· Private foundation
The Henderson Family 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.
Read this first · the figures below need context
62% of The Henderson Family Foundation’s FY2025 grant dollars went to Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2025 names 8 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it. Everything below is therefore FY2023, the last year The Henderson Family Foundation named its own grantees at scale: 30 organizations, $228k. It is dated, not current.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
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 · FY2023
- Under $10k38 grants · $102k
- $10k–50k8 grants · $126k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE STEPPING STONE FOUNDATION | $30,000 |
| HOMELESS CHILDREN FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| DHARMAKAYA CENTER FOR WELLBEING | $21,250 |
| DARTMOUTH COLLEGE | $10,000 |
| ORCA CONSERVANCY | $10,000 |
| FOXCROFT SCHOOL | $10,000 |
| VERO BEACH MUSEUM OF ART | $10,000 |
| HELP ME SEE | $10,000 |
| GEISEL SCHOOL OF MEDICINE | $6,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $5,500 |
| CHOOSE LOVE | $5,000 |
| JOEL KATZ RESIDENCY EDUCATION FUND | $5,000 |
| BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $5,000 |
| SMITH COLLEGE | $5,000 |
| MYRIAD USA | $5,000 |
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 (FY20–23, $30k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 67% 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.
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 +52% since the first grant, against +37% for the ones you funded once.
36 repeat relationships — 26 still active in FY2023, 10 since wound down; 17 grantees were first funded in FY2023 (too recent to call). Read against FY2023, the last year this funder named its own grantees directly; its giving has since run through a sponsor, which reports no donor behind each grant.
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, 80% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $15k 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
- VBVERO BEACH MUSEUM OF ART INC9× · 2017–2025 · $110k · revenue +916%
STEPPINGSTONE FOUNDATION INC6× · 2018–2023 · $102k · revenue +59%- DCDHARMAKAYA CENTER FOR WELLBEING INC6× · 2018–2023 · $82k · revenue +129%
Funded once
- UAUNITED AGAINST POVERTY INCone grant, 2019 · $3k · revenue +12%
- HMHIGH MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE INCone grant, 2019 · $3k · revenue -19%
- GOGREENWAVE ORGANIZATION CORPgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $2k · revenue +424%
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.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The mission of mit is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
Wentworth institute of technology is a nationally recognized private coeducational and residential university of higher education with a mission to empower, inspire and innovate through experiential learning with a core purpose of career…
New york school of interior design provides the most innovative, immersive, and transformative interior design education in the world, demonstrating the impact of professionally designed interiors on the health, happiness, and well-being…
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
Wpi transforms lives, turns knowledge into action to confront global challenges, and revolutionizes stem through distinctive and inclusive education, projects and research. (http://www.wpi.edu/about/mission.html)
Williams College strives to achieve educational excellence by fostering a community of learning in collaboration with students, faculty, staff, devoted alumni and parents.
Organization's mission: boston university is an international, comprehensive, private research university, committed to educating students to be reflective, resourceful individuals ready to live, adapt, and lead in an interconnected world.…
Bates is a college of the liberal arts and sciences, and is a coeducational, nonsectarian, residential college with special commitments to academic rigor, and to assuring in all of its efforts the dignity of each individual, and access to…
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
Education and Research
The peak school seeks to ignite a passion for learning, to develop students of diverse talents and backgrounds who think critically and act with integrity, and to graduate compassionate, confident, capable students who will embrace their…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Noble and Greenough School and the most unlike its peers is Windsor Foundation Inc. 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 35 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) — 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 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.
49 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. 49 of the 66 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 FIDELITY INVESTMENTS CHARITABLE GIFT FUND ↗
- Who funds Trustees of Dartmouth College ↗
- Who funds VERO BEACH MUSEUM OF ART INC ↗
- Who funds STEPPINGSTONE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds DHARMAKAYA CENTER FOR WELLBEING INC ↗
- Who funds BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC ↗
- Who funds RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR LEARNING & DEVELO DEVELOPMENT INC ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF THE SMITH COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds ORCA CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RESEARCH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds INDIAN RIVER HOSPITAL FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds NOBLE AND GREENOUGH SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds NEW ENGLAND CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC ↗
- Who funds RIVERSIDE THEATRE INC ↗
- Who funds SHINING HOPE FOR COMMUNITIES INC ↗
- Who funds JOHN HAY ESTATE AT THE FELLS ↗
- Who funds Foxcroft School ↗
- Who funds RIAN IMMIGRANT CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds ST ANDREW'S SCHOOL OF DELAWARE INC ↗
- Who funds BOYS & GIRLS CLUB OF INDIAN RIVER COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds CRADLES TO CRAYONS INC ↗
- Who funds HELP ME SEE INC ↗
- Who funds NEW LONDON BARN PLAYHOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES ↗
- Who funds THE CARROLL SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds CHOOSE LOVE INC ↗
- Who funds MYRIAD USA INC ↗
- Who funds WILLIAM JAMES COLLEGE INC ↗
- Who funds ONE TREE PLANTED 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: Boston Foundation Inc · Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · The Schooner Foundation · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · Citizens Charitable Foundation · The Robert and Judith Sturgis Family Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Jewish Communal Fund · National Philanthropic Trust · American Endowment 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 Henderson Family 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- William James College Inc — 11% of income from government
- Als Therapy Development Foundation Inc — 8% of income from government
- Familyaid Boston Inc — 4% of income from government
- American Academy of Arts & Sciences — 3% of income from government
- Cradles to Crayons Inc — 2% of income from government
- The Trustees of the Smith College — 1% of income from government
- United Way of Indian River County Inc — 1% of income from government
- New England Conservatory of Music — 1% of income from government
- Boston Symphony Orchestra Inc — 0% of income from government
- Indian River Land Trust Inc — 0% of income from government
- Steppingstone Foundation Inc — 0% of income from government
- St Andrew's School of Delaware 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 Henderson Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Henderson Family 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.