· Private foundation
The Spencer Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2021–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k2 grants · $12k
- $10k–50k59 grants · $2.2M
- $50k–250k143 grants · $14M
- $250k+10 grants · $8.0M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| NATIONAL ACADEMY OF EDUCATION | $2,532,835 |
| NATIONAL ACADEMY OF EDUCATION | $1,753,042 |
| WILLIAM T GRANT FOUNDATION | $650,000 |
| WILLIAM T GRANT FOUNDATION | $650,000 |
| COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK | $593,600 |
| MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY | $483,044 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY | $392,629 |
| UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS CENTER FOR RESEARCH INC | $382,906 |
| Individual grant recipient | $274,540 |
| BOSTON UNIVERSITY | $250,850 |
| THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN | $243,904 |
| UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON | $229,772 |
| INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON | $221,301 |
| NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY | $212,830 |
| NEW YORK UNIVERSITY | $209,723 |
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 (FY21–24, $275k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 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 10% of The Spencer 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.
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 +16% since the first grant, against +9% for the ones you funded once.
196 repeat relationships — 89 still active in FY2025, 107 since wound down; 51 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, 80% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $4.5M 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
- WTWILLIAM T GRANT FOUNDATION INC3× · 2022–2025 · $2.9M · revenue +118%
- NYNew York University4× · 2022–2025 · $1.9M · revenue +21%
Northwestern University5× · 2021–2025 · $1.9M · revenue +14%
Funded once
POMONA COLLEGEgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $671k · revenue +106%- PUPontificia Universidad Javerianaone grant, 2023 · $400k
- UOUniversity of KwaZulu-Natalone grant, 2022 · $399k
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 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…
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
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.
As a diverse community of learners, we cultivate integrity, curiosity, connection and resilience.
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Rooted in the liberal arts & sciences & lutheran expression of the christian faith, & is committed to offering a challenging education that develops qualities of mind, spirit, & body necessary for a rewarding life of leadership & service…
Depauw university develops leaders the world needs through an uncommon commitment to the liberal arts. depauw's diverse and inclusive learning and living experience, distinctive in its rigorous intellectual engagement and its global and…
Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.
Provides innovative education in a dynamic urban setting. dedicated to academic excellence and community engagement,we prepare students of diverse backgrounds with the knowledge, skill,and experience to lead meaningful lives as informed…
Manhattan university is an independent catholic instituion of higher learning that embraces qualified men and women of all faiths, cultures, and traditions. the mission of manhattan university is to provide a contemporary, person-centered…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Grantmakers for Education and the most unlike its peers is The National Academy of Education. 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 46 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) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.7% 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.
274 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. 274 of the 519 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 THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF EDUCATION ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds WILLIAM T GRANT FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds New York University ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Vanderbilt University ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION FOR A NEW AMERICAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Teachers College Columbia University ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ↗
- Who funds POMONA COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds STRATEGIC EDUCATION RESEARCH PARTNERSHIP INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds Research Foundation of the City University of New York ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN INDIAN COLLEGE FUND ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
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: Gates Foundation · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · Carnegie Corporation of New York · Walton Family Foundation Inc · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · William T Grant Foundation Inc · Field Foundation of Illinois · WK Kellogg Foundation · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · The Heising-Simons Foundation · The Wallace 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 Spencer 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.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- University of Delaware — 30% of income from government
- National Florence Crittenton Mission — 24% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 13% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Brandeis University — 9% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Northeastern University — 7% of income from government
- University of Miami — 5% of income from government
- American Academy of Arts & Sciences — 3% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston College — 3% of income from government
- Pacific University — 2% of income from government
- Trustees of Clark University — 2% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Middlebury College — 1% of income from government
- Wellesley College — 1% of income from government
- The Trustees of Mount Holyoke College — 1% of income from government
- Suffolk University — 1% of income from government
- Seton Hall University — 1% of income from government
- Lesley University — 1% of income from government
- Rowan University Foundation Inc — 0% of income from government
- Drew University — 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 Spencer Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Spencer 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.