· Private foundation
The Steven & Katherine Markel 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 clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- $10k–50k2 grants · $59k
- $50k–250k5 grants · $367k
- $250k+1 grant · $731k
Anchored by a single position — about 97% of reported assets are held in Markel Corp.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ANNA JULIA COOPER EPISCOPAL | $731,209 |
| THE MAYMONT FOUNDATION | $104,797 |
| YWCA | $104,797 |
| VPM | $52,398 |
| THE FIRST TEE OF GREATER RICHMOND | $52,398 |
| THE VIRGINIA HOME FOR BOYS AND GIRLS | $52,398 |
| SPORTS BACKERS | $34,000 |
| PARTNERSHIP FOR THE FUTURE | $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 (FY17–25, $911k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 7%. 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.
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 15% of The Steven & Katherine Markel 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, 96% of the giving stays in VA; read by stated purpose it is 40% — 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 +73% since the first grant, against +21% for the ones you funded once.
28 repeat relationships — 7 still active in FY2025, 21 since wound down; 1 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, 91% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $105k 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
- AJANNA JULIA COOPER SCHOOL3× · 2019–2025 · $1.4M · revenue +73%
- TVTHE VALENTINE MUSEUM7× · 2017–2023 · $1.1M · revenue +176%
- MFMAYMONT FOUNDATION9× · 2017–2025 · $1.1M · revenue +122%
Funded once
- BHBAPTIST HEALTH FOUNDATIONone grant, 2023 · $103k
- JFJewish Family Services Incone grant, 2023 · $51k · revenue +21%
- ETEXCEL TO EXCELLENCE INCone grant, 2017 · $45k · revenue -75%
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.
Renew Richmond strives to build healthier, more self-empowered communities by involving local youth in agriculture and environmental sustainability. We do this by partnering with local public schools.
The richmond symphony performs, teaches and champions music to inspire and unite our communities.
Chamberrva is the trusted voice for modern business in the richmond virginia region. we are change agents, rallying to do the hard things that will create a more connected, prosperous, health and equitable community.
Richmond County Partnership for Children advances a high-quality, accountable system of care and early education for each child beginning with a healthy birth, and supports families to improve early childhood health and development to…
To provide all richmond youth with access to coordinated, high-quality learning experiences beyond the classroom. we believe that when students participate in high-quality out-of-school time (ost) programs, they benefit academically,…
VCIC works with schools, businesses, and communities to achieve success through inclusion.
Mission: to cultivate the next generation of urban conservationists in richmond, virginia. vision: groundwork rva works with richmond youth to increase environmental, economic, and social well-being in neighborhoods by transforming…
GRP's mission is to aggressively generate economic opportunities that create quality jobs for residents in the region and increase the tax base for needed community services.
To present powerful voices so richmond can learn. to empower local voices so richmond can lead.
Vcpp operates wrir 97.3 lpfm, a community low power fm radio station serving citizens of the city of richmond, virginia, and surrounding counties. the station covers a listening area of approximately 5-7 miles. wrir broadcasts news, views…
Committed to providing a quality educational experience for each child, creating an environment that nurtures individual intellectual, emotional, creative, spiritual, and physical gifts within a community
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Childsavers- Memorial Child Guidance Clinic and the most unlike its peers is Excel to Excellence Inc. 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 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 23% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% 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.
31 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. 31 of the 38 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 ANNA JULIA COOPER SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THE VALENTINE MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds MAYMONT FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FEED MORE INC ↗
- Who funds RISE RICHMOND INC ↗
- Who funds CHILDSAVERS- MEMORIAL CHILD GUIDANCE CLINIC ↗
- Who funds PETER PAUL DEVELOPMENT CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds YWCA RICHMOND ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA LEAGUE FOR PLANNED PARENTHOOD INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA HOME FOR BOYS AND GIRLS ↗
- Who funds RICHMOND FIRST TEE ↗
- Who funds METROPOLITAN RICHMOND SPORTS BACKERS ↗
- Who funds HOPE REINS ↗
- Who funds Cristo Rey Richmond High School Inc ↗
- Who funds The Virginia Home ↗
- Who funds BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF METRO RICHMOND ↗
- Who funds ST JAMES'S CHILDREN'S CENTER ↗
- Who funds PARTNERSHIP FOR THE FUTURE ↗
- Who funds CARITAS ↗
- Who funds RICHMOND METRO HABITAT FOR HUMANITY ↗
- Who funds OCEAN REEF COMMUNITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ART 180 Inc ↗
- Who funds Jewish Family Services Inc ↗
- Who funds EXCEL TO EXCELLENCE INC ↗
- Who funds SPORTABLE RICHMOND ADAPTIVE SPORTS AND RECREATION INC ↗
- Who funds VIRGINIA REPERTORY THEATRE ↗
- Who funds PEOPLE CYCLE INC ↗
- Who funds SAVING GRACE ANIMALS FOR ADOPTION ↗
- Who funds URBAN HOPE INC ↗
- Who funds UP RVA ↗
- Who funds VPM MEDIA CORPORATION ↗
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 Community Foundation Inc · Herndon Foundation · The Pauley Family Foundation · Carmax Foundation · Wilbur Moreland Havens Charitable Foundation · Robins Foundation · Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation · The Mary Morton Parsons Foundation · Estes Foundation Co Matthew Breidenbach Pitcairn · Shelton H Short Jr Trust · Virginia Sargeant Reynolds Foundation · Robert G Cabell III and Maude Morgan Cabell 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 Steven & Katherine Markel 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.
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 Steven & Katherine Markel Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Steven & Katherine Markel 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.