· Private foundation
Dolores Kohl Education 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k20 grants · $42k
- $50k–250k4 grants · $421k
- $250k+2 grants · $748k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| RAVINIA FESTIVAL ASSOCIATION | $410,100 |
| DOLORES KOHL EDUCATION FOUNDATION - ANIMAL ORCHESTRA EXHIBIT | $337,731 |
| KOHL CHILDREN'S MUSEUM OF GREATER CHICAGO | $166,667 |
| DOLORES KOHL EDUCATION FOUNDATION - VAN GOGH | $108,605 |
| DOLORES KOHL EDUCATION FOUNDATION - RACE EXHIBIT | $87,322 |
| DOLORES KOHL EDUCATION FOUNDATION - STORY BUS PROGRAM | $58,589 |
| NORTH SHORE COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL | $7,500 |
| JEWISH UNITED FUND CHICAGO | $5,000 |
| NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JEWISH WOMEN | $5,000 |
| ACADEMY FOR URBAN SCHOOL LEADERSHIP | $5,000 |
| DOLORES KOHL EDUCATION FOUNDATION - KOHL EDUCATION PRIZE | $4,000 |
| NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY BIENEN SCHOOL | $2,500 |
| UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MUSEUM | $2,500 |
| CANCER RESEARCH FOUNDATION | $2,000 |
| AMERICAN COUNCIL OF TRUSTEES AND ALUMNI | $2,000 |
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 (FY17–23, $32k) 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.
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 11% of Dolores Kohl Education 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, 98% of the giving stays in IL; read by stated purpose it is 79% — 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.
35 repeat relationships — 18 still active in FY2024, 17 since wound down; 6 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, 98% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $20k 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
RAVINIA FESTIVAL ASSOCIATION7× · 2018–2024 · $1.1M · revenue +51%- KCKOHL CHILDREN'S MUSEUM OF GREATER CHICAGO INC8× · 2017–2024 · $930k · revenue +64%
- JUJEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO7× · 2018–2024 · $348k · revenue +34%
Funded once
- CHCHICAGO HORTICULTURAL SOCIETYgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $50k · revenue +37%
Northwestern Universitygraduatedone grant, 2020 · $22k · revenue +33%- IHILLINOIS HOLOCAUST MUSEUMone grant, 2018 · $15k
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.
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 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 organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
The mission of the university of chicago has been to sustain at the highest level of excellence, the communication of knowledge, the creation of knowledge and the fostering of a dynamic community of scholars and students.
The chicago public education fund (the fund) is a nonprofit organization that improves public schools in chicago by investing in the talented educators who lead them.
To spark curiosity and creativity in all young children through positive, play-based learning experiences.
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…
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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Museum of Contemporary Art and the most unlike its peers is Make It Better Foundation. 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 47 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) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% 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.
57 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. 57 of the 87 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 RAVINIA FESTIVAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds KOHL CHILDREN'S MUSEUM OF GREATER CHICAGO INC ↗
- Who funds The Chicago Community Trust ↗
- Who funds Chicago Humanities Festival ↗
- Who funds JEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds DOLORES KOHL EDUCATION FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Writers Theatre Inc ↗
- Who funds BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds LAKE FOREST COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ↗
- Who funds START EARLY ↗
- Who funds Erikson Institute ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds Chicago Symphony Orchestra ↗
- Who funds CRADLES TO CRAYONS INC ↗
- Who funds MUSIC INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds Center on Halsted ↗
- Who funds SHAKESPEARE CENTER OF LOS ANGELES ↗
- Who funds MERIT SCHOOL OF MUSIC ↗
- Who funds NORTH SHORE COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds Lyric Opera of Chicago ↗
- Who funds FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY ↗
- Who funds THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds CIVITAS ENSEMBLE ↗
- Who funds Make It Better Foundation ↗
- Who funds ACADEMY FOR URBAN SCHOOL LEADERSHIP ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR JEWISH WOMEN CHICAGO NORTH SHORE SECTION ↗
- Who funds Chicago Children's Museum ↗
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 · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Jerome H Stone Family Foundation · Robert R McCormick Foundation · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · The Irving Harris Foundation · Circle of Service Foundation · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · AbbVie Foundation · Baird 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 Dolores Kohl Education 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.
- Brandeis University — 9% of income from government
- Cradles to Crayons 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 Dolores Kohl Education Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Dolores Kohl Education 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.