· Private foundation
Helaine Edgar Opportunity Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2021–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| AID Coalition | $36,000 |
| HFS Chicago Scholars | $25,000 |
| Growing Home Inc | $25,000 |
| Industrial Council for Nearwest Chi | $25,000 |
| CHAMPS Male Mentoring | $25,000 |
| West Town Bikes | $25,000 |
| Math Circles of Chicago | $25,000 |
| Chabad Center of Sudbury INC | $25,000 |
| Revolution Workshop | $25,000 |
| Evanston Scholars | $25,000 |
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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY21–24) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 89% of your 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 10% of Helaine Edgar Opportunity 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, 12% of the giving stays in MA; read by stated purpose it is 7% — 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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +53% since the first grant, against +16% for the ones you funded once.
9 repeat relationships — 7 still active in FY2024, 2 since wound down; 3 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, 67% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $86k 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
- GHGROWING HOME INC3× · 2022–2024 · $60k · revenue +69%
- RWREVOLUTION WORKSHOP3× · 2022–2024 · $60k · revenue +66%
- HCHFS CHICAGO SCHOLARS3× · 2022–2024 · $60k · revenue +36%
Funded once
- TSThe Shalem Foundationone grant, 2023 · $36k · revenue -49%
- OSOcean State Job Lot Charitable Founone grant, 2023 · $36k
- JUJEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGOgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $36k · revenue +32%
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.
Tutoring and mentoring programs for inner city youth.
Chicago scholars is transforming the leadership landscape of our city by resolving the fundamental barriers to success for academically driven, first generation college students from under-resourced 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…
To provide academic & social support to inner-city chicago high school students. program provides scholarships, mentors & tutors to enable students to succeed in the high school of their choice.
To equip all students in grades six through twelve with the academic skills, intellectual habits and character traits to succeed in the college of their choice, strenghten their communities and change the world.
Provide resources and tools to help african american youth from underserved communities aged 14-24 achieve economic sustainability through education, career, and workforce development.
Chicago Votes is a non-partisan, non-profit organization building a more inclusive democracy by putting power in the hands of young Chicagoans. We're engaging and developing a new generation of leaders by opening the doors of government,…
We provide all Chicago youth with equitable access to chess education empowering them with essential life skills for success on and off the board.
The chicago summer business institute was founded in 1991 to provide meaningful summer jobs for chicago high school students and to introduce them to the financial services sector. positions at financial firms throughout chicago are…
Future founders is building the nation's largest inclusive community of intentional young entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial-minded leaders.
A better chicago is changing how chicago fights poverty by investing in bold ideas that create opportunity for our youth.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is High Jump and the most unlike its peers is The Shalem Foundation. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
16 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. 16 of the 27 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 GROWING HOME INC ↗
- Who funds REVOLUTION WORKSHOP ↗
- Who funds HFS CHICAGO SCHOLARS ↗
- Who funds MATH CIRCLES OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds EVANSTON SCHOLARS ↗
- Who funds WEST TOWN BIKES NFP ↗
- Who funds The Shalem Foundation ↗
- Who funds JEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds AMERICA ISRAEL DEMOCRACY COALITION ↗
- Who funds CHAMPS MALE MENTORING PROGRAM - CHIRISE ↗
- Who funds MAAFA Redemption Project ↗
- Who funds RYAN BANKS ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO'S SUNSHINE ENTERPRISES INC ↗
- Who funds HIGH JUMP ↗
- Who funds MINDS MATTER OF CHICAGO INC ↗
- Who funds YOUTH JOB CENTER 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 · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Robert R McCormick Foundation · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · Circle of Service Foundation · United Way of Metropolitan Chicago Inc · Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · AbbVie Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Local Initiatives Support Corporation · National Philanthropic Trust · 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 Helaine Edgar Opportunity 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 Helaine Edgar Opportunity Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Helaine Edgar Opportunity 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.