· Private foundation
The Eshelman Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k13 grants · $75k
- $10k–50k14 grants · $248k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $128k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| WELCOME HOME ANGEL INC | $65,000 |
| WELCOME HOME ANGEL INC | $63,000 |
| BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF SOUTHEASTERN | $30,000 |
| KIDS MAKING IT INC | $30,000 |
| THE CAROUSEL CENTER INC | $25,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF NC CHAPEL HILL PUBLIC HEALTH FOUNDAT | $25,000 |
| CHILDRENS CANCER PARTNERS OF THE CAROLINAS INC | $20,000 |
| LOWER CAPE FEAR HOSPICE INCORPORATED | $20,000 |
| CAPE FEAR GUARDIAN AD LITEM ASSOCIATION | $15,000 |
| WILMINGTON AREA REBUILDING MINISTRY INC | $15,000 |
| HILL SCHOOL OF WILMINGTON INC | $12,500 |
| HILL SCHOOL OF WILMINGTON INC | $12,500 |
| COMMUNITIES IN SCHOOLS OF CAPE FEAR INC | $12,500 |
| SAMARAS VILLAGE | $10,000 |
| PHOENIX EMPLOYMENT SERVICES OF WILMINGTON INC | $10,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $278k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 95% 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.
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 +78% since the first grant, against +49% for the ones you funded once.
32 repeat relationships — 23 still active in FY2024, 9 since wound down; 3 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, 93% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $31k 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
- WHWELCOME HOME ANGEL INC5× · 2017–2024 · $360k · revenue +686% · 32% of their budget
- TCThe Carousel Center Inc5× · 2017–2024 · $155k · revenue +162%
- KMKIDS MAKING IT INC6× · 2017–2024 · $138k · revenue +55%
Funded once
- NHNEW HANOVER REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER FOUNDATION INCgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $30k · revenue +147%
- CFCAPE FEAR CLINIC INCgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $25k · revenue +182%
- SMST MARY CATHOLIC SCHOOLone grant, 2019 · $20k
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 operate a private school for pre-kindergarten through grade 12 in Wilmington, NC
Wilmington School of the Arts is a tuition-free, public charter school located in New Hanover County, North Carolina. Its mission is to inspire students to pursue excellence in academics and the arts by awakening and nuturing the creative…
Operation of a public charter school.
The Children's Home Society of North Carolina's mission is to promote the right of every child to a permanent, safe, and loving family.
Public K-8 charter school located in New Hanover County, providing tuition-free education to the public and open to all residents of North Carolina.
Dedicated to eliminating racism, empowering women, and promoting peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all.
To promote quality nutrition and reduce food insecurities through financial and educational support in Family childcare homes and Day Care centers, while maintaining Child and Adult Care Food Program integrity.
The organization provides assistance to youth in Wilkes, Ashe, Alleghany and Alexander counties in North Carolina who are identified as candidates for dropping out of school.
Hope Harbor Home strives to break the cycle of domestic and sexual violence in Brunswick County, North Carolina.
Cape Fear Montessori Village operates the Island Montessori Charter School, a K-8 public charter elementary school committed to enabling children to learn and grow at their own pace by offering a developmentally appropriate and challenging…
WNC Health Network, Inc supports people and organizations to improve community health and wellbeing across Western North Carolina.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Autism Society of North Carolina Inc and the most unlike its peers is Masonboroorg. 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) — 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 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.
41 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. 41 of the 49 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 WELCOME HOME ANGEL INC ↗
- Who funds The Carousel Center Inc ↗
- Who funds KIDS MAKING IT INC ↗
- Who funds The Hill School of Wilmington Inc ↗
- Who funds Lower Cape Fear Hospice Incorporated dba Lower Cape Fear LifeCare ↗
- Who funds BRIGADE BOYS & GIRLS CLUB INC ↗
- Who funds Communities in Schools of Cape Fear Inc ↗
- Who funds Cape Fear Guardian ad Litem Association ↗
- Who funds A Safe Place Inc ↗
- Who funds NourishNC Inc ↗
- Who funds Coastal Therapeutic Riding Program ↗
- Who funds ST MARY DENTAL CLINIC CORP ↗
- Who funds BOYS & GIRLS HOMES OF NC INC ↗
- Who funds Coastal Horizons Center Inc ↗
- Who funds BEACON EDUCATION INC ↗
- Who funds Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeastern North Carolina Inc ↗
- Who funds THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL PUBLIC HEALTH FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Phoenix Employment Services of Wilmingto Inc DBA StepUp Wilmington ↗
- Who funds Oasis NC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITIES IN SCHOOLS OF BRUNSWICK COUN ↗
- Who funds NEW HANOVER REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Wilmington Area Rebuilding Ministry Inc ↗
- Who funds Good Shepherd Ministries of Wilmington Inc ↗
- Who funds UNC HEALTH FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds FIRST BOOK ↗
- Who funds CAPE FEAR CLINIC INC ↗
- Who funds BROOKLYN ARTS MUSIC ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds Education Without Walls ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S CANCER PARTNERS OF THE CAROLINAS INC ↗
- Who funds FOOD BANK OF CENTRAL & EASTERN NC INC ↗
- Who funds SAMARA'S VILLAGE INC ↗
- Who funds AUTISM SOCIETY OF NORTH CAROLINA INC ↗
- Who funds WILMINGTON CHILDREN'S MUSEUM 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 Landfall Foundation Inc · New Hanover Community Endowment Inc · North Carolina Community Foundation · Cape Fear Memorial Foundation · United Way of the Cape Fear Area Inc · Corning Incorporated Foundation · Duke Energy Foundation · Dan Cameron Family Foundation Inc · The Cynthia & George Mitchell Foundation · International Paper Company Foundation · Novant Health Inc · The Myrtle and Rt Sinclair Jr Charitable 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 Eshelman 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 Eshelman Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Eshelman 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.