· Private foundation
The Herman 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 $10k10 grants · $50k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $118k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| American Red Cross | $30,000 |
| Elisabethstift | $23,836 |
| Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now | $23,790 |
| World Central Kitchen Inc | $15,000 |
| Team Prime Time Inc | $15,000 |
| CASA of Los Angeles | $10,000 |
| RedRover dba of United Animal Natio | $5,000 |
| First Star | $5,000 |
| School on Wheels Inc | $5,000 |
| Coalition for Engaged Education | $5,000 |
| A Sense of Home | $5,000 |
| Mr Holland's Opus Foundation | $5,000 |
| ALS Association Golden West Chapter | $5,000 |
| Giraffe Conservation Foundation | $5,000 |
| Puppies Behind Bars | $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 US giving — 72% of grant dollars ($848k). The need read here covers only this US portion; the 28% that went abroad ($330k) is mapped below.
Your human-services grants (FY17–25, $294k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 81% 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.
Beyond the US — 28% of all-years giving ($330k)
1 country, by the recipient’s country on the filing.
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. International giving is mapped by the recipient’s country from the same 990 filings; comparable need data isn’t available at that grain.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 42% of The Herman 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, 55% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 31% — 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 +41% since the first grant, against +13% for the ones you funded once.
24 repeat relationships — 15 still active in FY2025, 9 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, 97% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $5k 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
- TPTEAM PRIME TIME INC9× · 2017–2025 · $135k · revenue +486%
- COCASA OF LOS ANGELES9× · 2017–2025 · $90k · revenue +131%
- PBPUPPIES BEHIND BARS INC9× · 2017–2025 · $45k · revenue +29%
Funded once
- MUMAUI UNITED WAYgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $15k · revenue +188%
MAUI FOOD BANK INCgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $15k · revenue +138%- TWTHE WOODEN FLOOR FOR YOUTH MOVEMENTone grant, 2022 · $5k · revenue +7%
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.
In addition to rescue and adoption, pet orphans provides a wide range of services including education, medical/financial, spay/neuter, and training assistance.
Marin humane transforms lives through exceptional animal care, humane education, and advocacy. every day, marin humane inspires compassion and positive relationships between people and animals.
The la conservation corps creates equitable opportunities for young people to build resilience in themselves, their communities and the environment through a program of work, education and support.
La's best provides free supervised before and after-school activities to over 15,000 children at 200 schools in los angeles unified school district (lausd).
Believing in the value of every life, mary's path empowers vulnerable teen mothers in foster care and their babies to create lives of dignity, hope and self-sufficiency.
Spcala is dedicated to the prevention of cruelty to animals through education, law enforcement, intervention and advocacy.
To surround students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life. we work with public school systems, establishing relationship with superintendents, principals, educators, and community partners to…
Youth Emerging Stronger (YES) empowers young people, between ages of 12 and 24 within Los Angeles County, including but not limited to run-away and homeless youth. YES mission is to end homelessness one youth at a time to become…
Assist prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families with the immediate and long-termeffects of incarceration and provide services for successful re-entry.
Santa barbara humane operates two campuses located in santa barbara and santa maria providing care for community-owned and homeless animals. both campuses offer affordable high quality veterinary care, compassionate behavior training…
To distribute public affairs and other educational information in order to create an electronic bridge between californians and their public officials, and, in the process educate a new generation of voting citizens and civic leaders who…
The organization's mission is to mobilize resources to fight hunger in our community. to fulfill its mission, the food bank:* sources and acquires nutritious food and other products and distribute them to people experiencing nutrition…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is United Friends of the Children and the most unlike its peers is Last Chance for Animals. 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 33 years old; the field is 13. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% 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.
36 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. 36 of the 41 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 TEAM PRIME TIME INC ↗
- Who funds CASA OF LOS ANGELES ↗
- Who funds PUPPIES BEHIND BARS INC ↗
- Who funds ALS Network ↗
- Who funds SCHOOL ON WHEELS INC ↗
- Who funds CANINE COMPANIONS FOR INDEPENDENCE INC ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds ALDEA INC ↗
- Who funds THE MR HOLLAND'S OPUS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NEADS INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds International Guiding Eyes Inc DBA Guide Dogs of America ↗
- Who funds FIRST STAR INC ↗
- Who funds PS ARTS ↗
- Who funds MAUI UNITED WAY ↗
- Who funds MAUI FOOD BANK INC ↗
- Who funds A SENSE OF HOME ↗
- Who funds Coalition for Engaged Education ↗
- Who funds LOS ANGELES CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds UNITED ANIMAL NATIONS DBA REDROVER ↗
- Who funds DOGS FOR THE DEAF INC DBA DOGS FOR BETTER LIVES ↗
- Who funds THE GENTLE BARN FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE WOODEN FLOOR FOR YOUTH MOVEMENT ↗
- Who funds Last Chance for Animals ↗
- Who funds Harmony Project ↗
- Who funds BEYOND BLINDNESS ↗
- Who funds SCHOLARMATCH INC ↗
- Who funds UNION STATION HOMELESS SERVICES ↗
- Who funds LANGE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds A Light of Hope Support Center ↗
- Who funds UNITED FRIENDS OF THE CHILDREN ↗
- Who funds COVENANT HOUSE CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds HEART OF LOS ANGELES YOUTH INC ↗
- Who funds 9 DOTS COMMUNITY LEARNING CENTER ↗
- Who funds MY STUFF BAGS FOUNDATION ↗
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: California Community Foundation · The Ahmanson Foundation · Weingart Foundation · The Annenberg Foundation · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · The Rose Hills Foundation · The Ralph M Parsons Foundation · Liberty Hill Foundation · Marin Community Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · 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 Herman 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.
- Neads Inc — 1% 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.