· Public charity
The Nature Conservancy
The mission of THE NATURE CONSERVANCY is to conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends.
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.
The 671 grants below total $67,830,125 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $180,029,763 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $112,199,638 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k68 grants · $517k
- $10k–50k342 grants · $7.6M
- $50k–250k204 grants · $22M
- $250k+57 grants · $38M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| AMERICAN FOREST FOUNDATION | $2,125,552 |
| THE CONSERVATION FUND | $1,921,184 |
| MONGOLIAN NATURES LEGACY FOUNDATION | $1,543,113 |
| NO ON 2117 COMMITTEE | $1,500,000 |
| POLK COUNTY | $1,500,000 |
| COMMODITY CREDIT CORPORATION | $1,500,000 |
| THE PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS | $1,310,522 |
| NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY | $1,297,950 |
| WINDWARD FUND | $1,265,905 |
| MAINE COAST HERITAGE TRUST | $1,080,274 |
| AUDUBON NEW YORK | $990,077 |
| PANTHERA CORPORATION | $948,355 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA | $885,391 |
| THE WATERSHED RESEARCH AND TRAINING CENTER | $862,966 |
| UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON | $847,869 |
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 (FY18–25, $1.2M) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 95% 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
Grants abroad, by region — $105M on the FY2025 return
Schedule F, as filed: 7 regions, $105M to organizations and $76k to individuals. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: CONSERVATION ACTIVITIES
Stated purpose: CONSERVATION ACTIVITIES
Stated purpose: CONSERVATION ACTIVITIES
Stated purpose: CONSERVATION ACTIVITIES
Stated purpose: CONSERVATION ACTIVITIES · ENTREPEUNEUR GRANTS
Stated purpose: CONSERVATION ACTIVITIES
Stated purpose: CONSERVATION ACTIVITIES
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. Grants abroad on Schedule F are filed by region, purpose and amount with no recipient name, so they are shown by region and cannot be placed on the country map or matched to a grantee.
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 +36% since the first grant, against +11% for the ones you funded once.
898 repeat relationships — 450 still active in FY2025, 448 since wound down; 205 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, 73% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $17M 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
- BIBLUE INVESTMENTS FOR NATURE INC3× · 2021–2023 · $61M · revenue ×843 · 100% of their budget
- AFAMERICAN FOREST FOUNDATION8× · 2018–2025 · $7.4M · revenue +66%
- DUDucks Unlimited Inc9× · 2017–2025 · $6.7M · revenue +99%
Funded once
- SRSPRUCE ROOT INCone grant, 2023 · $8.0M
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2023 · $3.7M
- SOSTATE OF CALIFORNIA DEPT OF FISH AND WILDLIFEone grant, 2024 · $2.5M
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.
Our mission is conserving West Michigans ecologically critical land. We protect land by creating public nature preserves, providing support to communities and local governments in creating natural areas, and helping private landowners…
Cascadia wildlands defends and restores cacasia's wild ecosystems in the forests,in the courts, and in the streets. we envision vast old-growth forests, rivers full of wild salmon, wolves howling in the backcountry, a stable climate, and…
Sustainable Conservation advances the collaborative stewardship of Californias land, air, and water for the benefit of nature and people. For over three decades, Sustainable Conservation has built coalitions of people with different…
Oregon agricultural trust partners with farmers and ranchers to protect agricultural lands for the benefit of oregons economy, communities, and landscapes.
The wildlands trust works throughout southeastern massachusetts to conserve and permanently protect native habitats, farmland, and lands of high ecologic and scenic value that serve to keep our communities healthy and our residents…
The mission of the Whatcom Land Trust is to preserve and protect wildlife habitat, scenic, agricultural and open space lands in Whatcom County for future generations by securing interests in land and promoting land stewardship.
The mission of wildcoast is to conserve coastal and marine ecosystems and address climate change through natural solutions. our staff is dedicated to conserving threatened and endangered coastlines and wildlife in california and mexico.…
Sudbury valley trustees, inc. ("the organization") works to protect natural areas and farmland for wildlife and people in the 36 communities that surround the sudbury, assabet, and concord rivers. the organization cares for some of the…
The purpose of the organization is to monitor, manage, and preserve conservation easements it stewards in northern california. the organization acquires conservation easements in land exhibiting important natural features to protect and…
Dedicated to protecting the world's natural environment on behalf of the public by serving as a public interest law firm. refer to schedule o, part iii, line 4a, for list of litigated cases or advocacy work.
To conserve, care for, and connect with the lands and waters essential to life in the inland northwest.
The Coast Fork Willamette Watershed Council is a local nonprofit organization that strives to enhance and restore habitat for fish and wildlife our community and for future generations. Our Board of Directors consists of seven members with…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Wildlands Conservancy Inc and the most unlike its peers is Pfleger Institute of Environmental Research. 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 29 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) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% 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.
1275 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. 1275 of the 1,911 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 BLUE INVESTMENTS FOR NATURE INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FOREST FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Ducks Unlimited Inc ↗
- Who funds OPEN SPACE INSTITUTE LAND TRUST INC ↗
- Who funds THE WATERSHED RESEARCH & TRAINING CENTER ↗
- Who funds ADIRONDACK LAND TRUST INC ↗
- Who funds FEATHER RIVER LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds THE CONSERVATION FUND A NONPROFIT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds TRUCKEE DONNER LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust ↗
- Who funds THE TRUST FOR PUBLIC LAND ↗
- Who funds The Pew Charitable Trusts ↗
- Who funds BIRD ALLIANCE OF OREGON INC ↗
- Who funds WINDWARD FUND ↗
- Who funds YAMPA VALLEY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds INDIANA AGRICULTURE NUTRIENT ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds TECHNOSERVE INC ↗
- Who funds Appalachian Mountain Club ↗
- Who funds EARTHWATCH INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds No on 2117 Committee ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY INITIATIVES ↗
- Who funds THE FOREST STEWARDS GUILD ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE VERDE RIVER ↗
- Who funds Forest Society of Maine ↗
- Who funds RAINFOREST TRUST ↗
- Who funds CHAMA PEAK LAND ALLIANCE ↗
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: Land Trust Alliance Inc · National Fish and Wildlife Foundation · Davis Conservation Foundation · Open Space Institute Land Trust Inc · Resources Legacy Fund · National Forest Foundation · Patagoniaorg · The Trust for Public Land · Bonneville Environmental Foundation · United States Endowment for Forestry · Wilburforce Foundation · Fields Pond Foundation Inc
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 Nature Conservancy 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.
- Lomakatsi Restoration Project — 100% of income from government
- Friends of Trees — 100% of income from government
- Calapooia Watershed Council — 57% of income from government
- Oregon Wildlife Heritage Foundation — 16% of income from government
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- McKenzie River Trust — 8% of income from government
- Northeastern University — 7% of income from government
- Mote Marine Laboratory Inc — 4% of income from government
- Trustees of Clark University — 2% of income from government
- Appalachian Mountain Club — 1% of income from government
- Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida I — 1% of income from government
- Bird Alliance of Oregon 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.