· Private foundation
David B Rothschild Mem Foundation
Its FY2023 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2019–2023.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| RAVINIA FESTIVAL | $4,000 |
| CONGREGATION HAKAFA | $2,925 |
| CHICAGO BOTANIC GARDEN | $1,000 |
| JEWISH COUNCIL ON URBAN AFFAIRS | $700 |
| WTTW | $346 |
| NORTHWOODS WILDLIFE CENTER | $200 |
| AMERICAN RED CROSS | $200 |
| ST JOSEPH'S INDIAN SCHOOL | $200 |
| NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY | $100 |
| DIGESTIVE HEALTH FOUNDATION | $100 |
| NATIONAL TAY-SACHS ALLIED DISEASE A | $100 |
| DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS USA | $100 |
| SPECIAL GIFTS THEATRE | $100 |
| CHICAGO ACADEMY FOR THE ARTS | $100 |
| THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART | $35 |
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 (FY19–22, $900) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 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.
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 +39% since the first grant, against +26% for the ones you funded once.
25 repeat relationships — 12 still active in FY2023, 13 since wound down; 3 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, 98% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $235 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
- JUJEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO3× · 2019–2022 · $15k · revenue +57%
RAVINIA FESTIVAL ASSOCIATION2× · 2019–2023 · $8k · revenue +41%- THTHE HEARD MUSEUM3× · 2019–2021 · $3k · revenue +157%
Funded once
- JCJEWISH CHILD FAMILY SERVICESone grant, 2022 · $375
- GIGASTRO INTESTINAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION INCgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $250 · revenue +584%
- PPPLANNED PARENTHOODone grant, 2022 · $200
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 Chicago History Museum strives to be a destination for learning, inspiration, and civic engagement. Through dynamic exhibitions, tours, programs, digital resources, and special events, the Museum connects people to Chicago's history…
The mission of the jewish museum is to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret art and jewish culture. see schedule o for more information.
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 bar foundation brings the legal community together through advocacy, funding, and innovation to improve access to justice for people in need and to make the legal system more fair, equitable, and effective.
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 conservation leadership by connecting people with wildlife and nature.
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…
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…
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Chicago Lighthouse for People Who Are Blind Or Visually Impaired and the most unlike its peers is Metropolitan Museum of Art. 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 52 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) — 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 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.
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 48 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 UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds RAVINIA FESTIVAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds THE HEARD MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds Chicago Humanities Festival ↗
- Who funds Endeavor Health Clinical Operations ↗
- Who funds Jewish Council on Urban Affairs ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO ACADEMY FOR THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds SPECIAL GIFTS THEATRE INC CO ELISE LARSEN ↗
- Who funds WINDOW TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHWOODS WILDLIFE CENTER ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO CHESED FUND ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO LIGHTHOUSE FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE BLIND OR VISUALLY IMPAIRED ↗
- Who funds DIGESTIVE HEALTH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GASTRO INTESTINAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds HADLEY INSTITUTE FOR THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED ↗
- Who funds SMILE TRAIN INC ↗
- Who funds NORTH SHORE SENIOR CENTER ↗
- Who funds BIRTHRIGHT ISRAEL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds ST MARY'S FOOD BANK ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds TRIO ANIMAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds DISABLED VETERANS NATIONAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HILLEL THE FOUNDATION FOR JEWISH CAMPUS LIFE ↗
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: Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · The Chicago Community Trust · Karmin Family Charitable Trust · Circle of Service Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · AbbVie Foundation · American Endowment Foundation · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program
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 B Rothschild Mem 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.
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Find your warmest path to David B Rothschild Mem 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.