· Private foundation
The Christensen Fund
Its FY2024 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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k22 grants · $66k
- $10k–50k36 grants · $712k
- $50k–250k57 grants · $7.2M
- $250k+19 grants · $5.2M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| INDIGENOUS PEOPLES RIGHTS INC | $350,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL WORK GROUP FOR INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS | $350,000 |
| SNOWCHANGE COOPERATIVE | $325,000 |
| CENTER FOR RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN DRYLANDS | $300,000 |
| RIGHTS AND RESOURCES INSTITUTE INC | $300,000 |
| RUDOLF STEINER FOUNDATION DBA RSF SOCIAL FINANCE | $300,000 |
| DRYLANDS LEARNING AND CAPACITY BUILDING INITIATIVES | $280,000 |
| INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT FOR PEACE ADVANCEMENT AND CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION | $260,000 |
| FOREST PEOPLES PROGRAMME | $260,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL INDIGENOUS WOMEN'S FORUM | $250,000 |
| NATIVE AMERICANS IN PHILANTHROPY | $250,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $250,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL INDIAN TREATY COUNCIL | $250,000 |
| CULTURAL SURVIVAL | $250,000 |
| RAINFOREST FOUNDATION INC | $250,000 |
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 US giving — 47% of grant dollars ($29M). The need read here covers only this US portion; the 53% that went abroad ($32M) is mapped below.
Your human-services grants (FY21–24, $1.3M) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 39% 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
Beyond the US — 53% of all-years giving ($32M)
32 countries, by the recipient’s country on the filing.
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. International giving is mapped by the recipient’s country from the same 990 filings; comparable need data isn’t available at that grain.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 11% of The Christensen 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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +18% since the first grant, against +14% for the ones you funded once.
121 repeat relationships — 64 still active in FY2024, 57 since wound down; 46 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (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 FY2024, 68% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $4.0M 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
Native Americans in Philanthropy4× · 2021–2024 · $2.3M · revenue +383%- IIInternational Indian Treaty Council Inc3× · 2022–2024 · $1.0M · revenue +28% · 33% of their budget
- AMAmah Mutsun Land Trust4× · 2020–2023 · $931k · revenue +89%
Funded once
- TVTHE VANUATU INDIGENOUS LAND DEFENSE DESK COMMITTEE INCone grant, 2020 · $510k
- NINAMATI INCgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $500k · revenue +65%
- AOASSOCIATION-FEDERATION OF ORGANIC DEVELOPMENT BIO-KGone grant, 2020 · $460k
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.
To protect the rainforest and advance the rights of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin. We partner with Indigenous communities in campaigns for human rights, corporate accountability, and the preservation of the Amazon Basin's…
To strenghten people's ability to guarantee their individual and collective right to a healthy environment, via the development, implementation, and effective enforcement of national and international law.
To empower frontline communities to lead nature-based solutions that advance climate justice, ecosystem restoration, and resilient livelihoods through connecting locally-led initiatives to funding, markets, and technical support.
Nature and culture international conserves biologically diverse landscapes in latin america, in concert with local cultures, for the well-being of the planet.
Rainforest trust saves endangered wildlife and protects our planet by creating rainforest reserves through partnerships, community engagement, and donor support.
Global Forest Generation restores and protects forest ecosystems in partnership with grassroots leaders and local communities across vast landscapes which play a critical role in preserving water, protecting biodiversity, storing carbon,…
To establish and promote programs to protect the global climate, forests, wildlife and the natural environment, through research, advocacy, and investigation.
International Rivers protects rivers and defends the rights of communities that depend on them.
The intertribal agriculture council was founded in 1987 to pursue and promote the conservation, development and use of our agricultural resources of american indian and alaska native tribes.
Nuru is a global collective that enables inclusive and sustainable prosperity by identifying communities at the stability tipping point, strengthening rural livelihoods and market systems, and fostering stabilizing connections that repair…
The water protector legal collective is an indigenous-led legal nonprofit that provides support and advocacy for indigenous peoples and original nations, the earth, and climate justice movements.
Wri is committed to creating change that improves people's lives and ensures the natural world can thrive. (see schedule o)wri's bold vision requires a formula for success we call "count it. change it. scale it.":- count it: our work is…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (See) Inc and the most unlike its peers is City Hope San Francisco. 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 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 1% 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.
150 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. 150 of the 306 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 Native Americans in Philanthropy ↗
- Who funds NATIVE AMERICAN RIGHTS FUND INC ↗
- Who funds RAINFOREST FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Land is Life Inc ↗
- Who funds International Indian Treaty Council Inc ↗
- Who funds SEVENTH GENERATION FUND FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES INC ↗
- Who funds Amah Mutsun Land Trust ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL CONGRESS OF AMERICAN INDIANS FUND ↗
- Who funds RSF SOCIAL FINANCE INC ↗
- Who funds CULTURAL SURVIVAL INC ↗
- Who funds INDIGENOUS PEOPLES RIGHTS INC ↗
- Who funds ALLIANCE FOR A JUST SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds ALLIED MEDIA PROJECTS INC ↗
- Who funds SOGOREA TE LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds Silicon Valley Community Foundation ↗
- Who funds LAW COLLEGE ASSOCIATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ↗
- Who funds NEW VENTURE FUND ↗
- Who funds RIGHTS AND RESOURCES INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds NAMATI 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 David and Lucile Packard Foundation · Rsf Social Finance Inc · Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc · Novo Foundation · The Schmidt Family Foundation · Common Counsel Foundation · Tides Foundation · Impactassetsinc · The Ford Foundation · First Nations Development Institute · Resources Legacy Fund · Silicon Valley Community 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 The Christensen 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.
- Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians — 10% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- The Trustees of the Smith College — 1% 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.