· Private foundation
The Salem Foundation
Its FY2024 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k2 grants · $2k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $80k
- $50k–250k7 grants · $410k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL | $100,000 |
| SQUASHBUSTERS INC | $60,000 |
| ST JOHN'S HIGH SCHOOL | $50,000 |
| FOUNDATION FOR THE CAROLINAS | $50,000 |
| HARLEM LACROSSE | $50,000 |
| SAVE THE BAY INC | $50,000 |
| MGM RESORTS FOUNDATION | $50,000 |
| MASSACHUSETTS PROJECT 351 INC | $25,000 |
| HARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE | $25,000 |
| THE ISLAND SCHOOL-CAPE ELEUTHERA FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| ANSWER THE CALL | $10,000 |
| ST BALDRICK'S FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| BARRINGTON HIGH SCHOOL AFTER PROM | $1,000 |
| SWIM ACROSS AMERICA INC | $1,000 |
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 (FY20–24, $150k) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 100% 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
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 30% of The Salem Foundation’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, 87% of the giving stays in RI; read by stated purpose it is 55% — 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.
20 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2024, 12 since wound down; 4 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, 80% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $77k 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
- EIEDESIA INC3× · 2020–2022 · $6.3M · revenue +129%
- WHWOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION2× · 2021–2022 · $500k · revenue +17%
PAN-MASSACHUSETTS CHALLENGE INC4× · 2020–2023 · $250k · revenue +49%
Funded once
Rhode Island Hospital Foundationone grant, 2020 · $200k · revenue +25%- CBCOLLEGE BOUND DORCHESTER INC (UNCORNERED)one grant, 2023 · $125k
- FOFRIENDS OF UNIV OF NOTRE DAMEone grant, 2022 · $100k · revenue -9%
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 mit is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
The University of New Haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts and professional education. Our mission is to prepare our students to lead purposeful and fulfilling lives in a…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Northeast college of health sciences (the college) is committed to academic excellence, leadership, and professional best practices in the health sciences.
Provider of pediatric healthcare, education, research & community service
Bates is a college of the liberal arts and sciences, and is a coeducational, nonsectarian, residential college with special commitments to academic rigor, and to assuring in all of its efforts the dignity of each individual, and access to…
Organization's mission: boston university is an international, comprehensive, private research university, committed to educating students to be reflective, resourceful individuals ready to live, adapt, and lead in an interconnected world.…
The university of rhode island alumni association informs and engages current and future alumni as committed partners of the university, its missions and traditions.
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
The organization's primary exempt purpose is to provide access to and conduct activities in furtherance of higher education.
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
Provide post-secondary education of excellence.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Save the Bay Inc and the most unlike its peers is Woosox 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 32 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 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.
46 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. 46 of the 70 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 EDESIA INC ↗
- Who funds YEAR UP INC ↗
- Who funds University of Notre Dame du Lac ↗
- Who funds WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds THE RHODE ISLAND COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SQUASHBUSTERS INC ↗
- Who funds PAN-MASSACHUSETTS CHALLENGE INC ↗
- Who funds SAVE THE BAY INC ↗
- Who funds Rhode Island Hospital Foundation ↗
- Who funds MGM RESORTS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MELMARK NEW ENGLAND INC ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR THE CAROLINAS ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF UNIV OF NOTRE DAME ↗
- Who funds WOMEN REFUGEE CARE ↗
- Who funds MONTEREY PENINSULA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE INC ↗
- Who funds HARLEM LACROSSE AND LEADERSHIP CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds FOLDS OF HONOR FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds ST BALDRICK'S FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY FOUNDATION FOR PALM BEACH AND MARTIN COUNTIES INC ↗
- Who funds BILLY ANDRADE-BRAD FAXON CHARITIES FOR CHILDREN INC ↗
- Who funds MASSACHUSETTS PROJECT 351 INC ↗
- Who funds RHODE ISLAND RESCUE MINISTRIES ↗
- Who funds Ron Burton Training Village Inc ↗
- Who funds TAO CARES RELIEF FUND ↗
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: Amica Companies Foundation · The Champlin Foundation · United Way of Rhode Island Inc · Citizens Charitable Foundation · Textron Charitable Trust Dtd 122353 · Cvs Health Charity Classic Inc · The Rhode Island Community Foundation · Eastern Bank Foundation · The Picerne Family Charitable Foundation · Boston Bruins Charitable Foundation Inc · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · Fidelity 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 Salem 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — 63% of income from government
- Special Olympics Connecticut Inc — 42% of income from government
- Steppingstone Inc — 33% of income from government
- Year Up Inc — 0% of income from government
- Pan-Massachusetts Challenge 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 Salem Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Salem 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.