· Private foundation
The Sherwood Foundation
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 $10k12 grants · $63k
- $10k–50k205 grants · $5.2M
- $50k–250k368 grants · $38M
- $250k+205 grants · $253M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| OMAHA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $15,106,582 |
| BUFFETT EARLY CHILDHOOD FUND | $15,100,000 |
| BUFFETT EARLY CHILDHOOD FUND | $15,089,706 |
| SOUTHSIDE REDEVELOPMENT CORPORATION | $15,004,381 |
| CONSERVATION FOUNDATION OF DICKINSON COUNTY | $10,304,734 |
| RISE ACADEMY | $10,026,860 |
| GIRLS INCORPORATED OF OMAHA | $7,006,972 |
| COMMUNITY INFORMATION TRUST | $5,579,890 |
| METROPOLITAN ENTERTAINMENT & CONVENTION AUTHORITY | $5,086,663 |
| OMAHA PARKS FOUNDATION | $5,011,904 |
| NEBRASKA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION | $5,000,000 |
| FAMILY PLANNING COUNCIL OF NE | $4,413,020 |
| WALTHILL PUBLIC SCHOOL | $4,161,293 |
| JUSTICE FOR OUR NEIGHBORS NEBRASKA | $4,030,796 |
| REGIONAL METROPOLITAN TRANSIT AUTHORITY OF OMAHA | $3,841,122 |
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, $203.5M) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 99% 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.
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 +37% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
506 repeat relationships — 352 still active in FY2025, 154 since wound down; 141 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, 86% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $38M 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
- BEBUFFETT EARLY CHILDHOOD FUND8× · 2018–2025 · $251M · revenue +13% · 100% of their budget
- UOUNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA FOUNDATION9× · 2017–2025 · $174M · revenue +70%
- CFCollective For Youth9× · 2017–2025 · $50M · revenue +81% · 93% of their budget
Funded once
- BEBUFFETT EARLY EDUCATION FUNDone grant, 2017 · $30M
- OSOMAHA SHELTER FOR HOMELESS TRUSTone grant, 2018 · $4.5M · revenue -100%
- CACOMMUNITY ALLIANCE INCone grant, 2023 · $4.0M · revenue -83%
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.
Mission: community action of nebraska strives to alleviate poverty through enhancing program development, providing technical assistance, and advocating public policy to support all community action agencies in nebraska.
To promote, facilitate and develop or co-develop affordable housing in lincoln county, nebraska.
The organization's purpose is to ensure a fair and modern democracy in nebraska through research, education, and advocacy for policies and practices that promote participation in democracy.
Partnering with individuals and families to encourage economic stability to gain independence through community-based solutions.
To increase business, employment, and investment in the greater omaha area.
To promote and coordinate economic development, education, and quality of life through strengthened communication in north central nebraska.
The organization's mission is to expand the world of possibilities for aging through advocacy, collaboration, and education.
Provide education and leadership to empower people to live safe and healthy.
Support for community colleges
To promote credit unions in nebraska
Labor relations
To help young children thrive socially, emotionally and academically through high-quality early childhood education, and in partnership with their families and the community.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Civic Nebraska and the most unlike its peers is Susan Laflesche Picotte Center. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 19 years old; the field is 25. You back the younger end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 15% startups (under 5 years old) — 10% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% lost their exemption, against 8% 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.
645 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. 645 of the 846 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 BUFFETT EARLY CHILDHOOD FUND ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Omaha Community Foundation ↗
- Who funds DOWNTOWN RIVERFRONT TRUST ↗
- Who funds Collective For Youth ↗
- Who funds NEBRASKA CHILDREN & FAMILIES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HEARTLAND FAMILY SERVICE ↗
- Who funds OMAHA PUBLIC SCHOOLS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CONSERVATION FOUNDATION of DICKINSON COUNTY ↗
- Who funds JUSTICE FOR OUR NEIGHBORS-NEBRASKA ↗
- Who funds SEVENTY-FIVE NORTH REVITALIZATION CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds THRESHOLD COC ↗
- Who funds SOUTHSIDE REDEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds THE CAMPAIGN LEGAL CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds WOMEN'S FUND OF GREATER OMAHA INC ↗
- Who funds Economic Empowerment Center ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY INFORMATION TRUST ↗
- Who funds PROJECT HARMONY ↗
- Who funds Minnesota Humanities Center ↗
- Who funds OPAS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds OMAHA PARKS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NEBRASKA YOUTH JUSTICE INITIATIVE DBA RADIUS ↗
- Who funds JOSLYN ART MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds NEBRASKA APPLESEED CENTER FOR LAW IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST ↗
- Who funds METROPOLITAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds COMMON SENSE MEDIA ↗
- Who funds NORTHSTAR FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HISTORIC ARNOLDS PARK INC ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR RURAL AFFAIRS ↗
- Who funds RISE ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds FAMILY PLANNING COUNCIL OF NEBRASKA INC ↗
- Who funds ROCK AND SOUL FOREVER FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds COLLEGE OF SAINT MARY ↗
- Who funds GIRLS INCORPORATED OF OMAHA ↗
- Who funds ONEWORLD COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS 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: The Lozier Foundation · Weitz Family Foundation · Peter Kiewit Foundation · Robert B Daugherty Foundation · Mutual of Omaha Foundation · The Hawks Foundation · Nebraska Community Foundation · The Holland Foundation · The Charles and Mary Heider Family Foundation · United Way of the Midlands · Suzanne & Walter Scott Foundation · Cooper 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 Sherwood 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.
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% 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 Sherwood Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Sherwood 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.