· Private foundation
The Heising-Simons 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 $10k11 grants · $61k
- $10k–50k64 grants · $1.3M
- $50k–250k406 grants · $51M
- $250k+190 grants · $98M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND INC | $3,600,000 |
| NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL | $3,300,000 |
| AMALGAMATED CHARITABLE FOUNDATION | $2,061,856 |
| GLOBAL IMPACT | $2,000,000 |
| NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR FAMILY SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT | $1,900,000 |
| CALIFORNIA EDUCATION PARTNERS | $1,500,000 |
| NEW VENTURE FUND | $1,500,000 |
| ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION FOR A NEW AMERICAN UNIVERSITY | $1,313,000 |
| CLIMATE AND CLEAN ENERGY EQUITY FUND | $1,200,000 |
| REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY | $1,155,000 |
| TIDES FOUNDATION | $1,124,831 |
| CENTER FOR COMMUNITY CHANGE | $1,000,000 |
| POWERMYLEARNING INC | $1,000,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON CLEAN TRANSPORTATION | $1,000,000 |
| THIRD SECTOR NEW ENGLAND INC | $1,000,000 |
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, $46.5M) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 58% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 8% of The Heising-Simons Foundation’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 +45% since the first grant, against +17% for the ones you funded once.
561 repeat relationships — 340 still active in FY2024, 221 since wound down; 53 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, 95% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $6.9M 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
ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND INCORPORATED8× · 2017–2024 · $33M · revenue +202%
NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL INC8× · 2017–2024 · $29M · revenue +41%- CICALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY8× · 2017–2024 · $19M · revenue +35%
Funded once
- NFNATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION INCone grant, 2020 · $2.4M · revenue -35%
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATIONone grant, 2020 · $2.0M · revenue 0%- SFSAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITYone grant, 2023 · $1.6M
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.
Ca fwd drives action to identify solutions that can be taken to scale to meet the challenges the state is facing. the organization is driven by the belief that regional solutions across the state will help ensure economic, environmental,…
Improving the transparency and scientific integrity of climate solutions through open data and tools.
The Climate Center is a climate and energy policy nonprofit working to rapidly reduce climate pollution at scale, starting in California.
A long-term, strategic alliance of labor, community, faith-based, and student organizations working together to build greater economic power for workers and community members through employee rights at work and access to good jobs,…
The american civil liberties union of northern california (aclu nc union) defends and advances the principles of freedom, equality and justice contained in the united states constitution. aclu nc union, a california mutual benefit…
Common future is a network of pioneering leaders across the u.s. and canada who work deeply within their communities to create alternative approaches to business, philanthropy, and investing. we envision an economy that has transitioned…
Central indiana corporate partnership (cicp) is an alliance of indiana's business and research university leaders coming together to foster long-term prosperity for the region. cicp's mission is to transform the economy of indiana in order…
Council for court excellence's (cce's) mission is to bring people together to conduct research, educate, and advocate to make d.c.'s unique legal systems more just, equitable, and accountable to the community.
The common application is a not-for-profit membership organization of over 1,100 colleges and universities across the globe committed to access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process. every year, over 1.5 million students…
See schedule onorc at the university of chicago conducts research and data science on critical societal issues to guide decision-making and the development of programs and public policy. our experts identify relationships and trends, and…
The open markets institute works to help people relearn how to use competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.
To investigate, research, write, publish, present conferences and teach with respect to global, regional, transboundary, and comparative environmental issues and to make the findings from such activities available to the general public; to…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Grantmakers for Education and the most unlike its peers is Rosenberg Foundation. 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 27 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 3% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.8% 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.
751 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. 751 of the 899 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 ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds NEW VENTURE FUND ↗
- Who funds NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ↗
- Who funds TIDES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TIDES CENTER ↗
- Who funds ALLIANCE FOR EARLY SUCCESS FKA BIRTH TO FIVE POLICY ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds THIRD SECTOR NEW ENGLAND INC ↗
- Who funds NEO Philanthropy Inc ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds The Partnership Project Inc ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY INITIATIVES ↗
- Who funds THE CALIFORNIA EDUCATION PARTNERS ↗
- Who funds UNITED STATES ENERGY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds National Association for Family School & Community ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEURS (SEE) INC ↗
- Who funds ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION FOR A NEW AMERICAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds LAS CUMBRES OBSERVATORY GTN INC ↗
- Who funds Advanced Energy Institute ↗
- Who funds Silicon Valley Community Foundation ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION FOR RESEARCH IN ASTRONOMY ↗
- Who funds CLIMATEWORKS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PowerMyLearning Inc ↗
- Who funds START EARLY ↗
- Who funds Society for Research in Child Development Inc ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS ↗
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: Philanthropic Ventures Foundation · The David and Lucile Packard Foundation · The Sobrato Family Foundation · The California Endowment · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · The James Irvine Foundation · Wellspring Philanthropic Fund Inc · The California Wellness Foundation · NEO Philanthropy Inc · Sunlight Giving · Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc · The Libra 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 Heising-Simons 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.
- Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships — 100% of income from government
- Education Development Center Inc — 65% of income from government
- Terc Inc — 44% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 13% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Reach Out and Read Inc — 9% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Forth Mobility Fund — 7% of income from government
- Teachers Development Group — 5% of income from government
- Third Sector New England Inc — 3% of income from government
- American Physical Society — 1% of income from government
- Wgbh Educational Foundation — 1% of income from government
- National Consumer Law Center Inc — 1% of income from government
- Ceres Inc — 0% 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to The Heising-Simons Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Heising-Simons 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.