· Private foundation
The Tapeats Fund
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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k58 grants · $276k
- $10k–50k20 grants · $315k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $180k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| WILDLIFE CONSERVATION NETWORK INC | $130,000 |
| HOUSTON ZOO INC | $50,000 |
| HOUSTON SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO A | $40,000 |
| YELLOWSTONE FOREVER | $30,000 |
| RANCH HANDS RESCUE | $30,000 |
| MGVP INC | $25,000 |
| TEACH FOR AMERICA | $20,000 |
| PRISON ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROGRAM | $20,000 |
| CHINQUAPIN PREPARATORY SCHOOL | $15,000 |
| BREAKTHROUGH HOUSTON | $15,000 |
| COALITION FOR THE HOMELESS OF HOUSTONHARRIS COUNT | $10,000 |
| POSITIVE COACHING ALLIANCE | $10,000 |
| MARBRIDGE FOUNDATION INC | $10,000 |
| MOMENTUM EDUCATION | $10,000 |
| THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN | $10,000 |
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 (FY20–24, $293k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 91% 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 18% of The Tapeats 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 +36% since the first grant, against +20% for the ones you funded once.
89 repeat relationships — 75 still active in FY2024, 14 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, 94% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $49k 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
- WCWILDLIFE CONSERVATION NETWORK INC5× · 2020–2024 · $610k · revenue +167%
Houston Zoo Inc5× · 2020–2024 · $250k · revenue +52%- RHRanch Hands Rescue5× · 2020–2024 · $163k · revenue +210%
Funded once
- OROUR RESCUEone grant, 2021 · $20k · revenue -16%
- AIADOPT-A-CLASSROOM INCgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $13k · revenue +112%
- SASpay-Neuter Assistance Program Incone grant, 2020 · $10k · revenue +20%
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.
To enrich life through discovery, education, and the conservation of plants and the natural environment.
Rebuilding Together Houston is the only organization in Houston and Harris County providing free home repairs to hundreds of families each year. We employ licensed contractors to restore homes to safe, livable conditions, extending each…
To advance the conservation of birds and their habitats in the Greater Houston Gulf Coast region by acquiring and maintaining critical habitat as bird sanctuaries, providing education programs and nature experiences, and advocating policy…
See Schedule OThe Women's Resource of Greater Houston helps women and girls make choices toward becoming independent, productive, and financially stable. We fulfill our mission by recruiting volunteer instructors to deliver our programs in…
The Houston Local Information Initiative, Inc. provides public service journalism that reflects the civic needs of the diverse communities comprising Greater Houston.
The mission of Family Service Center of Houston and Harris County (Family Houston) is to create a stronger community for tomorrow by helping individuals and families meet the challenges they face today. We help others help themselves.
At the Every Texan, we believe in a Texas that offers everyone the chance to compete and succeed in life. We envision a Texas where everyone is healthy, well educated, and financially secure. We want the best Texas, a proud state that sets…
RAISE Texas advances equitable policies and programs that foster financial security and economic mobility for low- and moderate-income Texans. We equip, innovate and advocate to reduce disparities, remove barriers and build opportunities…
To completely restore Houston Freedmen's Town as a heritage district that provides America with its only Freedmen's Town.
The Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Houston's mission is to inspire and enable all youth, especially those who need us most, to realize their full potential as productive, responsible and caring citizens.
Our mission is to be the leading advocate for our member physicians, their patients and our community, in promoting the highest standards of ethical medical practice, access to quality medical care, medical education, research, and…
American Leadership Forum (ALF) brings together, in classes, leaders with diverse perspectives so they can build relationships, learn to dialogue and respectfully differ, and work together for the good of our community.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Greater Houston Community Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Dog Is My Copilot. 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 28 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) — 1% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.9% 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.
102 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. 102 of the 110 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 WILDLIFE CONSERVATION NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds Houston Zoo Inc ↗
- Who funds Ranch Hands Rescue ↗
- Who funds MGVP INC Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project ↗
- Who funds PRISON ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROGRAM INC ↗
- Who funds Teach for America Inc ↗
- Who funds YELLOWSTONE FOREVER ↗
- Who funds POSITIVE COACHING ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds THE PEREGRINE FUND INC ↗
- Who funds Breakthrough Houston ↗
- Who funds CHINQUAPIN PREPARATORY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds The Houston Food Bank ↗
- Who funds YES Prep Public Schools Inc ↗
- Who funds MARBRIDGE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds KIPP Texas Inc ↗
- Who funds Bo's Place ↗
- Who funds Good Reason Houston Inc ↗
- Who funds THE WOODS PROJECT ↗
- Who funds Motorcycle Missions ↗
- Who funds HOUSTON SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS ↗
- Who funds TEAM RUBICON INC ↗
- Who funds Collaborative for Children ↗
- Who funds ALLIANCE FOR CHOICE IN EDUCATION ↗
- Who funds WILD SKIES RAPTOR CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds PTSD FOUNDATION OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds EMERGE Fellowship ↗
- Who funds Central Texas Food Bank Inc ↗
- Who funds MOBILE LOAVES & FISHES INC ↗
- Who funds The Georgetown Project ↗
- Who funds Momentum Education ↗
- Who funds Medical Bridges Inc ↗
- Who funds SLEEP IN HEAVENLY PEACE INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE POSSE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds The Brookwood Community Inc ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR TEEN HEALTH ↗
- Who funds PATRIOT PAWS SERVICE DOGS ↗
- Who funds Houston Museum of Natural Science ↗
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: Albert & Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation · The Brown Foundation Inc · Greater Houston Community Foundation · Strake Foundation · Houston Endowment Inc · Harry S & Isabel C Cameron Foundation Sentinel Trust Company · Centerpoint Energy Foundation Inc · Shell USA Company Foundation · The Powell Foundation · Vivian L Smith Foundation · Marek Family Foundation · The Elkins 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 Tapeats 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.
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 Tapeats Fund?
Find your warmest path to The Tapeats 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.