· Private foundation
The Wellmark 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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k9 grants · $18k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $151k
- $50k–250k6 grants · $600k
- $250k+6 grants · $2.4M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| CHARITIES AID FOUNDATION AMERICA | $758,599 |
| IOWA JAG INC | $400,000 |
| STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA FOUNDATION | $387,672 |
| BLUES CARE GIVING CONTRIBUTIONS | $336,307 |
| LIFESCAPE FOUNDATION | $250,000 |
| CHILDSERVE FOUNDATION INC | $250,000 |
| SOUTH DAKOTA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $150,000 |
| ROCK VALLEY COMMUNITY SCHOOL DISTRICT | $150,000 |
| SPENCER COMM SCHOOL DISTRICT | $100,000 |
| BRAVO GREATER DES MOINES INC | $100,000 |
| IOWA JAG INC | $50,000 |
| SOCIETY OF CHRISTIAN INSTRUCTION OF ROCK VALLEY IA | $50,000 |
| STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA | $33,375 |
| ROCK VALLEY COMMUNITY SCHOOL DISTRICT FOUNDATION | $31,951 |
| SPENCER COMMUNITY SCHOOL DISTRICT | $30,000 |
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 (FY21–24, $700k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 96% 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 22% of The Wellmark 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, 86% of the giving stays in IA; read by stated purpose it is 78% — 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 +113% since the first grant, against -7% for the ones you funded once.
4 repeat relationships — 3 still active in FY2024, 1 since wound down; 18 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, 36% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1.4M 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
- BCBLUES CARE GIVING CONTRIBUTIONS4× · 2021–2024 · $4.1M
- IJIOWA JOBS FOR AMERICA'S GRADUATES INC4× · 2021–2024 · $625k · revenue +113%
- COCITY OF CEDAR RAPIDS CEDAR RAPIDS PUBLIC LIBRARY2× · 2021–2023 · $125k
Funded once
- FBFood Bank of Iowaone grant, 2020 · $352k
- UDURBAN DREAMSone grant, 2021 · $250k · revenue -42%
- FBFOOD BANK OF IOWAgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $200k · revenue +46%
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.
Facilitate economic opportunity, business success, community engagement, prosperity, and quality of life for rural western iowa
Common good iowa engages iowans to create and advocate for research-based public policy that makes life better and more equitable for all who make iowa home.
The foundation is organized to further the growth and development of private colleges and universities of higher education in iowa.
The community foundation for western iowa is dedicated to creating a lasting legacy in our region by engaging our citizens and communities for durable change and fostering a culture of philanthropy. this is where giving grows.
Our mission is to champion the iowa city downtown district as a progressive, healthy, and culturally-vibrant urban center of the region.
The foundation for the iowa city community school district connects the community with our schools to ensure every student has extraordinary learning experiences. together we empower teachers and district staff and inspire students to…
The organization promotes, develops and advances the business community in iowa city and the surrounding area. in addition, the organization connects business and industry with federal, state and local resources to enable and stimulate…
To foster, encourage, aid or otherwise assist in the economic growth and development of the four-county region of buena vista, clay, dickinson and emmet counties in iowa.
To provide advocacy and services for disadvantaged persons and bring about institutional change for the benefit of the people we serve and the community at large. (see schedule o).to achieve this mission, scicap operates programs to…
The university of iowa facilities corporation acquires and holds property for the benefit and use of the university of iowa.
Our mission is to inspire the iowa city area to be greater by: 1) elevating business, 2) investing in strategic initiatives, and 3) advocating for the economic resiliency of the greater community.
Faciltate a team of industry professionals to bring initiatives, education and awareness to skilled trades in iowa
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Community Fdn of Greater Des Moines F/K/a Greater Des Moines Community Fdn and the most unlike its peers is Eat Greater Des Moines. 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 27 years old; the field is 38. You back the younger end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 13% startups (under 5 years old) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 3% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 6% 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.
55 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. 55 of the 207 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 CHARITIES AID FOUNDATION AMERICA ↗
- Who funds IOWA JOBS FOR AMERICA'S GRADUATES INC ↗
- Who funds STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds URBAN DREAMS ↗
- Who funds CHILDSERVE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds LIFESCAPE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SOUTH DAKOTA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FOOD BANK OF IOWA ↗
- Who funds Friends of Lacey-Keosauqua State Park ↗
- Who funds CAPITAL AREA COUNSELING SERVICEINC ↗
- Who funds BRAVO GREATER DES MOINES INC ↗
- Who funds FIVE ISLAND TRAIL CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds NAHANT MARSH EDUCATION CENTER ↗
- Who funds CASEY SERVICE CLUB INC ↗
- Who funds LET'S SKATE ↗
- Who funds LEON CHAMBER OF COMMERCE ↗
- Who funds THE DAVIS COUNTY TRAILS COUNCIL CORPORAT ↗
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 · Prairie Meadows Race Track and Casino Inc · Delta Dental of Iowa Foundation · GreenState Credit Union · South Dakota Community Foundation · United Way of Central Iowa · Mid-Iowa Health Foundation · Kyle J & Sharon Krause Family Foundation · Greenstate Foundation · First Interstate BancSystem Foundation Inc · Athene Charitable Foundation · The Merchants Bonding Company 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 Wellmark 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 Wellmark Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Wellmark 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.