· Private foundation
The Sooner 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 $10k51 grants · $70k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $23k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BUZZARDS BAY COALITION | $12,500 |
| RFK COMMUNITY ALLIANCE | $10,000 |
| WOODWELL CLIMATE RESEARCH | $5,000 |
| OLD DARTMOUTH HISTORICAL SOCIETY | $5,000 |
| THE PARK SCHOOL | $4,000 |
| MILTON ACADEMY | $4,000 |
| PLANNED PARENTHOOD | $3,000 |
| MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL | $3,000 |
| MT AUBURN HOSPITAL | $2,500 |
| THE HENRY FERGUSON MUSEUM | $2,500 |
| THE FISHERS ISLAND LIBRARY | $2,500 |
| JOHN F KENNEDY LIBRARY | $2,500 |
| LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY | $2,250 |
| EAST BOSTON SOCIAL CENTERS | $2,000 |
| APPLE ORCHARD SCHOOL | $2,000 |
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, $41k) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 60% 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 +26% since the first grant, against +4% for the ones you funded once.
81 repeat relationships — 48 still active in FY2025, 33 since wound down; 2 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, 99% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1k 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
Woodwell Climate Research Center Inc5× · 2021–2025 · $25k · revenue +24%
BUZZARDS BAY COALITION4× · 2021–2025 · $23k · revenue +46%- PSPARK SCHOOL CORPORATION6× · 2020–2025 · $14k · revenue +34%
Funded once
- MGMASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL MGH DEVELOPMENTone grant, 2018 · $10k
- RIREFUGEE & IMMIGRANT CENTER FOR EDUCATION & LEGAL SERVICESone grant, 2018 · $5k · revenue -30%
- PAPHIT AMERICA FOUNDATIONone grant, 2017 · $5k
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 bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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 organization's primary exempt purpose is to provide access to and conduct activities in furtherance of higher education.
Wentworth institute of technology is a nationally recognized private coeducational and residential university of higher education with a mission to empower, inspire and innovate through experiential learning with a core purpose of career…
Our mission is to ensure that the people of greater boston benefit from a vibrant, resilient, and inclusive waterfront, harbor, and islands; these spaces are equitable, accessible, and adapted to climate change; and to ensure our public,…
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.
The organization's mission is to conserve and promote new england's native plants to ensure healthy, biologically diverse landscapes.
Northeast college of health sciences (the college) is committed to academic excellence, leadership, and professional best practices in the health sciences.
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 boston public library fund provides financial support to the boston public library (bpl), ensuring that it remains viable, engaging, accessible, and free to all. the library fund fulfills this mission by working in partnership with…
To provide research facilities to members and to the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of the massachusetts government.
The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is a world-renowned center for biological discovery and training that is notably affiliated with more than 60 Nobel Prize winners. Research is conducted by full-time faculty as well as hundreds of the…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Cambridge Health Alliance Foundation Inc and the most unlike its peers is The Andrew K Dwyer Foundation. 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 38 years old; the field is 17. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 20% 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 11% 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.
79 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. 79 of the 131 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 Woodwell Climate Research Center Inc ↗
- Who funds BUZZARDS BAY COALITION ↗
- Who funds ROBERT F KENNEDY CHILDREN'S ACTION CORPS INC ↗
- Who funds MILTON ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds PARK SCHOOL CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Henry L Ferguson Museum ↗
- Who funds COMMONWEALTH ZOOLOGICAL CORPORATION D/B/A ZOO NEW ENGLAND ↗
- Who funds EPILEPSY FOUNDATION OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds FISHERS ISLAND LIBRARY ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds MILTON PLAYGROUND PLANNERS INC ↗
- Who funds ISLAND HEALTH PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds WHEATON COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY LIBRARY FOUNDATION INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds THE LIGHTHOUSE WORKS INC ↗
- Who funds HORIZONS FOR HOMELESS CHILDREN ↗
- Who funds HARVARD LEGAL AID BUREAU ↗
- Who funds THE ANDREW K DWYER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PEER HEALTH EXCHANGE INC ↗
- Who funds Old Dartmouth Historical Society ↗
- Who funds SAWTOOTH SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds EAST BOSTON SOCIAL CENTERS INC ↗
- Who funds UCLA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Voter Education Network Inc ↗
- Who funds BUCKINGHAM BROWNE & NICHOLS SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds HOMES FOR OUR TROOPS INC ↗
- Who funds The Village School Incorportated ↗
- Who funds FREE LIBRARY OF PHILADELPHIA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FISHERS ISLAND FIRE DEPARTMENT ↗
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: Boston Foundation Inc · Eastern Bank Foundation · The Fairfield Foundation · The Willinphila Foundation · The McCance Foundation · The William C and Cindy L Scott Foundation · The Frederic C Hamilton Family Foundation · The Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation Inc · Cambridge Savings Charitable Foundation Inc · Liberty Mutual Foundation Inc · Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc · Jeanann Gray Dunlap 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 Sooner 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.
- Crystal Springs Inc — 57% of income from government
- East Boston Social Centers Inc — 50% of income from government
- On the Rise Inc — 39% of income from government
- Buzzards Bay Coalition — 37% of income from government
- Save the Sound — 37% of income from government
- Epilepsy Foundation of America — 22% of income from government
- Horizons for Homeless Children — 21% of income from government
- Woodwell Climate Research Center Inc — 11% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Perkins School for the Blind — 7% of income from government
- Mount Auburn Hospital — 5% of income from government
- Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts Inc — 3% of income from government
- Lloyd Center for the Environment Inc — 3% of income from government
- Vna Care Hospice Inc — 3% of income from government
- Commonwealth Zoological Corporation D/B/a Zoo New England — 2% of income from government
- Old Dartmouth Historical Society — 2% of income from government
- Boston Children's Chorus Inc — 2% of income from government
- Special Olympics Massachusetts Inc — 1% of income from government
- Hope and Comfort Inc — 1% of income from government
- Emerald Necklace Conservancy Inc — 0% of income from government
- The Epiphany School Inc — 0% of income from government
- Wheaton College — 0% of income from government
- Rosie's Place Inc — 0% of income from government
- Milton Academy — 0% of income from government
- Buckingham Browne & Nichols School — 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 Sooner Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Sooner 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.