· Private foundation
Full Circle Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k7 grants · $27k
- $10k–50k67 grants · $1.4M
- $50k–250k6 grants · $360k
- $250k+1 grant · $280k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MCHENRY CO COLLEGE | $280,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $80,000 |
| NRDC | $80,000 |
| OPEN LANDS | $50,000 |
| CARTER CENTER | $50,000 |
| WETLANDS INITIATIVE | $50,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $50,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $40,500 |
| ALL CHICAGO | $40,000 |
| NATURE CONSERVANCY IN ILLINOIS | $40,000 |
| TUTORING CHICAGO | $40,000 |
| TURNING POINT | $40,000 |
| CASA OF MCHENRY COUNTY | $40,000 |
| FAMILY HEALTH PARTNERSHIP CLINIC | $40,000 |
| LA CASA NORTE | $35,000 |
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 (FY17–25, $429k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 53% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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 +25% since the first grant, against +16% for the ones you funded once.
83 repeat relationships — 57 still active in FY2025, 26 since wound down; 23 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, 69% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $653k 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
- OOPENLANDS8× · 2018–2025 · $280k · revenue +7%
MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC6× · 2020–2025 · $175k · revenue +39%- TCTHE CARTER CENTER INC8× · 2018–2025 · $165k · revenue +25%
Funded once
- CDCOOPERATIVE DEVELOPMENT SERVICES INCone grant, 2023 · $150k · revenue +8% · 30% of their budget
- RTRICHMOND TOWNSHIP FIRE PROTECTION Done grant, 2021 · $45k
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2019 · $30k
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.
At legal aid chicago, we work together to provide high quality civil legal aid to people living in poverty and other vulnerable groups.through advocacy, education, collaboration, and litigation we empower individuals, protect fundamental…
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.
The mission of goodwill is to create opportunities for individuals with barriers to enhance their lives. barriers include physical or mental disabilities, lack of education and job preparation, socio-economic disadvantages, and others.…
A better chicago is changing how chicago fights poverty by investing in bold ideas that create opportunity for our youth.
Strive to improve the health and well being of migrant and seasonal farmworkers and other medically vulnerable populations by providing quality accessable, affordable, and culturally responsive health care within the community we serve.
Arise chicago builds partnerships between faith communities and workers to fight workplace injustice through education, organizing, and advocating for public policy changes.
The Chicago Refugee Coalition is a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated ot the alleviation of human suffering through innovative partnerships, advocacy and community empowerment.
To provide decent, safe and sanitary housing that is affordable to low and moderate-income persons and to stabilize and strengthen communities by improving the local housing stock. the corporation shall administer programs that revitalize…
Standing with our neighbors, Lakeshore Legal Aid fights poverty and injustice through advocacy and by providing meaningful and dignified access to the legal system.
Nourishing hope provides food, mental health support, and social services to help all our neighbors thrive.
Serving recently arrived migrants and asylum seekers in the Chicagoland area and is committed to upholding the dignity and human rights of immigrants.
Operate homes for the aged and to conduct charitable and benevolent enterprises
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Midwest Shelter for Homeless Veterans Inc and the most unlike its peers is Leadership Greater Mchenry County. 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 31 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) — 1% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% lost their exemption, against 15% 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.
84 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. 84 of the 167 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 OPENLANDS ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds THE WETLANDS INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds THE CARTER CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds COOPERATIVE DEVELOPMENT SERVICES INC ↗
- Who funds INNER-CITY COMPUTER STARS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TUTORING CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO LIGHTS ↗
- Who funds LEADERSHIP GREATER MCHENRY COUNTY ↗
- Who funds GROWING HOME INC ↗
- Who funds IMENTOR INC ↗
- Who funds ALL CHICAGO MAKING HOMELESSNESS HISTORY ↗
- Who funds Inspiration Corporation ↗
- Who funds Independence Health & Therapy ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds LA CASA NORTE ↗
- Who funds Turning Point Inc ↗
- Who funds SEVEN GENERATIONS AHEAD ↗
- Who funds Family Health Partnership Clinic ↗
- Who funds CASA OF MCHENRY COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds FOOD CO-OP INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds THE THRESHOLDS ↗
- Who funds COOPERATIVE FOR ASSISTANCE AND RELIEF EVERYWHERE INC ↗
- Who funds THE HARVARD COMMUNITY SENIOR CENTER ↗
- Who funds ROSECRANCE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds PRAIRIE STATE LEGAL SERVICES INC ↗
- Who funds The Beacon Place NFP ↗
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 Community Foundation for McHenry County · The Chicago Community Trust · George M Eisenberg Foundation for Charities · Northwestern Memorial HealthCare Group · Willow Springs Charitable Trust Jenny B Stoddard Trustee · Foglia Family Foundation · Circle of Service Foundation · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · AbbVie Foundation · The Bersted Foundation · Aptargroup Charitable Foundation · United Way of Metropolitan Chicago 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 Full Circle 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 Full Circle Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Full Circle 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.