· Private foundation
The Sparkplug 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k8 grants · $36k
- $10k–50k34 grants · $569k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $63k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| INSTITUTE FOR THE CRITICAL STUDY OF | $62,976 |
| PALESTINIAN CHRISTIANS FOR JUSTICE | $20,700 |
| Individual grant recipient | $20,000 |
| CHRISTIANS FOR A FREE PALESTINE | $20,000 |
| PEACE DEVELOPMENT FUND | $20,000 |
| OPEN HEARTS INITIATIVE | $20,000 |
| DECARCERATE KC | $20,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $20,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $20,000 |
| CO-OP HUDSON VALLEY | $20,000 |
| FOSTER ADVOCATES | $20,000 |
| PHILLY BLACK WORKER PROJECT | $20,000 |
| PEOPLESHUB | $20,000 |
| 4DASOIL | $20,000 |
| MUSLIM ALLIANCE FOR SEXUAL AND | $20,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $248k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 74% 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 6% of The Sparkplug 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, 30% of the giving stays in NY; read by stated purpose it is 28% — 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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +432% since the first grant, against +22% for the ones you funded once.
20 repeat relationships — 4 still active in FY2024, 16 since wound down; 38 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, 14% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $560k 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
- WRWestern Regional Advocacy Project3× · 2019–2024 · $45k · revenue +153%
- MEMIDDLE EAST CHILDREN'S ALLIANCE4× · 2018–2024 · $45k · revenue +687%
- WFWESPAC FOUNDATION INC3× · 2017–2020 · $30k · revenue ×11
Funded once
- SASOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEURS (SEE) INCgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $50k · revenue +156%
- GIG-8 Incone grant, 2017 · $30k
- IPINTERFAITH PEACE BUILDERSone grant, 2022 · $30k
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.
Fuerza Laboral is a workers' rights center whose mission is to shift the balance of power in our economy in favor of workers by educating, training, and organizing workers to become community leaders; taking direct action to recover unpaid…
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,…
We are workers, united across different industries to improve our working conditions and our lives. We come together as working people to build power through education, organizing, and enforcement. We work to raise and uphold standards in…
Detention Watch Network seeks to end the cruel system of immigration detention via programs of grassroots organizing, strategic communications, and collective advocacy.
The mission of the Workers Center For Racial Justice is to eliminate structural barriers to sustainable and living wage
The National Legal Advocacy Network d/b/a Grassroots Law & Organizing for Workers is a legal non-profit organization dedicated to using legal strategies as a tool to build power for marginalized workers and create systemic change through…
Building support for the rights of working people through coalitions of labor and community and through public education.
Worker Justice Center of New York, Inc. (WJCNY) pusues juistice for those denied hian rights, with a focus on agricultural and other low-wage workers, through legal representation, community empowerment and advocacy for institutional…
Serve as a partner, educator, and guide for philanthropy in reimagining practices that advance a thriving and just world.
Fund for Justice is a nationally connected social impact research and advocacy organization that works to achieve fundamental, systemic reform by addressing policies and practicies that prevent individuals from reaching their full…
Colectiva Legal del Pueblo is a non-hierarchal collective organization founded for and by undocumented immigrants working to build community leadership and power for migrant justice through legal services, advocacy and education.
Justice Action Center JAC pilots an innovative model that advances the rights of immigrant communities by connecting cutting-edge impact litigation and compelling narrative and communications content. The purpose of JAC is to advance the…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (See) Inc and the most unlike its peers is Lower 9TH Ward Homeownership Association. 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 13 years old; the field is 16. You back the younger end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 13% of your grantees by number, and just 13% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 3% 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.
133 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. 133 of the 324 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 SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEURS (SEE) INC ↗
- Who funds Western Regional Advocacy Project ↗
- Who funds MIDDLE EAST CHILDREN'S ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds WESPAC FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds DISSENTERS ↗
- Who funds NEW ISRAEL FUND ↗
- Who funds FAMILIES FOR FREEDOM INC ↗
- Who funds BLACK ALLIANCE FOR JUST IMMIGRATION ↗
- Who funds Alliance for Global Justice Corp ↗
- Who funds 4DASOIL ↗
- Who funds COLUMBIA COUNTY SANCTUARY MOVEMENT INC ↗
- Who funds BACH COLLEGIUM SAN DIEGO ↗
- Who funds ALABAMA COALITION FOR IMMIGRANT JUSTICE UNITED ↗
- Who funds CENTRO PARA LA RECONSTRUCCION DEL HABITAT ↗
- Who funds CORRECTIONAL ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds HELPING EDUCATE TO ADVANCE THE RIGHTS OF THE DEAF ↗
- Who funds Laundry Workers Center 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: Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc · Proteus Fund Inc · Ben & Jerry's Foundation Inc · North Star Fund Inc · Borealis Philanthropy · New York Foundation · NEO Philanthropy Inc · Solidaire Network Inc · Tides Foundation · Tides Center · Common Counsel Foundation · The Ford 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 Sparkplug 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.
- Pioneer Valley Workers Center Inc — 53% of income from government
- The Education & Training Institute Inc — 19% of income from government
- Community Alliance of Lane County — 7% of income from government
- Greenroots Inc — 1% of income from government
- Asian American Resource Workshop Inc — 0% of income from government
- Chainless Change 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.