· Private foundation
The Helen and Jose Colton 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k26 grants · $95k
- $10k–50k11 grants · $250k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| POINT ROBERTS VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTERS CHARITABLE SOCIETY | $46,600 |
| SHADOW HILLS RIDING CLUB | $44,200 |
| HAPPY CATS HAVEN | $30,000 |
| RISE UP SCHOOLS | $27,000 |
| MENDING KIDS | $25,000 |
| SAFE HAVEN MEDICAL OUTREACH PROGRAM INC | $21,500 |
| LUPITA PROJECT | $13,500 |
| BRIDGE TO HOME | $12,500 |
| ROBINS NEST RESCUE | $10,000 |
| ACADEMY FOUNDATION (ACADEMY MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES) | $10,000 |
| CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL OF LA (CATCH) | $10,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $9,975 |
| CDT KIDS | $7,500 |
| VALOR HEALING FARMS | $6,400 |
| SINGER SANCTUARY | $6,250 |
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 (FY21–25, $169k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 94% 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 12% of The Helen and Jose Colton 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. Read by recipient address, 58% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 46% — 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.
36 repeat relationships — 20 still active in FY2025, 16 since wound down; 17 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, 68% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $110k 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
- SFSADDLES FOR SOLDIERS INC2× · 2022–2023 · $119k · revenue +350% · 79% of their budget
- MKMending Kids International dba Mending Kids5× · 2021–2025 · $108k · revenue +126%
- SHSAFE HAVEN MEDICAL OUTREACH PROGRAM INC3× · 2022–2025 · $47k · revenue +46%
Funded once
- H4HOMES 4 FAMILIESone grant, 2018 · $50k
- LCLINCOLN COUNTY FIRE DISTRICTone grant, 2022 · $45k
- PRPOINT ROBERTS EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS SENIOR COMMUNITY CENTERone grant, 2019 · $40k
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.
Sanctuary for abused or abandoned animals
My Happy Place Animal Sanctuary is a registered 501(c)3 non profit organization dedicated to providing rescue, rehabilitation and refuge to at-risk animals.
To compassionately serve pets and the people who love them.
Ark-Valley Humane Society's (AVHS) Mission is ensuring the welfare of companion animals through compassion and care. AVHS operated an open-admission animal shelter for Chaffee County, Colorado.
Our mission is to save dogs in distressing conditions on both sides of the California/Mexican border. We provide them with essential medical treatment and care to help them regain their health, and ultimately match them with loving homes…
We are a Wyoming based non-profit dedicated to providing support, transitional services, and a loving home for hounds, burros, horses, pigs, sheep, and chickens. While we provide sanctuary for our farm and hound friends, our primary focus…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Pilots to the Rescue Inc and the most unlike its peers is Red Bucket Equine Rescue. 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 16 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 9% of your grantees by number, and just 3% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% 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.
47 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. 47 of the 106 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 SHADOW HILLS RIDING CLUB INC ↗
- Who funds SADDLES FOR SOLDIERS INC ↗
- Who funds Mending Kids International dba Mending Kids ↗
- Who funds NEW MUSICALS INC ↗
- Who funds SAFE HAVEN MEDICAL OUTREACH PROGRAM INC ↗
- Who funds BARN SANCTUARY ↗
- Who funds Lupita Project ↗
- Who funds VALOR HEALING FARMS ↗
- Who funds CULTURAL HERITAGE FOUNDATION OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds HAPPY CATS HAVEN INC ↗
- Who funds WILDLIFE WAYSTATION ↗
- Who funds SINGER SANCTUARY ↗
- Who funds Cure Sanfilippo Foundation ↗
- Who funds BRIDGE TO HOME SCV ↗
- Who funds THE LITTLE ZOO ↗
- Who funds SOLDIERS BEST FRIEND ↗
- Who funds UNITE TO LIGHT INC ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ↗
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: Petco Love · The Duffield Family Foundation Dba Maddie's Fund · The Michelson Found Animals Foundation Inc · Petsmart Charities Inc · The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals · California Community Foundation · Enterprise Holdings Foundation · Mightycause Charitable Foundation · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Charities Aid Foundation America · The Bank of America 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 Helen and Jose Colton 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 Helen and Jose Colton Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Helen and Jose Colton 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.