· Private foundation
Dan J Epstein Family Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2019–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k6 grants · $22k
- $10k–50k10 grants · $212k
- $50k–250k6 grants · $644k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| JULLIARD SCHOOL | $196,399 |
| Individual grant recipient | $115,000 |
| NEW WORLD SYMPHONY | $102,500 |
| FORWARD MOMENTUM CHICAGO | $100,000 |
| PRINCETON UNIVERSITY | $70,000 |
| HOLOCAUST MUSEUM OF LOS ANGELES | $60,000 |
| ALAS-WINGS | $30,750 |
| JEWISH UNITED FUND | $30,000 |
| NY STEM CELL FOUNDATION | $30,000 |
| CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $25,709 |
| THE NEW SCHOOL NYC | $25,000 |
| HYDE PARK ARTS CENTER | $20,000 |
| UC SANTA CRUZ FOUNDATION | $20,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $10,422 |
| Individual grant recipient | $10,000 |
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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY19–24) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 92% of your 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 +41% since the first grant, against +13% for the ones you funded once.
30 repeat relationships — 12 still active in FY2024, 18 since wound down; 10 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (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 FY2024, 78% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $192k 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
- JSJUILLIARD SCHOOL6× · 2019–2024 · $802k · revenue +75%
- NWNEW WORLD SYMPHONY INC6× · 2019–2024 · $570k · revenue +17%
- FMFORWARD MOMENTUM CHICAGO5× · 2019–2024 · $297k · revenue +68%
Funded once
- RURush University Medical Centerone grant, 2022 · $43k · revenue +6%
- RHRUSH HOSPITALone grant, 2023 · $40k
- LOLyric Opera of Chicagoone grant, 2019 · $35k · revenue -1%
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 organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
The music institute of chicago ("music institute") leads people toward a lifelong engagement with music, by providing widely accessible resources for high quality music teaching, performing, and service activities.
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…
See schedule onorc at the university of chicago conducts research and data science on critical societal issues to guide decision-making and the development of programs and public policy. our experts identify relationships and trends, and…
Uchicago medicine network, inc. supports and encourages health and human service by providing support, directly or indirectly to ingalls memorial hospital, the university of chicago medical center, and other related tax-exempt…
To inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy
The Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University ("The Auditorium"), an Illinois not-for-profit corporation, is committed to presenting the finest in international, cultural, community and educational programming to Chicago and to the…
Chicago opera theater expands the tradition of opera as a living art form by engaging lovers of music and storytelling through innovative experiences, predominantly of new and rarely performed works.
The chicago theatre group is committed to producing both classic and contemporary works giving full voice to a wide range of artists and visions. by dedicating itself to three guiding principles - quality, equity, and community - the…
The chicago high school for the arts (chiarts) develops the next generation of diverse, artistically promising scholar-artists through intensive pre-professional training in the arts, combined with a comprehensive college preparatory…
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Juilliard School and the most unlike its peers is Lynn Sage Foundation. 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 42 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.
45 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. 45 of the 72 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 JUILLIARD SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds NEW WORLD SYMPHONY INC ↗
- Who funds FORWARD MOMENTUM CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds Chicago Symphony Orchestra ↗
- Who funds ASOCIACION LATINA DE ASISTENCIA Y PREVENCION DEL CANCER DE MAMA ↗
- Who funds JEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds HYDE PARK ART CENTER ↗
- Who funds The Trustees of Princeton University ↗
- Who funds Jazz Institute of Chicago ↗
- Who funds THE JOFFREY BALLET ↗
- Who funds The People's Music School ↗
- Who funds Marwen Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds Rush University Medical Center ↗
- Who funds Lyric Opera of Chicago ↗
- Who funds ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds Albany Park Theater Project ↗
- Who funds The New School ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO ACADEMY FOR THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY ↗
- Who funds UC SANTA CRUZ FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Hyde Park Jazz Festival ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ONETABLE INC ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES ↗
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 Chicago Community Trust · Lloyd a Fry Foundation · Ncrc Community Development Fund Inc · Arie and Ida Crown Memorial · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Field Foundation of Illinois · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · Prince Foundation · Reva and David Logan Foundation · Fulk Family Foundation Inc · Walder 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 Dan J Epstein 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 or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- New World Symphony 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 Dan J Epstein Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Dan J Epstein Family 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.