· Private foundation
The Johnson Charitable Trust
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.
Read this first · the figures below need context
50% of The Johnson Charitable Trust’s FY2024 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. FY2024 names 7 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it. Everything below is therefore FY2019, the last year The Johnson Charitable Trust named its own grantees at scale: 20 organizations, $2M. 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2019
- Under $10k1 grant · $5k
- $10k–50k16 grants · $263k
- $50k–250k5 grants · $325k
- $250k+3 grants · $1.3M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| CATLIN GABEL SCHOOL | $500,000 |
| OREGON COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $400,000 |
| FIDELITY | $400,000 |
| PORTLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION | $100,000 |
| CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION | $75,000 |
| SNOWCAP COMMUNITY CHARITIES | $50,000 |
| NEW AVENUES FOR YOUTH | $50,000 |
| ALLIANCE FOR EQUITY IN MONTESSORI EDUCATION | $50,000 |
| PORTLAND TENNIS AND EDUCATION | $30,000 |
| CAMPBELL INSTITUTE DBA CHILDREN'S INSTITUTE | $25,000 |
| PORTLAND HOMELESS FAMILY SOLUTIONS | $25,000 |
| CLACKAMAS SERVICE CENTER | $20,000 |
| COLLEGE POSSIBLE | $20,000 |
| OPEN SCHOOL | $20,000 |
| SMART READING | $20,000 |
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, $1.0M) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 88% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 31% of The Johnson Charitable Trust’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, 62% of the giving stays in OR; read by stated purpose it is 58% — 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 +32% since the first grant, against +13% for the ones you funded once.
29 repeat relationships — 17 still active in FY2019, 12 since wound down; 19 grantees were first funded in FY2019 (too recent to call). Read against FY2019, 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 FY2024, 100% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $0 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
- SCSNOWCAP COMMUNITY SERVICES7× · 2017–2024 · $620k · revenue +89%
PORTLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION INC7× · 2018–2024 · $560k · revenue +32%
CATLIN GABEL SCHOOL3× · 2018–2020 · $512k · revenue +68%
Funded once
- MAMUSEUM AT WARM SPRINGSone grant, 2017 · $20k · revenue -15%
- OPOPHELIA'S PLACEgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $10k · revenue +124%
- TOTRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGEone grant, 2018 · $10k
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.
Children's institute's mission is to leverage research, practice, policy, and advocacy to shift systems toward justice for families so that all of oregon's children, prenatal to grade 5, have access to opportunity.
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The oregon center for public policy's mission is to achieve economic justice for all oregonians through research, analysis, and advocacy. ocpp works to change policies that foster economic security and stability for all oregonians. we do…
Elevating potential, building sustained relationships with urban youth, and charting paths to brighter futures.
Friends - portland commits to standing alongside our community's youth as they work to overcome barriers to their success. each child receives 1:1 support and guidance from a salaried, professional mentor (called a friend), from…
Next up amplifies the voice of diverse youth to achieve a more just oregon
Youth progress is a nonprofit organization that is licensed as a child caring agency (cca) to serve youth ages 12-25 in the custody of the oregon youth authority (oya) or the oregon department of human services (dhs). youth progress uses…
Webelongpdx is dedicated to supporting children's mental health through proactive and comprehensive year-round out-of-school investment. we run programs that operate 42 weeks a year, offering enriching activities twice a week to children…
Open signal's mission is to nurture the change-making power of community media in service of a just and equitable world.
Oregon Justice Network is an alliance built and staffed by criminal legal system impacted people advocating for the well-being of people affected or at-risk of being affected by carceral systems. Our work centers around restorative…
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For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Open School Inc and the most unlike its peers is Glide Revitalization. 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 31 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) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
51 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. 51 of the 62 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 THE OREGON COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SNOWCAP COMMUNITY SERVICES ↗
- Who funds PORTLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds CATLIN GABEL SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds BOYS AND GIRLS CLUBS OF PORTLAND METROPOLITAN AREA ↗
- Who funds NEW AVENUES FOR YOUTH INC ↗
- Who funds Clackamas Service Center ↗
- Who funds PORTLAND TENNIS & EDUCATION ↗
- Who funds HAWAII COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SMART READING ↗
- Who funds INCIGHT COMPANY ↗
- Who funds TEAM RUBICON INC ↗
- Who funds Portland YouthBuilders ↗
- Who funds BOYS AND GIRLS CLUBS OF METRO DENVER INC ↗
- Who funds CLACKAMAS WOMEN'S SERVICES ↗
- Who funds PATH HOME ↗
- Who funds TOGETHER WE ARE GREATER THAN ↗
- Who funds BRIDGE MEADOWS ↗
- Who funds READING RESULTS ↗
- Who funds CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds OREGON MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY ↗
- Who funds BOYS AND GIRLS CLUBS OF SNOHOMISH COUNTY ↗
- Who funds Latino Network ↗
- Who funds Alliance for Equity in Montessori Education ↗
- Who funds KIDS UNLIMITED OF OREGON ↗
- Who funds IMPACT NW ↗
- Who funds BOYS & GIRLS CLUB OF SALEM MARION & POLK COUNTIES ↗
- Who funds OPEN SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM AT WARM SPRINGS ↗
- Who funds Nonprofit Association of Oregon ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP ↗
- Who funds CASA OF CLACKAMAS COUNTY ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA GARCIA MEMORIAL HEALTH CENTER ↗
- Who funds THE CHILDREN'S BOOK BANK ↗
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 Oregon Community Foundation · Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation Trust · Juan Young Trust · OCF Joseph E Weston Public Foundation · The Collins Foundation · Meyer Memorial Trust · The Autzen Foundation · The Reser Family Foundation · Maybelle Clark Macdonald Fund · Umpqua Bank Charitable Foundation · The Robert D and Marcia H Randall Charitable Trust · The Jackson 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 Johnson Charitable Trust 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.
- Glide Revitalization — 87% of income from government
- Lines for Life — 70% of income from government
- Alliance for Equity in Montessori Education — 65% of income from government
- Children's Public Private Partnership — 49% of income from government
- Black Parent Initiative — 45% of income from government
- Bridge Meadows — 36% of income from government
- Portland YouthBuilders — 35% of income from government
- Clackamas Women's Services — 33% of income from government
- Warm Springs Community Action Team — 28% of income from government
- Ophelia's Place — 22% of income from government
- New Avenues for Youth Inc — 20% of income from government
- Latino Network — 15% of income from government
- Ac Portland — 14% of income from government
- Ethos Inc — 13% of income from government
- Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center — 11% of income from government
- Clackamas Service Center — 9% of income from government
- Lifeworks Nw — 8% of income from government
- Impact Nw — 8% of income from government
- Nonprofit Association of Oregon — 6% of income from government
- Portland Community College Foundation Inc — 5% of income from government
- Open School Inc — 5% of income from government
- Together We Are Greater Than — 5% of income from government
- Oregon Museum of Science and Industry — 4% of income from government
- Lewis and Clark Montessori Charter School — 3% of income from government
- Smart Reading — 3% of income from government
- The Oregon Community Foundation — 2% of income from government
- Metropolitan Youth Symphony — 1% of income from government
- North Pole Studio — 0% of income from government
- Casa of Clackamas County — 0% of income from government
- Catlin Gabel School — 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 Johnson Charitable Trust?
Find your warmest path to The Johnson Charitable Trust 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.