· Private foundation
Equity Residential 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 $10k6 grants · $18k
- $10k–50k8 grants · $145k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Mercy Housing California | $40,000 |
| Ferguson Charitable Foundation | $25,000 |
| Innovation Network for Communities | $20,000 |
| Christ the King Jesuit College Preparatory School | $15,000 |
| Genesys Works Chicago | $15,000 |
| Emergency Network Los Angeles Inc | $10,000 |
| World Central Kitchen Inc | $10,000 |
| California Community Foundation | $10,000 |
| Pancreatic Cancer Action Network | $5,000 |
| American Red Cross | $5,000 |
| Misericordia Foundation | $2,500 |
| Cameron Boyce Foundation | $2,500 |
| Mercy Housing Lakefront | $2,500 |
| Common Pantry | $400 |
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, $102k) 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 14% of Equity Residential 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.
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 +35% since the first grant, against +28% for the ones you funded once.
19 repeat relationships — 5 still active in FY2025, 14 since wound down; 8 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, 38% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $95k 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
- ININNOVATION NETWORK FOR COMMUNITIES INC8× · 2017–2025 · $195k · revenue +97%
- FCFERGUSON CHARITABLE FOUNDATION3× · 2023–2025 · $75k · revenue +112%
GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY7× · 2017–2024 · $70k · revenue +140%
Funded once
- NFNAREIT FOUNDATIONone grant, 2022 · $50k · revenue -81%
EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVEone grant, 2020 · $31k · revenue -63%- DWDOWNTOWN WOMEN'S CENTERone grant, 2024 · $20k · 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.
Nourishing hope provides food, mental health support, and social services to help all our neighbors thrive.
Food forward fights hunger and prevents food waste by rescuing fresh surplus produce, connecting this abundance with people experiencing food insecurity, and inspiring others to do the same.
United Food Bank unites communities to alleviate hunger.
Our mission is to create housing and service options that model, with respect and dignity, sustainable, environmentally sensitive, affordable communities for people of limited resources.
Chcf is dedicated to advancing meaningful, measurable improvements in the way the health care delivery system provides care to the people of california, particularly those with low incomes and those whose needs are not well served by the…
The organization's mission is to mobilize resources to fight hunger in our community. to fulfill its mission, the food bank:* sources and acquires nutritious food and other products and distribute them to people experiencing nutrition…
Hollywood food coalition welcomes people to dinner each night. we rescue and redistribute food daily to other organizations. we care for our immediate community through our wellness program. we build community with and through our…
Our mission is to solve hunger in central pennsylvania by ensuring that everyone struggling with hunger has access to enough wholesome food every day. we will achieve this bold goal with the help of our generous donors, volunteers and…
On a mission to connect every person facing hunger with nutritious meals by maximizing food rescue. through direct service and community partnerships, feeding san diego provides more than 26 million meals each year to children, families,…
Chh honors every person's right to a home and health care, by bridging the housing and health care systems, to improve the lives of chicagoans experiencing homelessness.
To pursue anti-hunger initiatives through the west side campaign against hunger (wscah) program whose mission is to alleviate hunger by ensuring that all new yorkers have access with dignity to a choice of healthy food and supportive…
Empowering families and individuals experiencing homelessness to build a future filled with dignity, opportunity, and lasting solutions.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Families Forward and the most unlike its peers is Humane World for Animals Inc. 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 41 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) — 1% of your grantees by number, and just 7% 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.
70 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. 70 of the 83 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 INNOVATION NETWORK FOR COMMUNITIES INC ↗
- Who funds FERGUSON CHARITABLE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds OVER THE RAINBOW ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds NAREIT FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MERCY HOUSING CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds TREVOR PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds HISPANIC ALLIANCE FOR CAREER ENHANCEMENT ↗
- Who funds Ascend Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds PANCREATIC CANCER ACTION NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds DEPAUL UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds CITIZENS FOR SAFETY INC ↗
- Who funds DOWNTOWN WOMEN'S CENTER ↗
- Who funds HEALTHRIGHT 360 ↗
- Who funds GOLDEN HARVEST FOOD BANK INC ↗
- Who funds PROJECT BREAD-THE WALK FOR HUNGER INC ↗
- Who funds PINE STREET INN INC ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds EMERGENCY NETWORK LOS ANGELES INC ↗
- Who funds HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF UNITED HATZALAH INC ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA HOSPITAL MEDICAL CENTER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO CARES INC ↗
- Who funds LINK Unlimited Scholars ↗
- Who funds BUILD INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN INC ↗
- Who funds CAMERON BOYCE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HAWAII COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE POSSE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds HOUSING INDUSTRY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE WEST END MUSEUM INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds HOMELESS PERSONS REPRESENTATION PROJECT INC ↗
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 · Greater Chicago Food Depository · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Wells Fargo Foundation · California Community Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Greater Washington Community Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · American Endowment Foundation · The Bank of America Charitable 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 Equity Residential 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 West End Museum Incorporated — 65% of income from government
- Covenant House New Jersey Inc — 34% of income from government
- Nourishnj Inc — 27% of income from government
- Pine Street Inn Inc — 11% of income from government
- Seton Hall University — 1% 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 Equity Residential Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Equity Residential 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.