· Private foundation
David a and Edith F Demar 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 $10k21 grants · $26k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $30k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| STREETWISE | $20,000 |
| JUF | $10,000 |
| MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGO | $5,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $4,360 |
| THE CLARE CHARITABLE FOUNDATION | $3,000 |
| MESULAM CENTER FOR COGNITIVE | $1,000 |
| SPECIAL GIFTS THEATRE | $1,000 |
| HUNGER RESOURCE NETWORK | $1,000 |
| CAMP CHI | $1,000 |
| SPERTUS INSTITUTE | $1,000 |
| JCC CHICAGO | $1,000 |
| SOAR | $1,000 |
| CJE SENIORLIFE | $1,000 |
| CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $1,000 |
| FRANCES W PARKER SCHOOL | $800 |
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 (FY17–25, $29k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, 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 9% of David a and Edith F Demar 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, 99% of the giving stays in IL; read by stated purpose it is 91% — 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 +30% since the first grant, against +23% for the ones you funded once.
33 repeat relationships — 17 still active in FY2025, 16 since wound down; 5 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, 70% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $17k 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
- MOMUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART7× · 2017–2025 · $29k · revenue +0%
- JCJewish Community Centers of Chicago5× · 2021–2025 · $16k · revenue +34%
Northwestern University7× · 2017–2025 · $15k · revenue +41%
Funded once
- UMUNITED METHODIST CHURCH OF ARLINGTOone grant, 2020 · $10k
- FFUMCAHone grant, 2021 · $3k
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2018 · $500
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.
Presenting free high-quality classical music performances and music education experiences in the Chicago metropolitan area for people of all ages and degrees of musical awareness so they can experience how music enriches life.
We believe in the life-changing, transformational, revelatory power of great art and opera. Lyric Opera of Chicago exists to provide a broad, deep, and relevant cultural service to the Chicago region and the nation, and to advance 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…
To promote public appreciation, understanding and support of the humanities through festivals and educational programs.
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…
The Chicago School educates the next generation of change-makers in innovative theory and culturally competent practice to strengthen the integrated health of individuals, organizations, and communities.
Cedille Chicago, NFP is devoted to the activity of producing and marketing recordings of classical music by Chicago-area musicians and composers.
Chicago Sinfonietta is a professional orchestra dedicated to modeling and promoting diversity, inclusion, and both racial and cultural equity in the arts through the universal language of symphonic music. Our core values are built around…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Grant Park Orchestral Association and the most unlike its peers is The Clare Charitable 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 34 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) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 3% lost their exemption, against 16% 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.
28 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. 28 of the 54 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 JEWISH FEDERATION OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART ↗
- Who funds STREETWISE ↗
- Who funds Jewish Community Centers of Chicago ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds COUNCIL FOR JEWISH ELDERLY ↗
- Who funds THE CLARE CHARITABLE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Chicago Symphony Orchestra ↗
- Who funds SPECIAL GIFTS THEATRE INC CO ELISE LARSEN ↗
- Who funds HUNGER RESOURCE NETWORK ↗
- Who funds Francis W Parker School ↗
- Who funds SOUNDS GOOD CHOIR NFP ↗
- Who funds THE RYAN LICHT SANG BIPOLAR FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Support Our Aging Religious Inc ↗
- Who funds STREETERVILLE ORGANIZATION OF ACTIVE RESIDENTS ↗
- Who funds WARREN W CHERRY PRESCHOOL ↗
- Who funds GRANT PARK ORCHESTRAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds Storycatchers ↗
- Who funds JEWISH COUNCIL FOR YOUTH SERVICES ↗
- Who funds Erikas Lighthouse A Beacon of Hope for Adolescent Depression ↗
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 · Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · Arie and Ida Crown Memorial · Circle of Service Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · AbbVie Foundation · Arthur J Gallagher Foundation · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Baird Foundation Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · American Endowment 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 David a and Edith F Demar 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.