· Public charity
Thousand Currents
Through our grant making program, THOUSAND CURRENTS partners with organizations and movements in the global south that are creating lasting solutions to societal challenges.
Read this first · the figures below need context
88% of Thousand Currents’s FY2025 grant dollars went to Peace Development Fund, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2025 names 3 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it. Everything below is therefore FY2021, the last year Thousand Currents named its own grantees at scale: 8 organizations, $72M. It is dated, not current.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
What you funded, over time
Every grant clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 10 grants below total $71,759,086 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $76,784,062 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $5,024,976 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 · FY2021
- Under $10k1 grant · $5k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $40k
- $250k+7 grants · $72M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BLACK LIVES MATTER GLOBAL NETWORK FOUNDATION INC | $69,164,086 |
| URGENT ACTION FUND | $600,000 |
| GRASSROOTS INTERNATIONAL | $600,000 |
| GLOBAL GREENGRANTS FUND | $600,000 |
| COOPERATION JACKSON | $250,000 |
| ALLIANCE FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE | $250,000 |
| BLACK ALLIANCE FOR JUST IMMIGRATION | $250,000 |
| FRACTURED ATLAS | $25,000 |
| NEW VENTURE FUND | $15,000 |
| GRASSROOTS GLOBAL JUSTICE ALLIANCE | $5,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $332k) land where the poverty rate runs at 21%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 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.
Which US states your grants reach
Grants abroad, by region — $38M on the FY2025 return
Schedule F, as filed: 8 regions. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: PROGRAM SUPPORT
Stated purpose: PROGRAM SUPPORT
Stated purpose: PROGRAM SUPPORT
Stated purpose: PROGRAM SUPPORT
Stated purpose: PROGRAM SUPPORT
Stated purpose: PROGRAM SUPPORT
Stated purpose: PROGRAM SUPPORT
Stated purpose: PROGRAM SUPPORT
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. Grants abroad on Schedule F are filed by region, purpose and amount with no recipient name, so they are shown by region and cannot be placed on the country map or matched to a grantee.
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 -36% for the ones you funded once.
6 repeat relationships — 3 still active in FY2021, 3 since wound down; 10 grantees were first funded in FY2021 (too recent to call). Read against FY2021, the last year this funder named its own grantees directly; its giving has since run through a sponsor, which reports no donor behind each grant.
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; $90k 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
- UAURGENT ACTION FUND FOR FEMINIST ACTIVISM9× · 2017–2025 · $7.6M · revenue +311%
- GIGRASSROOTS INTERNATIONAL INC7× · 2018–2024 · $6.9M · revenue +56%
- JCJEWISH COMMUNITY ACTION2× · 2017–2018 · $26k · revenue +96%
Funded once
- CDCANGRESS DBA LOS ANGELES COMMUNITY ACTION NETWORKone grant, 2020 · $93k · revenue -51%
- FCFOOD CHAIN WORKERS ALLIANCEone grant, 2020 · $69k · revenue -12%
- OSONE SQUARE WORLD INCone grant, 2020 · $69k · revenue -8%
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.
Serve as a partner, educator, and guide for philanthropy in reimagining practices that advance a thriving and just world.
Fund for Justice is a nationally connected social impact research and advocacy organization that works to achieve fundamental, systemic reform by addressing policies and practicies that prevent individuals from reaching their full…
A long-term, strategic alliance of labor, community, faith-based, and student organizations working together to build greater economic power for workers and community members through employee rights at work and access to good jobs,…
Actionaid is an international network building a just, equitable, and sustainable world in solidarity with communities on the frontlines of poverty and injustice. actionaid usa is the u.s. branch of actionaid international, which works in…
To protect the rainforest and advance the rights of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin. We partner with Indigenous communities in campaigns for human rights, corporate accountability, and the preservation of the Amazon Basin's…
/The Rules is a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality, climate change, and poverty around the world.
The Organization unleashes the creative potential of the law to protect people and the planet from corporate abuse.
Colorofchange.org works to strengthen the voice of black americans and increase the level of accountability and responsiveness of elected officials to underrepresented black constituencies using the internet as a lobbying and…
The Equal Justice Society (EJS) is transforming the nations consciousness on racethrough law, social science, and the arts. EJS works to dismantle structural andinstitutional racism to advance robust equal protection under the Fourteenth…
The Funds mission is to provide sustained support to grassroots organizing projects and movements rooted in the multi-racial working class which rely on their members and constituency to build power in the community.
Our mission as a global alliance is to provide strategies, research, and resources that support the critical agency and influence of women's foundations and gender justice funders in the movement for equality, justice, and power for all.
The Alliance for Collective Action convenes leaders of environmental and social movements to advance solutions for a thriving planet. We advance our mission through the Alliance Center building and community, as well as through Collective…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Grassroots International Inc and the most unlike its peers is The Ceres Trust. 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 24 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 13% lost their exemption, against 14% 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.
29 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. 29 of the 30 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 BLACK LIVES MATTER GLOBAL NETWORK FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds GLOBAL GREENGRANTS FUND ↗
- Who funds URGENT ACTION FUND FOR FEMINIST ACTIVISM ↗
- Who funds GRASSROOTS INTERNATIONAL INC ↗
- Who funds Peace Development Fund ↗
- Who funds IMPACTASSETSINC ↗
- Who funds Alliance for Global Justice Corp ↗
- Who funds BLACK ALLIANCE FOR JUST IMMIGRATION ↗
- Who funds COOPERATION JACKSON OF MISSISSIPPI ↗
- Who funds GLOBAL FUND FOR WOMEN INC ↗
- Who funds CANGRESS DBA LOS ANGELES COMMUNITY ACTION NETWORK ↗
- Who funds BLACK LIVES MATTER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds DESTINY BRIDGE BUILDERS ↗
- Who funds ROCKY MOUNTAIN PEACE & JUSTICE CENTER ↗
- Who funds FOOD CHAIN WORKERS ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds ONE SQUARE WORLD INC ↗
- Who funds Mid South Peace and Justice Center ↗
- Who funds ONE LOVE GLOBAL ↗
- Who funds WOMENS ALL POINTS BULLETIN-WAPB INC ↗
- Who funds TIDES ADVOCACY ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL GOOD FUND INC ↗
- Who funds JEWISH COMMUNITY ACTION ↗
- Who funds FRACTURED ATLAS INC ↗
- Who funds NEW VENTURE FUND ↗
- Who funds THE CERES TRUST ↗
- Who funds INQUIRING SYSTEMS INC ↗
- Who funds US RIGHT TO KNOW ↗
- Who funds Coleman Children and Youth Services dba Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth ↗
- Who funds GRASSROOTS GLOBAL JUSTICE ↗
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: Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc · Tides Foundation · Impactassetsinc · Proteus Fund Inc · Rsf Social Finance Inc · Borealis Philanthropy · Common Counsel Foundation · Novo Foundation · Liberty Hill Foundation · The California Endowment · Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Inc · Willow Redistribution 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 Thousand Currents 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.