· Public charity
The Closet of the Greater Herndon Area Inc
A thrift shop that sells donated items and donates its net revenue to various charities and gives scholarships to local high schools that choose the recipients
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.
The 9 grants below total $105,000 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $238,150 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $133,150 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k4 grants · $23k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $83k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| HERNDON-RESTON FISH INC | $33,000 |
| LINK INC | $13,750 |
| LAUREL LEARNING CENTERCORNERSTONES | $13,750 |
| BRITEPATHS | $12,000 |
| DULLES SOUTH FOOD PANTRY | $10,000 |
| ALL AGES READ TOGETHER | $7,500 |
| COMPUTER CORE | $7,500 |
| MOBILE HOPE OF LOUDOUN | $5,000 |
| FELLOWSHIP SQUARE | $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, $296k) land where the poverty rate runs at 6%, against an area that typically sits at 4%. 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.
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 100% of The Closet of the Greater Herndon Area Inc’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. Read by recipient address, 100% of the giving stays in VA; read by stated purpose it is 0% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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 +54% since the first grant, against +1% for the ones you funded once.
41 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2025, 33 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, 90% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $10k 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
- HFHerndon-Reston FISH Inc9× · 2017–2025 · $174k · revenue +42%
- CICORNERSTONES INC8× · 2017–2025 · $54k · revenue +53%
- AAAll Ages Read Together6× · 2018–2025 · $53k · revenue +103%
Funded once
- NVNORTHERN VIRGINIA HEBREW CONGREGATIONone grant, 2023 · $5k
- DSDULLES SOUTH SOUP KITCHEN INCgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $3k · revenue +40%
- AHA Hand Up - NOVA Incone grant, 2024 · $3k · revenue -73%
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.
SeniorNavigator and its family of websites are national models for aging, disability and veteran information. By combining online assistance with a network of community-based centers, the websites bring over 26,000 community resources,…
Novaco helps homeless victims of domestic abuse become healthy, secure and self-sufficient through community collaboration to provide housing, education, childcare, counseling, mentoring and financial management.
Provision of food for the needy
Loaves & fishes provides nourishing food with respect and dignity to all who seek assistance, while offering robust opportunities for community engagement through volunteerism, partnerships, and nutrition education.
To provide dignified access to free groceries for qualified families in Arlington, VA and surrounding counties.
The mission of Virginia Legal Aid Society is to resolve serious legal problems of low-income people, promote economic and family stability, reduce poverty through effective legal assistance, and to champion equal justice.
Provide programs and services for older adults.
GoochlandCares (GC) provides basic human services for local individuals who need help with healthcare, housing, food, clothing, and domestic violence services, providing a safety net for 2,135 Goochland residents and their families in 2024.
The Organization provides various types of temporary housing assistance and life-skills training to homeless families with children.
To provide human services to poor and disadvantaged individuals and families in the Falls Church community.
Facilitating statewide collaboration among Virginia's food banks, partners, and neighbors to improve nutrition security and empower strong, healthy communities.
Fighting food insecurity in our area by providing nutritious food and community support to our neighbors in need, as well as offering and linking our clients to wraparound resources that will enable them to build healthy and stable lives.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Cornerstones Inc and the most unlike its peers is Adaptive Fitness Legion. 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 28 years old; the field is 12. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 25% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% 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.
48 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. 48 of the 57 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 Herndon-Reston FISH Inc ↗
- Who funds CORNERSTONES INC ↗
- Who funds All Ages Read Together ↗
- Who funds FAMILY PRESERVATION AND STRENGTHENING SERVICES ↗
- Who funds BRITEPATHS INC ↗
- Who funds NETWORK FOR GOOD ↗
- Who funds Shelter House Inc ↗
- Who funds PATHWAY HOMES INC ↗
- Who funds STROKE COMEBACK CENTER ↗
- Who funds FOOD FOR NEIGHBORS ↗
- Who funds Fellowship Square Foundation ↗
- Who funds VECINOS UNIDOS-NEIGHBORS UNITED INC ↗
- Who funds LINK INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds INSIGHT MEMORY CARE CENTER ↗
- Who funds COMPUTER CORE INC ↗
- Who funds CORE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHERN VIRGINIA DENTAL CLINIC INC ↗
- Who funds Kids R First ↗
- Who funds MOBILE HOPE ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds OAR of Fairfax County ↗
- Who funds Literacy Council of Northern Virginia Inc ↗
- Who funds KIDPOWER TEENPOWER FULLPOWER INTERNATIONAL ↗
- Who funds SHE BELIEVES IN ME ↗
- Who funds BRAWS BRINGING RESOURCES TO AID WOMEN'S SHELTERS ↗
- Who funds Women Giving Back Inc ↗
- Who funds DULLES SOUTH FOOD PANTRY INC ↗
- Who funds The Shepherd's Center of Northern Virginia ↗
- Who funds LOUDOUN LITERACY COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds HAVEN OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA INC ↗
- Who funds ADAPTIVE FITNESS LEGION ↗
- Who funds THE DOLLYWOOD FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds LIFT ME UP INC ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA CONGRESS OF PARENTS AND TEACHERS ↗
- Who funds CLOVERLEAF EQUINE CENTER ↗
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 Community Foundation for Northern Virginia Inc · Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation · United Way of the National Capital Area · Philip L Graham Fund co Graham Holdings Company · The Jv Schiro Zavela Foundation · Community Foundation for Loudoun and Northern Fauquier Counties · Van Metre Companies Foundation Inc · Nelson J & Katherine Friant Post Foundation · Alloy Family Foundation Inc · Ada L and Albert M Wibel Foundation · Clark-Winchcole Foundation · Latino Economic Development Corporation
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 Closet of the Greater Herndon Area Inc 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 Closet of the Greater Herndon Area Inc?
Find your warmest path to The Closet of the Greater Herndon Area Inc 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.