How much did THE NICHOLSON FAMILY FOUNDATION grant in FY2025?

A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 53% of THE NICHOLSON FAMILY FOUNDATION’s grantee dollars go to organizations outside the IRS cause taxonomy (common for large international and research funders), so a chart would be mostly “unclassified” and misrepresent the portfolio.

02beneath the categories

Past the labels — and the year it shifted

Beneath the NTEE codes, this is what the grant descriptions actually say.

…and in their own words, year by year

2022

theatreskill buildingchildrenafter-schoolmulti-year leadershipleadership youngyoung women

2023

educational enrichmentoutdoorarts educationpreforming artssocial educationalsocial educationyouth leadership

2024

multi-year socialenvironmental educationsocial educationalperforming artsarts educationsocial educationenrichment

2025

arts educationalmulti-year performingmulti-year socialoutdoorsocial educationalsocial educationarts education

Words distinctive to each year’s grant purposes (TF-IDF) · event-driven terms in cyan.

03FY2025 · 49 grants

Where the money goes

Your grants by size, and where they go.

By grant size · FY2025

Under $10k34 grants · $148k
$10k–50k15 grants · $165k

$5,000

Median grant

States reached

$9.0M

Total assets

Largest grants

GEORGE MARK CHILDREN'S HOUSE$25,000
BERKELEY ART CENTER$10,000
FIRST GRADUATE$10,000
TIDES CENTER FIRST EXPOSURES$10,000
HOSPICE OF SANTA CRUZ$10,000
SURVIVORS HEALING CENTER$10,000
SAN FRANCISCO YOUTH THEATRE$10,000
SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE$10,000
ARTOGETHER$10,000
ULTIMATE IMPACT$10,000
VISTA CENTER FOR THE BLIND$10,000
HACK THE HOOD$10,000
PERFORMING ARTS WORKSHOP$10,000
BE A MENTOR INC$10,000
CAMPING UNLIMITED$10,000

02The need

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.

show:

Your human-services grants (FY22–25, $93k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10% — the area typically sits at 8%. 70% of those dollars reach neighborhoods with above-average need. Most of your grants land in higher-need ZIPs.

grant to an above-average-need area below average· circle size = grant amount

Matched: human-services grants are those whose grantee’s IRS cause code is Human Services. Placed by people below the poverty line in 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, United Way ALICE — shown as context about the area, never attributed to your giving.

03Your edge

repeat funding

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.

73%of every dollar goes to organizations you’ve funded before.

$950k · 48 repeat orgs$359k to everyone else

And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +75% since the first grant, against +23% for the ones you funded once.

48 repeat relationships — 26 still active in FY2025, 22 since wound down; 23 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (too recent to call).

How the two cohorts compare

Re-uppedFunded once

Organizations

Total granted

$950k

$231k

Median revenue growth · since first grant

+75%

+23%

Still filing today

60%

50%

New vs renewed · share of each year

In FY2025, 59% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $128k went to new ones.

RenewedFirst-time

Where new relationships form · theme of each grantee’s first grant

Arts & CultureYouth DevelopmentHuman ServicesEducationHealthRecreation & SportsOther

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

LA
LEAP ARTS IN EDUCATION
3× · 2022–2024 · $30k · revenue +19%
VC
VISTA CENTER FOR THE BLIND
4× · 2022–2025 · $30k · revenue +49%
TK
TEEN KITCHEN PROJECT
3× · 2022–2025 · $25k · revenue +247%

Funded once

GV
GIRL VENTURES
one grant, 2022 · $10k
HO
HOSPICE OF SANTA CRUZ COUNTY
one grant, 2022 · $10k · revenue +0%
UR
UNITED ROOTS
one grant, 2022 · $10k · revenue -98%

Repeat = funded in two or more distinct years; growth and survival are read from each grantee’s own subsequent IRS filings.

04Your field

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 Council of San Francisco

Since 1974, Children's Council has been at the heart of early care and education in San Francisco.

Human Services

Arts for Oakland Kids

To advance arts justice by ensuring that all students in under-resourced oakland public schools receive a comprehensive arts education in order to improve learning and promote achievement.

Arts & Culture

Unitedly

Unitedly is a nonprofit organization based in San Mateo County, California. Unitedly was established to ensure Asian families and communities have access to equitable opportunities and resources to thrive in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Human Services

Oakland Kids First

Oakland Kids First is a community-based nonprofit in Oakland, CA that empowers young people to reimagine broken systems and organize for equitable public schools by providing youth leadership development, youth organizing, and community…

Youth Development

Jobs with Justice San Francisco

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,…

Employment

Oakland Literacy Coalition Inc

Working together to ensure that every Oakland child learns and loves to read.

Education

Root Division

Root Division provides discounted studios to 25+ emerging artists in exchange for volunteering. We serve 800 youth with free art classes, 550 adults with courses, 350 artists via exhibitions, & an overall audience of 9,000 within/ beyond…

Arts & Culture

Young Playwrights Theater

Young Playwrights Theater (YPT) is committed to using theater & writing to foster dialogue, arts education, literacy & conflict resolution in communities.

Arts & Culture

San Francisco Casa

San Francisco CASA (formerly San Francisco Court Appointed Special Advocates) transforms the lives of systems-involved and other vulnerable children, young adults and their families by providing consistent, caring volunteer advocates…

Civil Rights

Performing Arts Workshop Inc

Dedicated to helping young people develop critical thinking, creative expression, and basic learning skills through the arts.

