· Public charity
Cincinnati Bar Foundation
Promoting justice and changing lives through the law with the desire to serve the legal profession, the justice system and the Greater Cincinnati community.
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.
The 8 grants below total $102,237 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $168,667 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $66,430 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k4 grants · $31k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $72k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Cincinnati Bar Association | $31,737 |
| Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati | $15,000 |
| ProKids | $15,000 |
| Summer Work Experience in Law (SWEL) | $10,000 |
| Children's Home of Cincinnati | $8,000 |
| Catholic Charities Southwestern Ohio | $7,500 |
| Cincinnati Works | $7,500 |
| Pro Bono Partnership of Greater Cincinnati | $7,500 |
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 (FY18–25, $97k) land where the poverty rate runs at 16%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 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 100% of Cincinnati Bar 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, 96% of the giving stays in OH; read by stated purpose it is 0% — 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 +56% since the first grant, against +7% for the ones you funded once.
12 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2025, 4 since wound down.
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, 100% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $0 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
- LALegal Aid Society of Cincinnati8× · 2017–2025 · $130k · revenue +87%
- PProKids7× · 2017–2025 · $91k · revenue +210%
- CWCINCINNATI WORKS6× · 2018–2025 · $38k · revenue +19%
Funded once
- SOSTATE OF OHIOone grant, 2017 · $15k
- PSPro Seniors Incgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $8k · revenue +140%
- HCHEALTH CARE ACCESS NOWone grant, 2024 · $8k · revenue +7%
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 Ohio Crime Victim Justice Center (OCVJC) is to ensure that the constitutional and statutory rights of Ohio crime victims are protected and enforced in state and federal jurisdictions in all 88 Ohio counties. To fulfill this…
Toledo Legal Aid Society provides legal representation for indigent clients that are charged with criminal, traffic, or juvenile offenses for which the penalty or any possible adjudication includes the potential loss of liberty.
The Central Ohio Worker Center is a non-profit organization that educates, empowers, and advocates for and with low-wage and immigrant workers in Central Ohio.
To provide legal representation to indigent persons for the citizens of Summit County, Ohio.
To strengthen the capacity of United Ways across Ohio and to advance the common good for Ohioans.
To work as a coalition of labor unions, community organzation, and religious community to raise the public awarness of and build campaigns to promote workers rights an social justice issues.
Promoting justice and changing lives through the law with the desire to serve the legal profession, the justice system and the Greater Cincinnati community. The Cincinnati Bar Foundation concentrates grant-making efforts in the following…
Our mission is to promote a just and peaceful community by honoring all people, building their capacity to act, and facilitating opportunities for them to engage in conflict constructively. We continue to fulfill our mission by…
Standing with our neighbors, Lakeshore Legal Aid fights poverty and injustice through advocacy and by providing meaningful and dignified access to the legal system.
United Way improves lives by uniting the caring power of our community.
See schedule o.legal aid's mission is to secure justice, equity and access to opportunity for and with people who have low incomes through passionate legal representation and advocacy for systematic change.
OneJustice's mission is to strengthen the legal services sector's expertise and capacity to advance justice and equity.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Legal Aid Society of Cincinnati and the most unlike its peers is Found Village. 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 44 years old; the field is 17. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 21% 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.
23 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. 23 of the 25 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 Cincinnati Bar Association ↗
- Who funds Legal Aid Society of Cincinnati ↗
- Who funds ProKids ↗
- Who funds CINCINNATI WORKS ↗
- Who funds Summer Work Experience In Law Inc ↗
- Who funds PRO BONO PARTNERSHIP OF OHIO ↗
- Who funds NORTHERN KENTUCKY CHILDRENS LAW CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds OHIO JUSTICE AND POLICY CENTER ↗
- Who funds The Children's Home of Cincinnati Ohio ↗
- Who funds Catholic Charities Southwestern Ohio ↗
- Who funds Immigrant & Refugee Law Center ↗
- Who funds Pro Seniors Inc ↗
- Who funds HEALTH CARE ACCESS NOW ↗
- Who funds Volunteer Lawyers for the Poor Foundation ↗
- Who funds Found Village ↗
- Who funds Back 2 Back Ministries Inc ↗
- Who funds Young Mens Christian Association of Greater Cincinnati ↗
- Who funds Living Arrangements for the Developmentally Disabled Inc ↗
- Who funds United Way of Greater Cincinnati ↗
- Who funds Law and Leadership Institute LLC ↗
- Who funds TALBERT HOUSE ↗
- Who funds Dress for Success Cincinnati ↗
- Who funds BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA COUNCIL 438 DAN BEARD ↗
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 Greater Cincinnati Foundation · United Way of Greater Cincinnati · Millstone Fund · Johnson Charitable Gift Fund · Ohio State Bar Foundation · Pfau Charitable Foundation · Carol Ann and Ralph V Haile Jr Foundation · Ge Aerospace Foundation · The Thomas J Emery Memorial · John a Schroth Family Char Tr · Interact for Change · Spaulding 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 Cincinnati Bar 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 Cincinnati Bar Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Cincinnati Bar 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.