· Private foundation
Bear-Sontz Family Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k44 grants · $89k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $62k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BOSTON UNIVERSITY TANGLEWOOD | $25,000 |
| TURNOUT ACTIVISM INC | $14,500 |
| JEWISH FEDERATION OF SOUTH PALM | $12,000 |
| BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $10,000 |
| MILAGRO CENTER | $8,500 |
| LYNN WOMEN'S HEALTH INSTITUTE | $6,500 |
| ANTI DEFAMATION LEAGUE | $5,500 |
| AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE | $5,000 |
| GRACE CHURCH SCHOOL | $4,000 |
| ST JUDE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL | $4,000 |
| JEWISH FAMILY CHILDREN SERVICES | $3,000 |
| C-CAP | $3,000 |
| JEWISH FAMILY SERVICES | $3,000 |
| DELRAY BEACH LIBRARY | $2,500 |
| CROS MINISTRIES - DB FOOD PANTRY | $2,500 |
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 (FY20–25, $16k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 50% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +39% since the first grant, against +21% for the ones you funded once.
66 repeat relationships — 36 still active in FY2025, 30 since wound down; 12 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (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 FY2025, 86% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $22k 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
- BSBOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC6× · 2019–2025 · $131k · revenue +22%
- MFMILAGRO FOUNDATION INC9× · 2017–2025 · $50k · revenue +51%
NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY3× · 2017–2019 · $48k · revenue +110%
Funded once
- NRNORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM AT STOCKBRIDGE INCone grant, 2017 · $5k · revenue +11%
- FOFRIENDS OF UNITED HATZALAH INCone grant, 2023 · $3k · revenue -45%
- RNRUTH & NORMAN RALES JEWISH FAMILY SERVICES INCgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $3k · revenue +42%
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.
The mission of mit is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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.
The University of New Haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts and professional education. Our mission is to prepare our students to lead purposeful and fulfilling lives in a…
Nyu is a private university with approximately 60,000 matriculating students in 20 schools and institutes. nyu's primary missions are education, research and scholarship, and patient care.
Operate a state-of-the-art, world-class genomic research center that creates and uses advanced genomics to understand the genetic basis of disease. for more information, see schedule o.
Biu produces students who excel in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business & the arts.
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,…
Ci works to spotlight and secure the critical benefits that nature provides to humanity.
The open markets institute works to help people relearn how to use competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.
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.
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is United Animal Nations Dba Redrover and the most unlike its peers is Project High Hopes. 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 38 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.
58 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. 58 of the 100 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 BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC ↗
- Who funds MILAGRO FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds TURNOUT ACTIVISM INC ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds ST JUDE CHILDREN'S RESEARCH HOSPITAL INC ↗
- Who funds Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds DIRECT RELIEF ↗
- Who funds IMPACT 100 PALM BEACH COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds THE UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS INC ↗
- Who funds RAYMOND F KRAVIS CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS INC ↗
- Who funds HOLOCAUST MUSEUM HOUSTON ↗
- Who funds THE CLEAR FUND ↗
- Who funds LAPPIN FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds HUMAN RELATIONS SERVICE INC ↗
- Who funds THE CARTER CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds JEWISH FAMILY SERVICES OF GREATER ORLANDO INC ↗
- Who funds SIERRA CLUB FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GREATER BOSTON FOOD BANK INC ↗
- Who funds MASSACHUSETTS AUDUBON SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND INCORPORATED ↗
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: Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Jewish Communal Fund · Boston Foundation Inc · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund · The Chicago Community Trust · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · National Philanthropic Trust · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · The Blackbaud Giving Fund
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 Bear-Sontz Family 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Boston Area Rape Crisis Center Inc — 82% of income from government
- Greater Boston Food Bank Inc — 22% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Northeastern University — 7% of income from government
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc — 7% of income from government
- The Trustees of Reservations — 2% of income from government
- Massachusetts Audubon Society Inc — 1% of income from government
- Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge Inc — 1% of income from government
- Boston Symphony Orchestra Inc — 0% of income from government
- Big Dog Ranch Rescue Inc — 0% of income from government
- Americares Foundation Inc — 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.