· Private foundation
Ben Silverman 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 $10k2 grants · $11k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $50k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| US SKI & SNOWBOARD FOUNDATION | $15,000 |
| RYAN SEACREST FOUNDATION | $15,000 |
| CREATIVE COMMUNITY FOR PEACE'S | $10,000 |
| MERONA LEADERSHIP FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| FRIENDS OF RODEPH SHOLOM SCHOOL | $6,000 |
| THE JEWISH GRAD ORGANIZATION | $5,000 |
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 human-services grants (FY24–24, $5k) land where the poverty rate runs at 20%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 100% 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.
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 67% of Ben Silverman 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. Read by recipient address, 74% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 20% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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 +41% since the first grant, against +1% for the ones you funded once.
9 repeat relationships — 2 still active in FY2025, 7 since wound down; 4 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, 18% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $50k 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
FRIENDS OF THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES3× · 2018–2020 · $46k · revenue +41%- ALANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE2× · 2020–2024 · $20k · revenue +48%
- MWMACCABI WORLD UNION INC2× · 2018–2020 · $9k · revenue +100%
Funded once
- IEISRAEL EMERGENCY ALLIANCE DBA CREATIVE COMMUNITY Fone grant, 2024 · $50k
- TATHE ASPEN COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL INCone grant, 2024 · $25k · revenue +16%
- BSBRENTWOOD SCHOOLgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $20k · 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.
Artis is an independent nonprofit organization that supports contemporary artists from israel whose work addresses aesthetic, social and political questions to inspire reflection and debate. www.artis.art
Based on jewish values, the jewish federation of greater los angeles convenes and leads the community and leverages its resources to assure the continuity of the jewish people, support a secure state of israel, care for jews in need here…
The mission of the jewish museum is to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret art and jewish culture. see schedule o for more information.
Minneapolis jewish federation is a nonprofit organization that promotes a culture of philanthropy, leverages resources to meet local and global jewish needs, and facilitates community planning to ensure a thriving and secure future.
We steward $1.5 billion in charitable assets through donor-advised funds, endowments, and other giving vehicles. partnering with 1,400 individuals, families, and organizations, we build enduring legacies and multigenerational impact. in…
Ihds utilizes a dual general and judaic studies curriculum. the judaic studies curriculum emphasizes the fundamentals of hebrew reading, writing and speaking, jewish history, holidays, jewish values, torah, the jewish life cycle, the land…
The organization's mission is to engage in non partisan analysis of u.s. foreign policy in the middle east, with special emphasis on the middle east peace process, and to present policymakers in the united states, in the region and in the…
To promote a positive relationship between catholics and israelis.
Our vision is to reignite the zionist spirit and meet the needs of jewish civilization in the twenty-first century by connecting people around the world through the vibrancy and creativity of contemporary israeli culture.
The weizmann institute of science, located in rehovot, israel, is one of the worlds top-ranking, multidisciplinary research institutions. at any one time, several thousand scientists, staff and students are involved in hundreds of research…
To create an informed, celebratory and satisfying jewish community for students at the university of southern california, to deepen jewish identity through social, intellectual and spiritual participation, to offer diversified…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is New York Foundation for the Arts Inc and the most unlike its peers is Rod Dedeaux Foundation. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 19 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 23% startups (under 5 years old) — 9% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 14% 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.
21 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. 21 of the 42 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 CORPORATION OF THE FINE ARTS MUSEUMS ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES ↗
- Who funds THE ASPEN COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF RODEPH SHOLOM SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds BRENTWOOD SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds American Friends of Israel Philharmonic Orchestra ↗
- Who funds RYAN SEACREST FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds United States Ski Team Foundation ↗
- Who funds CROSSROADS SCHOOL FOR ARTS AND SCIENCES ↗
- Who funds MERONA LEADERSHIP FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE DISCOVERY LAND COMPANY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MACCABI WORLD UNION INC ↗
- Who funds LA-ARETZ ↗
- Who funds GREENSPACESLA INC ↗
- Who funds ROD DEDEAUX FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds UP2US INC ↗
- Who funds JEWISH GRADUATE STUDENT INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds DAVID LYNCH FOUNDATION FOR CONSCIOUSNESS -BASED EDUCATION AND WORLD PEACE ↗
- Who funds THE MAYOR'S FUND FOR LOS ANGELES ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS 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: Jewish Communal Fund · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · American Endowment Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · 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 Ben Silverman 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to Ben Silverman Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Ben Silverman 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.