· Private foundation
Barbara Bluhm-Kaul Foundation (F/K/A Mayfair 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k6 grants · $13k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $104k
- $50k–250k4 grants · $375k
- $250k+1 grant · $537k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ASPEN ART MUSEUM | $537,300 |
| ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART | $185,000 |
| ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO | $90,000 |
| JEWISH UNITED FUND | $50,000 |
| RELIGIOUS ACTION CENTER OF REFORM JUDAISM | $50,000 |
| THE WASHINGTON INSTITUE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY | $25,000 |
| PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| SEGERSTROM CENTER FOR THE ARTS | $24,390 |
| CHICAGO CARES | $20,000 |
| ASPEN MUSIC FESTIVAL & SCHOOL | $10,000 |
| ANDERSON RANCH ARTS CENTER | $5,000 |
| CHICAGO SINAI CONGREGATION | $3,875 |
| AMERICAN FRIENDS OF ISRAEL PHILHARMONIC | $2,000 |
| ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE & RELATED DISORDERS ASSOCIATION INC | $1,000 |
| CHICAGO BOTANICAL GARDENS | $600 |
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 (FY17–19, $7k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 0% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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
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.
26 repeat relationships — 12 still active in FY2024, 14 since wound down; 4 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, 97% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $28k 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
- TATHE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO8× · 2017–2024 · $383k · revenue +45%
- MOMUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART6× · 2017–2023 · $155k · revenue +0%
- JUJEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO2× · 2023–2024 · $100k · revenue +32%
Funded once
- CAChicago Architecture Foundationone grant, 2023 · $50k · revenue -10%
- SKSTORM KING ART CENTERgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $50k · revenue +75%
- CFCentral Fund of Israelgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $35k · revenue +31%
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.
We believe in the life-changing, transformational, revelatory power of great art and opera. Lyric Opera of Chicago exists to provide a broad, deep, and relevant cultural service to the Chicago region and the nation, and to advance the…
To collect, display and interpret objects in craft art and design.
Chicago opera theater expands the tradition of opera as a living art form by engaging lovers of music and storytelling through innovative experiences, predominantly of new and rarely performed works.
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
The Museum of Modern Art is a private, non-profit institution chartered by the State of New York Department of Education in 1929 to foster public awareness of modern and contemporary art. (Continued in Schedule O)
The Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University ("The Auditorium"), an Illinois not-for-profit corporation, is committed to presenting the finest in international, cultural, community and educational programming to Chicago and to the…
The music institute of chicago ("music institute") leads people toward a lifelong engagement with music, by providing widely accessible resources for high quality music teaching, performing, and service activities.
The chicago theatre group is committed to producing both classic and contemporary works giving full voice to a wide range of artists and visions. by dedicating itself to three guiding principles - quality, equity, and community - the…
The arts club of chicago was formed as a means to encourage, foster, and develop higher standards of arts craftsmanship, and to maintain the city of chicago facility for the housing of galleries and exhibitions open to the public and free…
The Chicago History Museum strives to be a destination for learning, inspiration, and civic engagement. Through dynamic exhibitions, tours, programs, digital resources, and special events, the Museum connects people to Chicago's history…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Museum of Contemporary Art and the most unlike its peers is Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. 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 48 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) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
47 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. 47 of the 71 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 ASPEN ART MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART ↗
- Who funds THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO CARES INC ↗
- Who funds JEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY ↗
- Who funds Chicago Architecture Foundation ↗
- Who funds STORM KING ART CENTER ↗
- Who funds Central Fund of Israel ↗
- Who funds Chicago Symphony Orchestra ↗
- Who funds THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM ↗
- Who funds Segerstrom Center for the Arts ↗
- Who funds MUSIC ASSOCIATES OF ASPEN INC ↗
- Who funds Pacific Symphony ↗
- Who funds ASPEN COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ANDERSON RANCH ARTS CENTER ↗
- Who funds THE JOFFREY BALLET ↗
- Who funds NORTH SUBURBAN LEGAL AID CLINIC ↗
- Who funds Planned Parenthood of Illinois ↗
- Who funds Writers Theatre Inc ↗
- Who funds ILLINOIS NETWORK OF CHARTER SCHOOLS ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE ISRAEL MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL FOUNDATION OF ILLINOIS INC ↗
- Who funds WISEPLACE ↗
- Who funds GRANT PARK ORCHESTRAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds PAWS CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds Society for Contemporary Art C-O The Art Institute of Chicago ↗
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 Chicago Community Trust · Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · National Philanthropic Trust · American Endowment Foundation · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Network for Good · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Amazonsmile 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 Barbara Bluhm-Kaul Foundation (F/K/A Mayfair 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.
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.