· Private foundation
Western Union Foundation
Its FY2024 filing reports that it funds preselected organizations and did not take unsolicited requests; check the foundation's own site before ruling it out.
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
- $50k–250k16 grants · $2.0M
- $250k+5 grants · $1.9M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ASPEN INSTITUTE | $500,000 |
| IIE WU GLOBAL SCHOLARS | $400,450 |
| WATSON | $400,000 |
| JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT WORLDWIDE | $315,737 |
| NATIONAL PARTNERSHIP FOR NEW AMERIC | $300,000 |
| HY-VEE VARIETY CHILDREN'S CHARITY | $200,000 |
| BRIDGE FOR BILLIONS-POSSIBILITY LAB | $200,000 |
| THE ENTREPRENUERIAL REFUGEE NETWORK | $200,000 |
| GLOBAL ALLIANCE AFRICA | $200,000 |
| METROPOLITAN STATE UNIVERSITY OF D | $150,000 |
| HIAS | $125,006 |
| Individual grant recipient | $115,000 |
| EVER FREE | $100,000 |
| REFUGEES INTERNATIONAL | $100,000 |
| CAPABLE | $100,000 |
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 US giving — 86% of grant dollars ($21M). The need read here covers only this US portion; the 14% that went abroad ($3.4M) is mapped below.
Your human-services grants (FY20–23, $1.2M) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 93% 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
Beyond the US — 14% of all-years giving ($3.4M)
18 countries, by the recipient’s country on the filing.
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. International giving is mapped by the recipient’s country from the same 990filings; comparable need data isn’t available at that grain.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 11% of Western Union 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.
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 +27% since the first grant, against +19% for the ones you funded once.
385 repeat relationships — 7 still active in FY2024, 378 since wound down; 14 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, 43% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $2.2M 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
THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC5× · 2020–2024 · $1.5M · revenue +193%- WIWatson Institute5× · 2020–2024 · $1.3M · revenue +332%
- IRInternational Rescue Committee INC4× · 2020–2023 · $661k · revenue +63%
Funded once
- IWIIE WU GLOBAL SCHOLARS 23-24one grant, 2023 · $505k
- PIPLAN INTERNATIONAL - PHILIPPINESone grant, 2023 · $310k
- B2BACK 2 SCHOOL AMERICAone grant, 2020 · $300k · revenue -1% · 44% of their budget
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 meaningful access to high quality, civil legal services in the pursuit of justice for as many low income persons and members of vulnerable populations throughout colorado as possible.
Inspired by the gift of donation from our communities, allosource responsibly provides innovative cellular and tissue allografts to advance patient healing.
Colorado center on law and policy is an antipoverty organization advancing the rights of every coloradan.
The npr foundation ("foundation") is organized and operated exclusively for the benefit of its sole supported organization, national public radio, inc. ("npr inc."). the foundation supports npr inc. through various activities such as…
The purpose of the water research foundation (wrf) is a definitive research organization to advance the science of all things water to better meet the evolving needs of its subscribers and the water sector. to engage exclusively in…
The union of concerned scientists puts rigorous, independent science into action, developing solutions and advocating for a healthy, safe, and just future.
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
Our mission is to invest in and accelerate the development of the most promising future leaders in biomedical research with global impact.
At the internet society foundation, we focus on funding initiatives that strengthen the internet in function and reach so that it can effectively serve all people. our work advances the vision of the internet society (isoc): the internet…
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
A nonprofit scientific research organization that develops vaccines and antibodies for hiv, tuberculosis, and emerging infectious diseases.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Make-a-Wish Foundation of America and the most unlike its peers is Internet Archive. 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 31 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 1% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.9% 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.
792 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. 792 of the 1,013 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 INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds Watson Institute ↗
- Who funds HAWAII COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds International Rescue Committee INC ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CORPS ↗
- Who funds JA WORLDWIDE INC ↗
- Who funds LABOR MOBILITY PARTNERSHIPS INC ↗
- Who funds EDUCATION FOR EMPLOYMENT ↗
- Who funds Re Coded Co ↗
- Who funds GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR AFRICA ↗
- Who funds WHITAKER PEACE AND DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds VARIETY - THE CHILDREN'S CHARITY OF IOWA ↗
- Who funds UPWARDLY GLOBAL ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds Save The Children Federation Inc ↗
- Who funds BACK 2 SCHOOL AMERICA ↗
- Who funds PLAN INTERNATIONAL USA INC ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL PARTNERSHIP FOR NEW AMERICANS ↗
- Who funds JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT-ROCKY MOUNTAIN INC ↗
- Who funds Mercy Corps ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT ↗
- Who funds MILE HIGH UNITED WAY INC ↗
- Who funds HIAS 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: The Janus Henderson Foundation · Colorado Gives Foundation · The Denver Foundation · Rose Community Foundation · The Colorado Health Foundation · Schlessman Foundation Inc · The Anschutz Foundation · Anschutz Family Foundation · Gary Philanthropy · Boettcher Foundation · Xcel Energy Foundation · El Pomar 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 Western Union 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.
- Hias Inc — 88% of income from government
- Womenspace — 62% of income from government
- Mercy Corps — 47% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Save the Children Federation Inc — 30% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Food for the Poor Inc — 0% of income from government
- Shriners Hospitals for Children — 0% of income from government
- K9S for Warriors Inc — 0% of income from government
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 Western Union Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Western Union 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.