· Private foundation
Berlin Family Fund
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 FY2020–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k7 grants · $16k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $90k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $340k
- $250k+2 grants · $800k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| PRINCETON UNIVERSITY | $500,000 |
| NEW TRIER EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION | $300,000 |
| WINNETKA PARKS FOUNDATION | $220,000 |
| WINNETKA COMMUNITY HOUSE | $120,000 |
| WINNETKA CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH | $40,000 |
| FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY - WINNETKA-NORTHFIELD | $20,000 |
| BELOIT COLLEGE | $20,000 |
| INDIAN HILL SCHOLARSHIP FUND | $10,000 |
| VANDER COOK COLLEGE OF MUSIC | $5,000 |
| MOBILE CARE CHICAGO | $5,000 |
| HUMAN SOCIETY OF VERO BEACH & INDIAN RIVER COUNTY | $2,000 |
| INDIAN RIVER HABITAT FOR HUMANITY | $2,000 |
| YOUTH GUIDANCE MENTORING ACEDEMY INDIAN RIVER | $1,000 |
| THE SEA NOTES CHORAL SOCIETY | $500 |
| FEED THE LAMBS - VERO BEACH | $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 (FY20–24, $57k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 56% 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.
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 +66% since the first grant, against +5% for the ones you funded once.
38 repeat relationships — 5 still active in FY2025, 33 since wound down; 10 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, 95% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $66k 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
The Trustees of Princeton University6× · 2020–2025 · $1.2M · revenue +51%- NTNEW TRIER EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION3× · 2023–2025 · $309k · revenue +827%
- WCWINNETKA COMMUNITY HOUSE INC3× · 2020–2025 · $135k · revenue +80%
Funded once
- NSNORTH SHORE HOSPITAL FOUNDATIONone grant, 2024 · $1.0M
- EHEndeavor Healthone grant, 2023 · $100k
- NSNORTH SHORE UNIVERSITYone grant, 2020 · $100k
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.
Bates is a college of the liberal arts and sciences, and is a coeducational, nonsectarian, residential college with special commitments to academic rigor, and to assuring in all of its efforts the dignity of each individual, and access to…
Williams College strives to achieve educational excellence by fostering a community of learning in collaboration with students, faculty, staff, devoted alumni and parents.
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…
Wilson college empowers students to be confident and critical thinkers, creative visionaries, effective communicators, honorable leaders, and agents of justice.
Wheaton college provides a transformative liberal arts education, combining theory and practice, for intellectually curious students within a collaborative and vibrant extended community and network that values and strives to create an…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Since 1775, the mission of Hampden-Sydney College has been to form good men and good citizens in an atmosphere of sound learning.
Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.
Education and Research
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
HMC seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities, social sciences and the arts so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the…
Provide post-secondary education leading to a baccalaureate degree. Program service expenditures are made in conjunction with the operation of a liberal arts college spread over 107 acres with approximately 63 educational and support…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Community House and the most unlike its peers is Cool Earth Action Usa Inc. 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 40 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 4% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
52 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2026.
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 2017–2026, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 52 of the 96 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 The Trustees of Princeton University ↗
- Who funds NEW TRIER EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds WINNETKA PARKS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds WINNETKA COMMUNITY HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds Endeavor Health ↗
- Who funds Chicago Symphony Orchestra ↗
- Who funds Scenic Hudson Inc ↗
- Who funds CAMP DUDLEY INC ↗
- Who funds Trustees of Hamilton College ↗
- Who funds Elpis Enterprises ↗
- Who funds WHIDBEY CAMANO LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds Friends of the Library- WinnetkaNorthfield ↗
- Who funds THE COMMUNITY HOUSE ↗
- Who funds BELOIT COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds PLEASANTON GIRLS SOCCER ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds SILVER BAY ASSOCIATION FOR CHRISTIAN CONFERENCES AND TRAINING ↗
- Who funds THE TVRC EDUCATION FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds The Hap Foundation Inc (F/K/A Journeycare Foundation) ↗
- Who funds EVANS SCHOLARS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds WHIDBEY ISLAND WALDORF SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds MBIRA ↗
- Who funds ST DAVID'S CENTER ↗
- Who funds SOUTH WHIDBEY HOMELESS COALITION ↗
- Who funds METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
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: Kemper Educational and Charitable Fund · The Chicago Community Trust · Goosefoot Community Fund · John D and Alexandra Nichols Family Foundation · Frank Family Foundation · Charles H and Beverly E Shaw Foundation · Seattle Foundation · The Winnetka Club · The Sharon L King Foundation · Madigan Family Foundation · Whidbey Community Foundation · Sheila Reynolds Berner 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 Berlin Family Fund 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.
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- Kinhaven Music School 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to Berlin Family Fund?
Find your warmest path to Berlin Family Fund 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.