· Private foundation
The Old Bug Light Charitable Foundation C/O Spinnaker Trust
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.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k15 grants · $53k
- $10k–50k7 grants · $97k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $50k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| LEARNINGWORKS | $50,000 |
| DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS | $30,000 |
| NATIONAL NETWORK OF ABORTION FUNDS | $15,000 |
| SAILMAINE | $12,000 |
| TOO YOUNG TO WED | $10,000 |
| FRIENDS OF CONGRESS SQUARE PARK | $10,000 |
| FOUNDATION FOR PORTLAND PUBLIC | $10,000 |
| ACLU OF MAINE | $10,000 |
| OLYMPIA SNOWE WOMENS LEADERSHIP | $5,500 |
| PORTLAND OVATIONS | $5,000 |
| BICYCLE COALITION OF MAINE | $5,000 |
| GULF OF MAINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE | $5,000 |
| PORTLAND MUSUEM OF ART | $5,000 |
| PORTLAND COMMUNITY SQUASH | $4,000 |
| HOSPICE OF SOUTHERN MAINE | $4,000 |
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 (FY17–25, $269k) land where the poverty rate runs at 7%, against an area that typically sits at 8%. 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.
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.
35 repeat relationships — 17 still active in FY2025, 18 since wound down; 6 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, 66% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $68k 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
- LLEARNINGWORKS6× · 2020–2025 · $231k · revenue +10%
- TTThe Telling Room6× · 2017–2023 · $90k · revenue +55%
- SMSAIL MAINE9× · 2017–2025 · $89k · revenue +66%
Funded once
- BGBoys & Girls Clubs of Southern Mainegraduatedone grant, 2017 · $25k · revenue +341%
- COCity of Portlandone grant, 2021 · $10k
- ACAMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY INCone grant, 2023 · $7k · revenue -79%
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.
Maine Media Workshops & College educates and inspires visual artists and storytellers to achieve their creative potential. We provide lifelong learning opportunities for those pursuing the fine arts and media-related professions. We are…
Portland Public Library is a welcoming cultural center that brings people together and connects them with trusted resources, ideas, experiences, and information. We build a stronger community by inspiring learning, creativity, and…
The Maine Philanthropy Center (MPC) is the state's leading resource that provides opportunity, leadership and support to advance the effectiveness of philanthropy in Maine and its ability to make a meaningful difference. It helps grant…
The Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center serves as a hub of collaboration that strengthens the immigrant community through language acquisition, economic integration and civic engagement.
To enhance, every day, the health of our patients, our families and our communities. We do that through a range of health care services for people of all ages, in a variety of care settings.
Secure a sustainable future for fisheries and fishing communities in Eastern Maine and beyond.
To provide access to outdoor gear and know-how through a collaborative, equity-centered approach.
Maine & Company is a private, non-profit business development sales organization. Its purpose is to improve Maine's success in attracting new business and expanding and retaining existing business by providing a focused, statewide sales…
The mission of Midcoast Conservancy is to protect vital lands and waters on a scale that matters and to inspire wonder and action on behalf of all species and the Earth.
A broad multi-disciplinary network that works to ensure we can all live healthy, engaged, and secure lives as we age in our homes and communities. With the voices of people with lived experience, we work on policy issues related to…
To promote and ensure workers' rights
Our mission is to strengthen the leadership, voice, and organizational effectiveness of our state's nonprofit organizations so they can better enrich the quality of community and personal life in Maine.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Center for Grieving Children and the most unlike its peers is 240 Strings. 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 30 years old; the field is 21. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 16% 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 9% 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.
36 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. 36 of the 51 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 LEARNINGWORKS ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF CONGRESS SQUARE PARK ↗
- Who funds The Telling Room ↗
- Who funds SAIL MAINE ↗
- Who funds SURFAID INTERNATIONAL USA ↗
- Who funds PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds PORTLAND TRAILS ↗
- Who funds Foundation for Portland Public Schools ↗
- Who funds GULF OF MAINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds BICYCLE COALITION OF MAINE ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds Boys & Girls Clubs of Southern Maine ↗
- Who funds Hospice of Southern Maine ↗
- Who funds Portland Museum of Art ↗
- Who funds Dempsey Center for Quality Cancer Care ↗
- Who funds Eastern Trail Alliance ↗
- Who funds Compassionate Care ALS Inc ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL NETWORK OF ABORTION FUNDS INC ↗
- Who funds IMMIGRANT LEGAL ADVOCACY PROJECT ↗
- Who funds Portland Community Squash ↗
- Who funds Maine Public Broadcasting Corporation ↗
- Who funds SPACE Gallery ↗
- Who funds Too Young to Wed Inc ↗
- Who funds PORTLAND OVATIONS ↗
- Who funds Planned Parenthood of Northern New England Inc ↗
- Who funds THE CENTER FOR GRIEVING CHILDREN ↗
- Who funds Good Shepherd Food Bank ↗
- Who funds GIRLS ON THE RUN - MAINE ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY INC ↗
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: Maine Community Foundation Inc · Sam L Cohen Foundation · Onion Foundation · Horizon Foundation Inc · The Widgeon Point Charitable Foundation · Morton-Kelly Charitable Trust · Davis Family Foundation · Murray Charitable Trust · Fisher Charitable Foundation · United Way Inc · Saco & Biddeford Savings Charitable Foundation · The Cabin 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 Old Bug Light Charitable Foundation C/O Spinnaker 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 or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Planned Parenthood of Northern New England Inc — 2% 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.
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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.