Environment & Animals Charities in California

California is a major center for environment & animals nonprofits, with 38 organizations filing under both the Environment & Animals NTEE category and a California principal office. Combined revenue across the group runs into hundreds of millions or more.

Environment & Animals in California narrows 38 organizations down to the intersection of one IRS NTEE category and one state of principal office. The combined view gives a workable head-to-head comparison set for donors focused on a specific region and cause area.

The 38 environment & animals nonprofits in California in this view together report $3.1B in combined annual revenue on their most recent IRS Form 990 filings. Median revenue is $43.8M, and the simple average is $80.6M — a gap that reflects the long-tail distribution typical of the nonprofit sector, where a handful of large organizations account for most aggregate dollars.

Across the 38 environment & animals nonprofits in California we track, 8 earn an A and 24 earn a B on the Efficiency Score (combined 84% in the top two tiers, with A-grade organizations alone at 21%). Another 6 land at C, 0 at D, and 0 at F — a combined 0% in the bottom two tiers based on program ratio, reserves, growth consistency, and CEO-comp ratio drawn from each organization's most recent Form 990.

Executive compensation detail is reported on Schedule J of the Form 990 and is not always present for every organization in this list — particularly the smaller filers using Form 990-EZ.

Pages that intersect a single NTEE category and a single state are the most apples-to-apples comparison NonprofitTruth offers. The donor question they answer is narrow: among the environment & animals charities operating from a California office, how does Organization X compare on financial structure to Organization Y? Sort by revenue first to keep scale roughly constant, then sort by Efficiency Score within a tier.

The NonprofitTruth Efficiency Score is a 0–100 composite that summarizes four signals from the Form 990: program-spending ratio (50% of the score), revenue-growth consistency over multiple years (20%), months of fund reserves on the balance sheet (20%), and CEO compensation as a share of revenue (10%). The grade A–F mapping is purely descriptive — it summarizes the financial structure that the 990 reveals, not the social impact, program quality, or outcomes of the work the organization does. Donors evaluating impact should pair these financial signals with program-level evaluations from sources like Charity Navigator, GiveWell, or the organization's own audited reports.

For a broader view of environment & animals nationwide, see the all-states Environment & Animals page; for every nonprofit in California, see the California state page. Both views are linked at the bottom of this page.

All financials on this page come from each organization's IRS Form 990 — the federal information return that 501(c)(3) public charities, private foundations, and most other tax-exempt organizations must file annually. The Form 990 is a public document. We ingest it primarily through the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer feed, which mirrors the IRS Tax-Exempt Organization Search dataset. Original e-file XML and PDF copies of any return can be looked up directly at the IRS, ProPublica, or the Candid (formerly GuideStar) directory.

Every nonprofit in this list links to a profile page that cites the source filing year. The original Form 990 is available free at the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, and the Candid (GuideStar) directory.