· Private foundation
Epstein Foundation
Its FY2018 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 FY2017–2018.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2018
- Under $10k31 grants · $63k
- $10k–50k3 grants · $43k
- $250k+1 grant · $258k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE CHICAGO COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $258,331 |
| LOYOLA UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART | $20,750 |
| CHI ARTS | $12,500 |
| ART INSTITUTE DEPT OF PHOTOGRAPHY | $10,000 |
| LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO | $7,500 |
| VICTORY GARDENS THEATRE | $7,500 |
| CHICAGO YOUTH CENTERS | $5,000 |
| CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY | $5,000 |
| CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTR | $5,000 |
| CHICAGO FOUNDATION FOR WOMEN | $5,000 |
| MIDWEST ACCESS PROJECT | $4,000 |
| THE GOODMAN THEATRE | $3,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $2,500 |
| CENTER FOR ENRICHED LIVING | $2,500 |
| LUBIZNIK CENTER | $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 (FY17–18, $2k) 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.
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.
20 repeat relationships — 20 still active in FY2018, 0 since wound down; 14 grantees were first funded in FY2018 (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 FY2018, 17% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $298k 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
- CYChicago Youth Centers2× · 2017–2018 · $16k · revenue +59%
- LOLyric Opera of Chicago2× · 2017–2018 · $15k · revenue +33%
- CSChicago Symphony Orchestra2× · 2017–2018 · $10k · revenue +58%
Funded once
- TATHE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGOgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $8k · revenue +45%
- DHDIGESTIVE HEALTH FOUNDATIONone grant, 2017 · $5k · revenue -89%
- MOMUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ARTone grant, 2017 · $3k · revenue +0%
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 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.
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
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 psychoanalytic institute transforms the lives of individuals, families and communities, using psychoanalytic knowledge to help them grow and thrive.
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 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…
To spark curiosity and creativity in all young children through positive, play-based learning experiences.
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.
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 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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Illinois Humanities Council Inc and the most unlike its peers is The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 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 41 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 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.
34 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. 34 of the 63 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 Chicago Youth Centers ↗
- Who funds Lyric Opera of Chicago ↗
- Who funds Chicago Symphony Orchestra ↗
- Who funds Victory Gardens Theater ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO FOUNDATION FOR WOMEN ↗
- Who funds THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds Repro TLC ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO THEATRE GROUP INC ↗
- Who funds DIGESTIVE HEALTH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART ↗
- Who funds THE CENTER FOR ENRICHED LIVING INC ↗
- Who funds GRANT PARK ORCHESTRAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INC ↗
- Who funds SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds Erikson Institute ↗
- Who funds WINDOW TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds PCD KS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE EXPERIMENTAL STATION ↗
- Who funds The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ↗
- Who funds LANDMARKS PRESERVATION COUNCIL OF ILLINOIS ↗
- Who funds JEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds LINCOLN PARK VILLAGE INC ↗
- Who funds CIVIC LEADERSHIP FOUNDATION ↗
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 · Circle of Service Foundation · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · Kovler Family Foundation · Lloyd a Fry Foundation · Richard and Mary L Gray Foundation · The Robert Thomas Bobins Foundation · The Seabury Foundation · The Sidley Austin Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · AbbVie 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 Epstein 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 Epstein Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Epstein 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.