· Private foundation
The Marian 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.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Mamabird Alumni Mentorship Association | $6,000 |
| American Dance Festival | $1,000 |
| PBS Foundation | $1,000 |
| NPR | $1,000 |
| Triangle Land Conservancy | $500 |
| HL Ferguson Museum | $500 |
| Prison Mindfulness Institute | $500 |
| Book Harvest | $500 |
| Individual grant recipient | $400 |
| Appalachian Trail Conservancy | $300 |
| USA Ultimate Fund | $200 |
| Feeding America | $200 |
| Rocking the Boat NYC | $200 |
| Stark Mountain Foundation | $200 |
| Barack Obama Foundation | $200 |
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 (FY17–25, $3k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 23% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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 +46% since the first grant, against +34% for the ones you funded once.
52 repeat relationships — 21 still active in FY2025, 31 since wound down; 13 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, 37% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $10k 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
- NONATIONAL OUTDOOR LEADERSHIP SCHOOL9× · 2017–2025 · $7k · revenue +8%
TRIANGLE LAND CONSERVANCY INC8× · 2017–2025 · $6k · revenue +528%
BOOK HARVEST7× · 2018–2025 · $5k · revenue +122%
Funded once
- CECOOL EARTH ACTION USA INCone grant, 2018 · $1k · revenue +7%
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2018 · $600
- WVWOMEN VOTEone grant, 2024 · $500
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.
Ci works to spotlight and secure the critical benefits that nature provides to humanity.
Rainforest trust saves endangered wildlife and protects our planet by creating rainforest reserves through partnerships, community engagement, and donor support.
Project drawdown's mission is to drive meaningful climate action by advancing science-based solutions and strategies. project drawdown's work is focused on three pillars: science - advancing science-based climate solutions and strategies;…
RA works at the intersection of business, agriculture & forests to improve lives & protect nature by transforming how land is used, production of goods & consumer choices.
The purpose of rainforest foundation us is to support indigenous peoples and forest communities in their efforts to secure their lands, protect their environment, and uphold their rights.
Actionaid is an international network building a just, equitable, and sustainable world in solidarity with communities on the frontlines of poverty and injustice. actionaid usa is the u.s. branch of actionaid international, which works in…
We safeguard the earth: its people, its plants and animals, and (see schedule o) the natural systems on which all life depends. we work to restore the integrity of the elements that sustain life - air, land, and water - to defend…
Iatp works locally and globally at the intersection of policy and practice to ensure fair and sustainable food, farm and trade systems.
To engage and catalyze global seafood supply chains in rebuilding depleted fish stocks and reducing the environmental impacts of fishing and fish farming.
RA works at the intersection of business, agriculture & forests to improve lives & protect nature by transforming how land is used, production of goods & consumer choices.
Protection and expansion of threatened urban and wildland forest ecosystems. See Part III
The endowment works collaboratively with partners in the public and private sectors to advance systemic, transformative, and sustainable change for the health and vitality of the nation's working forests and forest reliant communities.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Grassroots International Inc and the most unlike its peers is Alana Faith Chen 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 41 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) — 1% of your grantees by number, and just 8% 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.
77 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2026.
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 2017–2026, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 77 of the 125 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 NATIONAL OUTDOOR LEADERSHIP SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN DANCE FESTIVAL INC ↗
- Who funds MAMABIRD ALUMNI MENTORSHIP ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds TRIANGLE LAND CONSERVANCY INC ↗
- Who funds BOOK HARVEST ↗
- Who funds Prison Dharma Network Inc ↗
- Who funds ROCKING THE BOAT INC ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR TIBET ↗
- Who funds JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE FOR WILDLIFE RESEARCH EDUCATION AND CONSERVATION ↗
- Who funds INTER-FAITH FOOD SHUTTLE ↗
- Who funds GREENPEACE INC ↗
- Who funds TRICYCLE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TRIANGLE FLYING DISC ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds Henry L Ferguson Museum ↗
- Who funds Cambodian Childrens Fund ↗
- Who funds PBS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds COOL EARTH ACTION USA INC ↗
- Who funds Asheville GreenWorks ↗
- Who funds RESCUE MISSIONS MINISTRIES INC ↗
- Who funds THE BARACK OBAMA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds RAILS TO TRAILS CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds GOVERNORS ISLAND ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds Designed For Joy ↗
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: Triangle Community Foundation Inc · Duke Energy Foundation · Strowd Roses Inc · Boston Foundation Inc · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund · Impactassetsinc · Ge Aerospace Foundation · WK Kellogg Foundation · Ibm International Foundation · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Shell USA Company 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 Marian 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.
- Mercy Corps — 47% of income from government
- American Hiking Society — 14% of income from government
- Feed the Children Inc — 1% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Middlebury College — 1% of income from government
- Wgbh Educational Foundation — 1% of income from government
- James F Farr Academy 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 Marian Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Marian 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.