Arts & Culture

Everyones Harvest

Everyone's Harvest's mission is to provide access to healthy, affordable fruits and vegetables through certified farmers markets and community food programs.

Food & Nutrition

California Competes

California Competes: Higher Education for a Strong Economy is a nonpartisan policy and research organization focused on identifying solutions to the states most critical challenges at the intersection of higher education, equity, and the…

Education

For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Oakland Public Education Fund and the most unlike its peers is World Central Kitchen 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.

the sector your giving your giving is ahead of the sector the sector’s ahead of you· dot size = how much the theme matters to each side

Ordered by the change in your giving — leaning in on top, pulling back at the bottom. The bar between the two dots is how out of step you are with the sector. Hover any row for detail.

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 21 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.

The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.

Closures · last 5 years

The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% lost their exemption, against 10% of the field you don’t fund.

orgs you fund

1%1/72

the rest of the field

10%

2,879/28,566

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.

05the grantee network

70 grantees, every filing reconciled, 2017–2025.

Each one resolved to its own IRS returns and tracked year by year — your grant beside their revenue.

Load-bearing (≥25% of a budget)

Early backer (in before they grew)

69/70

Grantees still filing

53/70

Grew since you first funded

Where your money sits — by cause, then by grantee

Other$743,670Youth Development$170,000Arts & Culture$168,500Human Services$93,000Health$70,000Education$43,100Civil Rights$20,000

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.

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.

The Morris Stulsaft FoundationCA37.3× affinity15 shared granteesties to 9 of 11Hover any node to trace its alignments.Compare side by side →

Open a dossier: The Morris Stulsaft Foundation · East Bay Community Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Kaiser Foundation Hospitals · The San Francisco Foundation · Bothin Foundation · The Barrios Trust · The Joseph and Vera Long Foundation · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · Community Foundation Santa Cruz · Monterey Peninsula Foundation · Ken Birdwell 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 organisation THE NICHOLSON FAMILY 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.

2025

’20’21’22’23’24’25

no gov moneyreceives it· size = income

0get no government money at all

0rely on government for over half their income

typical government reliance, FY20–25

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. 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.

05Through Plinth

Through Plinth

Your grantmaking, live and operational

This dossier was generated cold from public filings. In Plinth it’s a working system — every applicant assessed and every grant monitored. Here’s a taste, run on one of your grantees: 1 GRAIN TO 1000 GRAINS.

Agentic due diligence · confidence × risk

Financial management

insufficient risk

Limited financial data in public filings.

Track record & reputation

low risk

8 years of Form 990 filings, still active.

Legal standing

low risk

US 501(c)(3); EIN 463802710 on file with current IRS Form 990 filings.

Governance

Live in Plinth

Board composition & governance documents — verified live in Plinth from the applicant.

Compliance & sanctions

Live in Plinth

OFAC / UN sanctions screening — run live in Plinth at assessment.

Program capacity

Live in Plinth

Staffing, M&E and activity alignment — assessed live in Plinth from submitted proposals.

Live · Plinth’s real DD engine

Run the actual assessment on 1 GRAIN TO 1000 GRAINS, cold from public data.

Generated live from public IRS filings + open web sources by Plinth’s agentic engine. Shown as an illustration of the product, not a formal assessment.

Post-award monitoring · continuous checks

Awaiting reportFinancial stability— Runway not derivable from filings.
WatchSustained operations— Filing through 2024; revenue contracted over the period.
On trackReliance on your funding— Your grants peaked at 15% of their budget — diversified.
Awaiting reportEvidence of delivery— Plinth collects the grantee's own monitoring reports post-award.

What you see here is static and public. In Plinth it’s operational — the full six-pillar framework on every applicant (with their own documents + live registry and sanctions checks), monitoring dashboards on every award, custom board reports, and eligibility routing for intake.

Agentic due diligenceMonitoring dashboardsCustom board reportsEligibility routing

Preview generated from this grantee’s public IRS filings and independent reporting. Pillars marked “live in Plinth” require the applicant’s submitted documents. Shown as illustration, not a formal assessment.

Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPro

How do I get to The Nicholson Family Foundation?

Find your warmest path to The Nicholson Family Foundation through people who sit on both boards. Search for your organization and Plinth traces the introduction across shared trustees and officers.

Every link is a documented governance overlap in public IRS 990 filings — not a personal network — and each hop carries its own confidence tier. Low-confidence or distant paths are held back rather than guessed.

THE NICHOLSON FAMILY FOUNDATION

What you funded, over time

Past the labels — and the year it shifted

Where the money goes

Do your dollars go where the need is?

Who you back again

Backed again, and grew

Funded once

70 grantees, every filing reconciled, 2017–2025.

Government reliance of your grantees

Your grantmaking, live and operational

How do I get to The Nicholson Family Foundation?

More from the funding graph

THE NICHOLSON FAMILY FOUNDATION

What you funded, over time

Past the labels — and the year it shifted

Where the money goes

Do your dollars go where the need is?

Who you back again

Backed again, and grew

Funded once

70 grantees, every filing reconciled, 2017–2025.

Government reliance of your grantees

Your grantmaking, live and operational

How do I get to The Nicholson Family Foundation?

More from the funding graph