· Private foundation
The Sumners 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 $10k6 grants · $30k
- $10k–50k12 grants · $327k
- $50k–250k10 grants · $964k
- $250k+2 grants · $1.5M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Individual grant recipient | $856,100 |
| LAW FOCUSED EDUCSTATE BAR OF TEXAS | $666,190 |
| YMCA OF AUSTIN | $175,000 |
| UNITED STATES ASSN OF FORMER MEMBER | $132,000 |
| YMCA ALBUQUERQUE CENTRAL NM | $125,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $125,000 |
| TEXAS TRIBUNE | $100,000 |
| AMERICAN LEGION TEXAS BOYS STATE | $75,000 |
| FUND FOR AMERICAN STUDIES | $65,400 |
| TEXAS FFA FOUNDATION | $60,000 |
| BRAVER ANGELS | $57,000 |
| FORT WORTH REPORT | $50,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF DALLAS | $45,000 |
| BAYLOR UNIVERSITY | $40,000 |
| TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY | $38,825 |
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 (FY20–24, $1.3M) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 27% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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 +56% since the first grant, against +41% for the ones you funded once.
67 repeat relationships — 26 still active in FY2024, 41 since wound down; 4 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, 69% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $873k 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
- YMYOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION OF AUSTIN5× · 2020–2024 · $910k · revenue +41%
TEXAS TRIBUNE INC8× · 2017–2024 · $810k · revenue +118%- UOUniversity of Dallas8× · 2017–2024 · $611k · revenue +36%
Funded once
- 2S28 SCHOLARSHIPS GIVENone grant, 2021 · $194k
- TGTHE GEORGE W BUSH FOUNDATIONgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $125k · revenue +37%
- SUSOUTHWESTERN UNIVERSITYgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $80k · revenue +59%
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 american enterprise institute is a community of scholars and supporters committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise. aei pursues these ideals through independent thinking and the…
The mission of the george washington university (gw) is to educate individuals in liberal arts, languages, sciences, learned professions, and other courses and subjects of study, and to conduct scholarly research and publish the findings…
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.
The foreign policy research institute (frpi) is dedicated to producing the highest quality scholarship and nonpartisan policy analysis focused on crucial foreign policy and national security challenges facing the united states. we educate…
Uatx is a nonprofit dedicated to building a liberal arts university committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse. to maintain these principles, the university will be fiercely independent financially,…
The manhattan institute is a community of scholars, journalists, activists, and civic leaders dedicated to advancing opportunity, individual liberty, and the rule of law in america and its great cities.
Allbritton journalism institute aims to train a new generation of non-partisan political reporters from diverse backgrounds to produce high-quality, fact-based journalism.
The open markets institute works to help people relearn how to use competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.
Trinity university is an independent co-educational university whose mission is excellence in the interrelated areas of teaching, research and services.
The council on foreign relations (cfr) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and…
The mission of the washington internship institute is to foster students' intellectual, personal, and professional development through individually tailored, quality internships and challenging academic coursework that take full advantage…
The peterson institute for international economics (piie) is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to strengthening prosperity and human welfare in the global economy through expert analysis and practical…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Texas Public Policy Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Glasshouse Policy. 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 39 years old; the field is 12. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 26% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 4% lost their exemption, against 15% 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.
75 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. 75 of the 119 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 INSTITUTE FOR POLICY INNOVATION ↗
- Who funds YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION OF AUSTIN ↗
- Who funds TEXAS TRIBUNE INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITIES FOUNDATION OF TEXAS INC ↗
- Who funds University of Dallas ↗
- Who funds THE FUND FOR AMERICAN STUDIES ↗
- Who funds Southern Methodist University ↗
- Who funds Braver AngelsInc ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds OKLAHOMA CITY UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds NEW MEXICO FIRST ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR TEACHING ECONOMICS ↗
- Who funds TEXAS FUTURE FARMERS OF AMERICA FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds BAYLOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds St Edwards University ↗
- Who funds TEXAS PUBLIC POLICY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HUSTON-TILLOTSON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds NANCY LIEBERMAN CHARITIES ↗
- Who funds FIRST LIBERTY INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds THE GEORGE W BUSH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FORT WORTH REPORT ↗
- Who funds Bill of Rights Institute ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL ARCHIVES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE JAMES MADISON INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY STUDIES INC ↗
- Who funds Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL CONSTITUTION CENTER ↗
- Who funds THE PHILANTHROPY ROUNDTABLE ↗
- Who funds TEXAS WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds San Antonio Report ↗
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: Communities Foundation of Texas Inc · Donors Trust Inc · Woodford Foundation · The Armstrong Foundation · Amon G Carter Foundation · Adolph Coors Foundation · The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Inc · Bradley Impact Fund Inc · Bnsf Railway Foundation · Texas Instruments Foundation · Pierre F & Enid Goodrich Foundation · Texas Higher Education 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 Sumners 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 Sumners Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Sumners 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.