· Private foundation
The Mortar Foundation Inc
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.
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 · FY2024
- Under $10k6 grants · $5k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $80k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $100k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| She Recovers Foundation | $100,107 |
| Salvation Army | $25,000 |
| Hispanics in Philanthropy-HipGive | $25,000 |
| About-Face | $20,000 |
| Florence Crittenton Services | $10,000 |
| Access Institute for Psychological | $2,500 |
| Sandy Hook Promise Foundation | $622 |
| Nature Conservancy | $480 |
| Plan International USA | $468 |
| Individual grant recipient | $300 |
| Surfrider Foundation | $191 |
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, $122k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 0% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 11% of The Mortar Foundation Inc’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, 90% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 85% — 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 +21% since the first grant, against +10% for the ones you funded once.
20 repeat relationships — 7 still active in FY2024, 13 since wound down; 3 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (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 FY2024, 81% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $35k 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
- AIAccess Institute for Psychological Services4× · 2017–2024 · $108k · revenue +113%
HISPANICS IN PHILANTHROPY3× · 2017–2019 · $107k · revenue +21%- MRMOBILIZE RECOVERY2× · 2022–2023 · $75k · revenue +21%
Funded once
- AIAcess Institute for Psychological Sone grant, 2020 · $25k
- CHCHILDREN'S HEALTH COUNCIL INCgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $25k · revenue +75%
- FHFreedom Houseone grant, 2017 · $20k
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 mission of the San Francisco Public Press is to enrich civic life by publishing investigative and solutions journalism that engages diverse audiences and promotes public accountability. The San Francisco Public Press…
A long-term, strategic alliance of labor, community, faith-based, and student organizations working together to build greater economic power for workers and community members through employee rights at work and access to good jobs,…
Forward Together is a national reproductive justice organization that centers people, families, and communities who experience reproductive oppression. They prioritize queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and other peoples of color and utilize…
See schedule okqed serves the people of northern california with a community-supported alternative to commercial media, providing the knowledge needed to make informed decisions; convening community dialogue; bringing the arts to everyone;…
The Climate Center is a climate and energy policy nonprofit working to rapidly reduce climate pollution at scale, starting in California.
SF Partnership is an organization comprised of SF's leading employers dedicated to supporting an equitable, resilient, and vibrant economy shared by all people working and living in San Francisco. Through education, advocacy, and research,…
Serve as a partner, educator, and guide for philanthropy in reimagining practices that advance a thriving and just world.
The Workers Labs purpose is to give new ideas about increasing worker power a genuine changce to succeed and flourish. We envison a society where workers are powerful drivers of economic, social, and political transformation. To bring…
Ca fwd drives action to identify solutions that can be taken to scale to meet the challenges the state is facing. the organization is driven by the belief that regional solutions across the state will help ensure economic, environmental,…
Pangea's mission is to provide deportation defense services, advocate for policy change, and provide education and legal empowerment for our immigrant communities.
EFIs mission is to transform the produce industry and the lives of farmworkers by facilitating collaboration among workers, agricultural employers, retail buyers and consumer advocates.
San Francisco CASA transforms the lives of children and youth traumatized and displaced in the foster care and related systems by providing one consistent, caring volunteer advocate, trained to address each childs needs in the court and…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Hispanics in Philanthropy and the most unlike its peers is Center for Open Recovery Dba Open Recovery. 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) — 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 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.
34 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. 34 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 Access Institute for Psychological Services ↗
- Who funds HISPANICS IN PHILANTHROPY ↗
- Who funds Center for Open Recovery DBA Open Recovery ↗
- Who funds MOBILIZE RECOVERY ↗
- Who funds AT THE CROSSROADS ↗
- Who funds ABOUT-FACE MEDIA LITERACY INC ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S HEALTH COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds Performing Arts Workshop Inc ↗
- Who funds TIDES CENTER ↗
- Who funds Homeless Youth Alliance ↗
- Who funds Florence Crittenton Services of Greater Washington ↗
- Who funds GIRLS FOR GENDER EQUITY INC ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO FOOD BANK ↗
- Who funds THE EXPLORATORIUM ↗
- Who funds DRY DOCK CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL GOOD FUND INC ↗
- Who funds Foglifter Press ↗
- Who funds Alliance for Girls ↗
- Who funds Homeless Prenatal Program Inc ↗
- Who funds SANDY HOOK PROMISE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
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 San Francisco Foundation · Horizons Foundation · Viragh Family Foundation · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · Tides Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Cerity Partners Foundation · McNabb Foundation · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · Marin Community Foundation · 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 Mortar Foundation Inc 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.
- Sandy Hook Promise Foundation — 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 Mortar Foundation Inc?
Find your warmest path to The Mortar Foundation Inc 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.