· Private foundation
The Vredenburg 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k6 grants · $17k
- $10k–50k19 grants · $310k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| City of Chariton | $25,000 |
| Russell Volunteer Fire Dept | $25,000 |
| City of Chariton | $25,000 |
| Almost Home Animal Rescue | $25,000 |
| Hope Learning Center | $25,000 |
| City of Chariton | $24,000 |
| Chariton Area ChamberMain Street | $20,000 |
| Iowa Public Radio | $20,000 |
| Salvation Army Lucas County | $15,000 |
| Chariton Community School District | $13,500 |
| Chariton Community School District | $12,500 |
| Lucas Co Preservation Alliance | $10,000 |
| Iowa PBS Foundation | $10,000 |
| YMCA Greater Des Moines | $10,000 |
| Lucas County Arts Council | $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 (FY17–25, $226k) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 87% 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.
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 +32% since the first grant, against -29% for the ones you funded once.
35 repeat relationships — 16 still active in FY2025, 19 since wound down; 3 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, 89% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $38k 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
- HLHOPE LEARNING CENTER8× · 2017–2025 · $196k · revenue +79%
- LCLUCAS COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL7× · 2017–2025 · $145k · revenue +7% · 43% of their budget
- IPIOWA PUBLIC RADIO INC8× · 2017–2025 · $90k · revenue +32%
Funded once
- CVCHARITON VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENTone grant, 2017 · $50k
- COCity of Charitonone grant, 2024 · $43k
- LCLucas County Arts Councilone grant, 2024 · $28k
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 provide low-cost housing to eligible families.
To support the work of iowa legal aid in achieving its mission of making hope, dignity, and justice available to low income iowans.
To improve member newspapers
The foundation is organized to further the growth and development of private colleges and universities of higher education in iowa.
The mission of the iowa center loan fund cdfi is to reduce proverty and inequality and further community development by providing access to capital to iowans starting or expanding a business who do not have access to traditional forms of…
Improve communications between employers and local unions.
Iowa Catholic Radio Foundation (the "Foundation") is a charitable foundation and nonprofit corporation organized under the laws of the State of Iowa. It has been established to raise funds and utilize those funds to support Iowa Catholic…
The organization's mission is to address the immediate needs of sick, injured, and orphaned wild birds, with the goal to return them to the wild and help educate and bring awareness to the global issue that birds are dissappearing at an…
To promote the development, growth and utilization of childrens advocacy centers and multidisciplinary teams to better serve Iowas abused and neglected children and their families.
Provide hospice care and bereavement support services.
To serve non-public Christian schools in the State of Iowa.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Iowa Legal Aid and the most unlike its peers is Almost Home Animal Rescue. 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 30 years old; the field is 21. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 21% startups (under 5 years old) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 6% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 4% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
17 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. 17 of the 61 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 HOPE LEARNING CENTER ↗
- Who funds LUCAS COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds IOWA PUBLIC RADIO INC ↗
- Who funds Lucas County Fair Association ↗
- Who funds IOWA PBS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ALMOST HOME ANIMAL RESCUE ↗
- Who funds DES MOINES METRO OPERA INC ↗
- Who funds LUCAS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds Camp Foster Young Mens Christian Association Inc ↗
- Who funds CAMP HERTKO HOLLOW INC ↗
- Who funds Iowa Legal Aid ↗
- Who funds INTERCHURCH COUNCIL OF LUCAS COUNTY IOWA INC ↗
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: Community Fdn of Greater Des Moines F/K/A Greater Des Moines Community Fdn · South Central Iowa Community Founda · The Coons Foundation · Dekko Foundation Inc · Prairie Meadows Race Track and Casino Inc · Bookey Family Foundation · Alliant Energy Foundation Inc · First Interstate BancSystem Foundation Inc · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · American Endowment Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program
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 Vredenburg 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.