· Public charity
The Sterling Donor Advised Fund
Educate the general public and nonprofit organizations to encourage charitable giving in all forms beneficial to nonprofit charitable organizations.
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.
The 39 grants below total $1,812,250 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $2,327,509 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $515,259 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2024
- $10k–50k29 grants · $467k
- $50k–250k9 grants · $745k
- $250k+1 grant · $600k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ROOTS OF HUMANITY FOUNDATION | $600,000 |
| YOUNG AMERICA'S FOUNDATION | $170,000 |
| ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST | $100,000 |
| CHEHALIS FOUNDATION | $100,000 |
| DISCOVER CHILDREN'S MUSEUM | $100,000 |
| DIOCESE OF METUCHEN-BISHOP'S ANNUAL APPEAL FOUNDATION | $70,000 |
| JUNIOR STATE OF AMERICA | $55,000 |
| BEST BUDDIES | $50,000 |
| THE STANFORD JEWISH CENTER | $50,000 |
| CENTRAL FUND OF ISRAEL | $50,000 |
| KEHILLAT MA'ALAV | $30,000 |
| FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY | $25,000 |
| FOUNDATION TO ERADICATE DUCHENNE | $25,000 |
| RENOWN HEALTH FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| INCLINE VILLAGE COMMUNITY HOSPITAL FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
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 (FY17–23, $980k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 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
Grants abroad, by region — $430k on the FY2024 return
Schedule F, as filed: 3 regions. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: GENERAL SUPPORT
Stated purpose: IMPLEMENTATION OF COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL TRAINING IN THE KURDISTAN REGION OF IRAQ
Stated purpose: GENERAL SUPPORT
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. Grants abroad on Schedule F are filed by region, purpose and amount with no recipient name, so they are shown by region and cannot be placed on the country map or matched to a grantee.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 23% of The Sterling Donor Advised Fund’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 +18% since the first grant, against +4% for the ones you funded once.
35 repeat relationships — 18 still active in FY2024, 17 since wound down; 20 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, 64% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $661k 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
- TCTHE CENTER FOR EARLY EDUCATION2× · 2018–2019 · $2.0M · revenue +10%
- NYNew York University2× · 2018–2019 · $500k · revenue +59%
Indiana University Foundation2× · 2017–2023 · $110k · revenue +97%
Funded once
- LCLEGACY CHURCH INCone grant, 2017 · $3.7M
- UIUCB International Ministriesone grant, 2018 · $1.0M · revenue -65% · 90% of their budget
- RCROTARY CLUB OF ESCONDIDO AFTER FIVE CHARITABLE FOUNDATIONone grant, 2017 · $965k
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 organization provides professional investment management services for endowed gifts and financial assets entrusted to the ucsf foundation.
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.
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 ucla foundation is the giving, receiving, and investing arm of the ucla campus. the foundation enables private donors to help build, sustain and advance one of the world's finest academic and research institutions. private philanthropy…
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 uc santa barbara foundation actively works to further the goals of the university of california, santa barbara. the foundation seeks to maintain and nurture the university's quality and distinction. on behalf of the campus, the…
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…
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.
The mission of the uc davis foundation is to secure, steward and manage private gifts for uc davis.
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.
See Disclosure Above.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Ellington Fund and the most unlike its peers is Boothbay Region Housing Trust. 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 35 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) — 8% of your grantees by number, and just 2% 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.
86 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. 86 of the 105 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 UNITED CHARITABLE ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF FACES ↗
- Who funds THE CENTER FOR EARLY EDUCATION ↗
- Who funds UCB International Ministries ↗
- Who funds ROTARY CLUB OF ESCONDIDO AFTER FIVE CHARITABLE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Roots Of Humanity Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds Mitchell Thorp Foundation ↗
- Who funds New York University ↗
- Who funds AMPELIS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GREAT LIFE MENTORING ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ENDOWMENT FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GENEROSITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE CHEHALIS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Young America's Foundation ↗
- Who funds Indiana University Foundation ↗
- Who funds THE UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Best Buddies International Inc ↗
- Who funds Central Fund of Israel ↗
- Who funds THE LITTLE ORCHESTRA SOCIETYORPHEON INC ↗
- Who funds DISCOVER CHILDREN'S MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds JUNIOR STATE OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO BALLET ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds Young Men's Christian Association Boothbay Region ↗
- Who funds AMHERST COLLEGE TRUSTEES ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO BALLET ENDOWMENT FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATRE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SCHOOLING FOR LIFE ↗
- Who funds Renown Health Foundation ↗
- Who funds WING LUKE MEMORIAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds INCLINE VILLAGE COMMUNITY HOSPITAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GOOD NEWS RESCUE MISSION ↗
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: Millennium Evergreen Charitable Fund · Kids Connect Charitable Fund · Schooling for Life · Youth Initiative Fund · Tagliabue Family Foundation · Century Vision Benefit Fund · Six Talents Foundation Inc · Palmer Walbridge Foundation · Thelma B & Thomas P Hart Foundation · Mildred H McEvoy Foundation · American Gift Fund · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund
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 Sterling Donor Advised Fund 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.
- The Maryland Food Bank Inc — 11% of income from government
- Best Buddies International Inc — 4% of income from government
- Amherst College Trustees — 0% of income from government
- Wheaton College — 0% of income from government
- Ave Maria University 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 Sterling Donor Advised Fund?
Find your warmest path to The Sterling Donor Advised Fund 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.