The Wyoming Channel

Every flow on this map

Sorted by amount. Column headers re-sort the table. DOC = read off a primary filing · SEC = from a transcription of a filing not opened directly · INF = a structural relationship with no traceable dollar.

Two rails

Wyoming money in this record runs on two separate systems. They are governed by different rules, they disclose different things, and on the evidence of the filings they do not carry each other’s money.

What the Storer Foundation’s own returns say

Form 990-PF Part VI-B (Part VII-B on older forms) asks a private foundation, under penalty of perjury, five questions about political and lobbying expenditure. Five consecutive returns were read.

The TY2020 render does not carry the checkbox state for lines 5a(1)–(5); the expenditure responsibility statement attached to that return establishes the 5a(4) answer.

Where a grant names its destination

Wyoming Civic Engagement Network did not obtain its own IRS exemption until February 2024. A private foundation cannot grant directly to an organisation without an exemption, so before that date the money went through intermediaries — and on each occasion the destination is written into the purpose line of the foundation’s own return.

The routing is disclosed rather than concealed: a reader of the foundation’s return can see the destination in every year, including the years the payment was not made directly.

The c3 and the c4 that share an executive

Wyoming Civic Engagement Network is a 501(c)(3), recognised in February 2024, employer identification number 93-3777806. Wyoming Voter Network is not a separate organisation at all. Its own privacy policy opens: “The Wyoming Voter Network is a special project of the Wyoming Donor Alliance, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization.” A full-text search of every electronically filed Form 990 from calendar year 2014 forward returns no return of any organisation containing the phrase “Wyoming Voter Network.” It has no employer identification number and it files nothing.

WyCEN’s own posting for an executive director describes the role as a joint position over both, reporting to both boards, supervising WyCEN’s Field Strategist, a joint WyCEN/WVN Data Organizer and WVN’s Field Manager, and developing fundraising plans “in partnership with the Executive Director of the Wyoming Donor Alliance.” The advertised salary is $80,000–$90,000.

Better Wyoming has the same shape: a 501(c)(3) that began operating in 2017 and obtained recognition in May 2020, and Better Wyoming Action + Research, a 501(c)(4) incorporated on 13 December 2023 at the same Laramie post-office box and recognised in April 2025. The Wyoming Donor Alliance has funded both halves — $66,000 to the charity and $7,613 to the c4.

A network of twenty-six that publishes no roster

WyCEN’s own hiring page describes an executive director who will “oversee two networks of 26 organizational partners (both of which are expanding annually).” The twenty-six are named nowhere. What follows is where the search went and what each place held.

Nine of the twenty-six, and how each one is known

Nine organisations can be tied to this layer by a document. Seventeen cannot.

Nine tenths of a redacted donor list, rebuilt from other people’s returns

A 501(c)(3) files Schedule B, which lists its substantial donors — and the public copy is redacted. The donors’ own returns are not. Every line below was read on the funder’s filing rather than on WyCEN’s.

Fiscal years do not align exactly across eight organisations. A grant one foundation books in 2024 may reach the recipient in 2025. The total is a reconstruction from eight independent returns, not a reconciliation to WyCEN’s books.

The same accountant, opposite answers to the same question

Both returns are prepared by Highpoint CPAs LLC of 401 Fremont Street, Laramie. Both forms ask, at Part VI line 19, how the organisation makes its governing documents and financial statements available to the public.

Both answers are lawful. The difference is the whole point of running the two entities side by side: the charitable half is answerable to anyone who asks, and the political half is answerable to no one.

One page of one return, and what it carries

Western Futures Fund Inc of Sheridan filed a 2024 Schedule I listing twenty-two grantees and $6,780,000. One is a 501(c)(3). The other twenty-one are 501(c)(4)s, 527 political committees and one labour organisation, spread across Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Alaska, Nebraska, Utah and Oregon. Three lines of that page reach this record.

The fund’s own address is 30 N Gould Street #23616, Sheridan — the same building as the committee on line 11, a different suite number at the same registered-agent mail drop. Its three officers, president Michael Hennesy, treasurer Jeremy Krones and secretary Christopher Hirsch, each report one hour a week and no compensation. Gross receipts for the year were $8,735,000.

The same template, documented in Montana a decade earlier

In 2013 ProPublica, Montana Free Press and High Country News jointly published an account of Montana Hunters and Anglers in the 2012 United States Senate race. The structure they described is the one set out above, at national scale and thirteen years earlier.

