· Public charity
The Working World Inc
Seed commons is an applied research organization studying, testing, assessing and implementing best practices for community economic development through the expansion of democratic enterprise and community-controlled non-extractive capital.
What you funded, over time
Every grant clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 19 grants below total $1,505,971 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $3,162,845 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $1,656,874 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2024
- $10k–50k12 grants · $327k
- $50k–250k6 grants · $844k
- $250k+1 grant · $335k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| COLABORATIVA LA MILPA | $335,000 |
| TWW NYC SOLIDARITY INC | $240,000 |
| CINCINNATI UNION COOPERATIVE INITIATIVE | $235,000 |
| NEW YORK CITY NETWORK OF WORKER COOPERATIVES | $139,814 |
| REPAIRED NATIONS COOPERATIVE INC | $80,000 |
| SPOKANE WORKERS COOPERATIVE LCA | $75,000 |
| SOUTHEAST CENTER FOR COOPERATIVE DEVELOPMENT | $74,583 |
| PHILADELPHIA AREA COOPERATIVE ALLIANCE | $37,500 |
| DETROIT COMMUNITY WEALTH FUND | $37,400 |
| URBAN TILTH | $33,750 |
| CLEVELAND OWNS | $32,500 |
| BELOVED COMMUNITY INCUBATOR INC | $32,500 |
| ORGANIZATION FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEMOCRACY | $30,674 |
| GREATER DAYTON UNION COOPERATIVE INITIATIVE INC | $22,250 |
| AUSTIN MEMBER-OWNED BUSINESS FOUNDATION | $20,000 |
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, $1.9M) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 49% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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 +53% since the first grant, against +25% for the ones you funded once.
19 repeat relationships — 13 still active in FY2024, 6 since wound down; 6 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, 86% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $210k 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
- CLColaborativa La Milpa5× · 2020–2024 · $949k · revenue +353%
- CUCINCINNATI UNION COOPERATIVE INITIATIVE6× · 2018–2024 · $775k · revenue +204% · 31% of their budget
- NNNYC NOWC Inc5× · 2020–2024 · $572k · revenue +31% · 26% of their budget
Funded once
POSSIBILITY LABSone grant, 2022 · $1.0M · revenue +25%- CHCALIFORNIA HARVESTERS INCone grant, 2019 · $119k
- CHCALIFORNIA HARVESTERS INCone grant, 2020 · $86k
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 L.A. Co-op Lab is a collective that builds capacity for worker ownership in Los Angeles as a pathway toward a more equitable and democratic economy.
Community Cooperative's mission is to support entrepreneurs and organizations advancing the cooperative and solidarity economy through connection to funding, training, workshops, networks, and resources that foster leadership in the…
The Central Ohio Worker Center is a non-profit organization that educates, empowers, and advocates for and with low-wage and immigrant workers in Central Ohio.
To promote and develop cooperatives to improve economic opportunities for all.
Fuerza Laboral is a workers' rights center whose mission is to shift the balance of power in our economy in favor of workers by educating, training, and organizing workers to become community leaders; taking direct action to recover unpaid…
New Brookwood Labor College strives to address racial economic and social imbalances of power by educating workers into their class. We are creating an inclusive labor movement that uses the power of organization not merely to lift…
NDCC works collaboratively with partners to conduct and contract with others to conduct general organizational training activities including engaging in conferences and membership solicitation to educate, organize and distribute leadership…
The CO-OP ED Center NFP is an organization committed to building democratic worker-owned businesses in Chicagoland that contribute to a strong local economy and invest in community development. Its a purpose is to train, develop and…
To build a thriving ecosystem for worker-owned and controlled businesses - and their cooperative leaders - to power movements for racial justice and economic democracy.
Building a movement of diverse, upwardly mobile college grads overcoming underemployment through digital skills and peer connections.
The mission of the Workers Center For Racial Justice is to eliminate structural barriers to sustainable and living wage
Rainier Beach Action Coalition is a grassroot, Black-led organization devoted to locally driven development. It promotes quality education, living wage jobs, affordable transportation and housing, and building community capacity in…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Beloved Community Incubator Inc and the most unlike its peers is Urban Tilth. 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 12 years old; the field is 16. You back the younger end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 8% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% 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 52 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 POSSIBILITY LABS ↗
- Who funds Colaborativa La Milpa ↗
- Who funds CINCINNATI UNION COOPERATIVE INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds NYC NOWC Inc ↗
- Who funds TWW NYC SOLIDARITY INC ↗
- Who funds PHILADELPHIA AREA COOPERATIVE ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds SOUTHEAST CENTER FOR COOPERATIVE DEVELOPMENT ↗
- Who funds BUFFALO NEIGHBORHOOD STABILIZATION COMPANY INC ↗
- Who funds ORGANIZATION FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEMOCRACY ↗
- Who funds Urban Tilth ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY INC ↗
- Who funds GREATER DAYTON UNION COOPERATIVE INITIATIVE INC ↗
- Who funds PEOPLE UNITED FOR SUSTAINABLE HOUSING INC ↗
- Who funds Builders of The Highway Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds BELOVED COMMUNITY INCUBATOR INC ↗
- Who funds BEYOND CARE CHILD CARE COOPERATIVE INC ↗
- Who funds ASSOCIATION FOR BLACK ECONOMIC POWER ↗
- Who funds CATALYST MIAMI INC ↗
- Who funds Cleveland Owns ↗
- Who funds Sustainable Economies Law Center ↗
- Who funds Sankofar Research Institute ↗
- Who funds ROCKY MOUNTAIN EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP CENTER ↗
- Who funds AUSTIN MEMBER-OWNED BUSINESS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Center for Popular Research Education and Policy ↗
- Who funds SOUTHWEST BROOKLYN INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds BUSINESS OUTREACH CENTER NETWORK 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: New Economy Coalition Inc · Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc · The Kresge Foundation · Tides Foundation · Solidaire Network Inc · Solutions Project Inc · New Venture Fund · The Ford Foundation · Common Counsel Foundation · Rsf Social Finance Inc · Common Future · Impactassetsinc
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 Working World Inc 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 Working World Inc?
Find your warmest path to The Working World Inc 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.