· Private foundation
Brian and Dafna Berman Family Foundation Inc
Its FY2023 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
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 70% of BRIAN AND DAFNA BERMAN FAMILY FOUNDATION INC’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2023
- Under $10k62 grants · $100k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $42k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $62k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MELVIN J BERMAN HEBREW ACADEMY | $61,550 |
| CHABAD SHUL OF POTOMAC | $11,063 |
| YOUNG ISRAEL EZRAS ISRAEL POTOMAC | $11,000 |
| OPERATION EMBRACE | $10,000 |
| AMERICAN FRIENDS OF SHALVA ISRAEL | $10,000 |
| JGIVE FRIENDS OF ASOR | $7,180 |
| CHARIDY INC | $5,896 |
| YEHUDA MOND FOUNDATION | $5,000 |
| AMERICAN FRIENDS OF YESHIVA HAKOTEL | $5,000 |
| INSTITUTE FOR DAYANIM | $5,000 |
| GREATER WASHINGTON COMMUNITY KOLLEL | $5,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $5,000 |
| BIKUR CHOLIM OF GREATER WASHINGTON | $5,000 |
| CHABAD OF ROCKVILLE | $3,017 |
| BEIS MENACHEM CHABAD JEWISH STUDENT CENTER | $3,000 |
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 (FY20–23, $21k) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 5% 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.
65 repeat relationships — 33 still active in FY2023, 32 since wound down; 33 grantees were first funded in FY2023 (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 FY2023, 71% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $59k 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
- MJMELVIN J BERMAN HEBREW ACADEMY2× · 2021–2023 · $162k · revenue +52%
- MIMEOR INC2× · 2021–2022 · $110k · revenue +31%
- SISulam Inc2× · 2021–2022 · $20k · revenue +8%
Funded once
- YYYAD YEHUDA OF GREATER WASHINGTON INCone grant, 2020 · $100k
- CSCHABAD SHUL OF POTOMAC ADEL FUNDone grant, 2020 · $50k
- MMJBHAone grant, 2022 · $50k
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.
Religious School
To promote, benefit, and support Jewish religious, charitable & educational activities in Israel and the USA.
To provide support to jewish religious education in israel and around the world, and provide financial assistance to and on behalf of yeshivah beth israel tifereth menachem.
To further jewish education in israel
To voluntarily assist the house of religious learning known as yeshiva neveh zion in israel
To pursue a greater outreach of knowledge of the Jewish Torah and to further educate the less knowledgeable
Aleh Israel Foundation, Inc.(The Foundation)is a Foundation that provides support to rehabilitative centers caring for most severely disabled children in Israel.
Furtherance of jewish education
Etzion Foundation supports Yeshivat Har Etzion and its affiliated educational programs and is dedicated to fostering development of Jewish education and Jewish leadership in Israel and around the world.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Emunah of America Inc and the most unlike its peers is Camp Extreme D/B/a Project Extreme. 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 24 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 2% 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.
44 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. 44 of the 189 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 MELVIN J BERMAN HEBREW ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds MEOR INC ↗
- Who funds THE TORAH SCHOOL OF GREATER WASHINGTON INC ↗
- Who funds Sulam Inc ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE FOR DAYANIM ↗
- Who funds BIKUR CHOLIM OF GREATER WASHINGTON INC ↗
- Who funds Hebrew Free Loan Association of DC ↗
- Who funds EMUNAH OF AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF MEIR PANIM ↗
- Who funds ISRAEL FOOD DISTRIBUTION INC CO MR AVI SCHOEMANN ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF YESHIVAT HAKOTEL INC ↗
- Who funds JGIVE-FRIENDS OF ASOR FUND USA 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: The Dennis Berman Family Foundation Inc · The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington Inc · Jewish Communal Fund · Mayberg Foundation Inc · Associated Jewish Charities of Baltimore · The Gary and Pennie Abramson Charitable Foundation · Berman Charitable Trust · Melvyn and Barbara Ciment Family Foundation Inc · The Ojc Fund · Leslie & Samuel Kaplan Family Foundation · Aviv Foundation Inc · Jack Adjmi Family Foundation Inc
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 Brian and Dafna Berman Family Foundation Inc 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.
- Greater Washington Jewish Coalition Contd — 28% of income from government
- Melvin J Berman Hebrew Academy — 2% of income from government
- The Torah School of Greater Washington Inc — 2% 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 Brian and Dafna Berman Family Foundation Inc?
Find your warmest path to Brian and Dafna Berman Family Foundation Inc 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.