeless, neglected, and abused pets, including dogs, cats, horses, exotic…
Sustainable Conservation advances the collaborative stewardship of Californias land, air, and water for the benefit of nature and people. For over three decades, Sustainable Conservation has built coalitions of people with different…
In addition to rescue and adoption, pet orphans provides a wide range of services including education, medical/financial, spay/neuter, and training assistance.
Santa barbara humane operates two campuses located in santa barbara and santa maria providing care for community-owned and homeless animals. both campuses offer affordable high quality veterinary care, compassionate behavior training…
San Francisco CASA transforms the lives of children and youth traumatized and displaced in the foster care and related systems by providing one consistent, caring volunteer advocate, trained to address each childs needs in the court and…
To ensure every companion animal has access to quality medical care, compassionate shelter, and a loving home.
Food Rescue - The Organization rescues excess fresh food from Bay Area businesses, schools and non-profits and immediately delivers the food to safety net partners - such as senior housing centers, after-school programs, and homeless…
High Sierra Animal Rescues mission is to save the lives of homeless dogs in the regions served. Our staff and volunteers are dedicated to making our communities better through successful adoptions advancing their welfare and creating human…
The san diego foundation inspires enduring philanthropy and enables community solutions to improve the quality of life in our region.
The organization provides professional investment management services for endowed gifts and financial assets entrusted to the ucsf foundation.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Jacobs & Cushman San Diego Food Bank and the most unlike its peers is The Dartmouth Inc. 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 31 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) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 4% 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.
49 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. 49 of the 100 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 LAUGHING PONY RESCUE ↗
- Who funds BAY AREA CANCER CONNECTIONS ↗
- Who funds CANAL ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO FOOD BANK ↗
- Who funds The Guardsmen ↗
- Who funds SONOMA COUNTY WILDLIFE RESCUE ↗
- Who funds ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE & RELATED DISORDERS ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds CAMINAR ↗
- Who funds SAN MATEO COUNTY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds Episcopal Impact Fund FKA Episcopal Charities ↗
- Who funds Words Alive ↗
- Who funds WOODSIDE HIGH SCHOOL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds VOICES FOR CHILDREN ↗
- Who funds MENTOR ME ↗
- Who funds Pets In Need ↗
- Who funds MARIN ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds PETALUMA EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TERI Inc ↗
- Who funds TIPPING POINT COMMUNITY ↗
- Who funds MAKE-A-WISH FOUNDATION OF SAN DIEGO ↗
- Who funds All About Equine Animal Rescue Inc ↗
- Who funds DOG DREAMS 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: Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · Marin Community Foundation · The David and Lucile Packard Foundation · The San Francisco Foundation · Thornton S Jr and Katrina D Glide Foundation · Heffernan Group Foundation · Rancho Santa Fe Foundation · McNabb Foundation · The Intuit Foundation · Gordon E and Betty I Moore Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust 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 Christensen Family 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.
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 Christensen Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Christensen Family 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.