• Two paired entities. Montana Hunters and Anglers Action!, a nonprofit that disclosed no donors, and Montana Hunters and Anglers Leadership Fund, a super PAC (FEC C00493262) which disclosed its donors — and whose donors were mostly other super PACs.
• One national funder supplied nearly all of it. The League of Conservation Voters gave the super PAC $410,000 in July 2011, described in the reporting as almost everything the group had raised at that point.
• One consultancy ran several nominally independent groups. Hilltop Public Solutions, of Washington: one partner sat on the nonprofit’s board, another was the super PAC’s treasurer, and two more operated separate committees. The League of Conservation Voters and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Montana both paid the firm management fees.

“We figured having a local brand like that and partnering with them on local issues made more sense than having a D.C. brand.”
— Navin Nayak, League of Conservation Voters, quoted in that reporting

That sentence is the clearest published explanation of why national money arrives under a local name. It is not an inference drawn here; it is a funder describing the strategy.

The League of Conservation Voters appears in both records. Way Back PAC’s federal schedule lists $32,000 from the LCV Victory Fund.

The operators

The final column of the map is people. Each is placed only where a record puts them, and every role carries its own confidence marking — documented, secondary, or a structural inference. The pattern the map shows is not that individuals moved money between the two rails. It is that the same small number of people hold roles on both: a consultant who founded the endorsing organisation and both firms the state committee paid; a director who ran the statewide donor network one year and chaired the Jackson organisation the next; a foundation chief executive who is also a legislator and formed a local committee; a foundation trustee who is also a county commissioner and a director of a grantee.

One of the consulting firms describes its own training programme as producing participants who “run for office, serve on boards, and work as community organizers.” A partner in that firm ran for county commission in 2026 and won.

What this map does not establish

No document in this record shows foundation money reaching a political action committee, and the foundation has certified in five consecutive returns that it paid nothing, directly or indirectly, to influence an election or to carry on a voter registration drive. The two rails share people — the same names appear on a foundation board, a charity board, a donor network and a committee treasurer’s line — and they share a state. They are not shown sharing money.

Records not yet examined

1. Wyoming Hunters and Anglers Alliance. Its EIN, exemption type and Forms 990. It is the only non-charity the foundation has funded in five years and it appears nowhere else in this record.
2. Storer Forms 990-PF for FY2025 onward. Part VII lists trustees with addresses. The FY2024 return names Press Stephens as chairperson and Leslie Self as a trustee; the current published roster names neither, and adds Ryan Lance, Miles Cottom and Adrienne Reece.
3. ANDREA SHIPLEY. A board member on the Wyoming Donor Alliance’s 2024 return, replacing Heather Smith. Who she is has not been established.
4. LESLIE SPOONHUNTER. A WyCEN board member on the 2024 return. No organisation has been established for her.
5. Wyoming Rising, Powell. A $15,480 grantee of the statewide donor table in 2024. Its employer identification number, tax status, officers and filings are all unknown.
6. Donor Advised Charitable Giving, Lone Tree CO. A $145,000 funder of WyCEN with a Schedule I running to more than 4,600 lines. Not examined.
7. Michael Hennesy, Jeremy Krones and Christopher Hirsch. The three officers of the Sheridan fund that supplies both committees and the donor table. Nothing has been established about any of them beyond the returns they sign.
8. Whether Kate Sollitt and David Sollitt are related. David Sollitt was executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance. The surname appears in two different layers of this structure and no document connects them.
9. The cost-allocation agreement between WyCEN and the Wyoming Donor Alliance. Wyoming Voter Network has no filings of its own — it is a project of the Donor Alliance — so the allocation between the charitable and political halves appears in no public document.
10. The seventeen unidentified partners. WyCEN’s own Schedule O states that documents are made available on request. Its 2025 Form 990 has not yet been filed.
11. The Wyoming Donor Alliance fundraising page and the reported $1,579,000 target for the August 2026 primaries.
12. Committee on States, State Leadership Project and Forward Wyoming — three funders of this layer that appear nowhere else in this record.
13. Progress PAC. The Wyoming state PAC roster records a committee at PO Box 11072, Jackson, formed 8 February 2016 and terminated 3 January 2022, with Clyde L Propst III as chairman and Elizabeth Storer as treasurer. The filing itself has not been read.
14. WyCEN’s partner roster. The network describes about twenty-six partner organisations and publishes no list.