· Private foundation
Hoffer 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 FY2020–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k11 grants · $31k
- $10k–50k10 grants · $207k
- $50k–250k4 grants · $240k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Judson University | $65,000 |
| Fox Valley Christian Action | $65,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $60,000 |
| Elgin Community College Foundation | $50,000 |
| PADS of Elgin | $40,000 |
| Food For Greater Elgin | $25,000 |
| Fellowship Housing Corporation | $22,000 |
| Fellowship Housing Corporation | $22,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $20,000 |
| Habitat for Humanity | $20,000 |
| Administrator Justice | $15,000 |
| Fox Valley Hands of Hope | $15,000 |
| Northern Illinois Food Bank | $15,000 |
| Purdue University | $13,000 |
| Cals Angels | $6,000 |
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 (FY20–25, $325k) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 2% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +22% since the first grant, against +14% for the ones you funded once.
23 repeat relationships — 16 still active in FY2025, 7 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, 94% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $27k 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
- BGBOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF NORTH CENTRAL ILLINOIS INC2× · 2021–2022 · $1.0M · revenue +61%
- JUJUDSON UNIVERSITY A BAPTIST INSTITUTION6× · 2020–2025 · $494k · revenue +22%
- FFFOOD FOR GREATER ELGIN INC6× · 2020–2025 · $443k · revenue +71%
Funded once
- UWUNITED WAY OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO INCone grant, 2021 · $48k · revenue -42%
- FBFire Barn 5one grant, 2021 · $20k
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2020 · $13k
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.
Family Service Association of Greater Elgin Area is dedicated to empowering individuals and families, promoting self sufficiency and building stronger communities through quality, accessible client centered services.
The Elgin Area Chamber connects communities through engagement, advocacy, collaboration, and leadership.
The Foodbank's mission is to provide food, and develop awareness of and creative solutions for food insecurity. Annually, the Foodbank distributes approximately 9.5 million pounds of food to 130 food pantries, soup kitchens, children's…
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.…
Eastern illinois foodbank exists to alleviate hunger in eastern illinois by providing a reliable source of food for the hungry through cooperation with a network of food pantries and agencies.
To support not for profit organizations in innovation, excellence and leadership in their communities.
Voluntary Action Center, which serves Bureau, Dekalb, Kendall, Lasalle and Putnam counties provides high quality services that address the basic transportation and nutrition needs of its communities.
Building community vitality by connecting and empowering neighbors.
To provide low or no cost medical care to low income and uninsured people.
Operate homes for the aged and to conduct charitable and benevolent enterprises
Central illinois agency on aging believes in the independence and dignity of older persons, and that each older person should be empowered to exert control over their own life & have access to needed services. we do planning, program…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Community Crisis Center Inc and the most unlike its peers is The Nypro Foundation Inc co Nypro Inc. 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 30 years old; the field is 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 20% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% 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.
25 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. 25 of the 60 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 BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF NORTH CENTRAL ILLINOIS INC ↗
- Who funds JUDSON UNIVERSITY A BAPTIST INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds FOOD FOR GREATER ELGIN INC ↗
- Who funds Riverwoods Christian Center dba Fox Valley Christian Action ↗
- Who funds ELGIN COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Fellowship Housing Corporation ↗
- Who funds FOX VALLEY HANDS OF HOPE INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHERN ILLINOIS FOOD BANK ↗
- Who funds PADS OF ELGIN INC ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO INC ↗
- Who funds CASA KANE COUNTY ↗
- Who funds ALIGNMENT COLLABORATIVE FOR EDUCATION INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY CRISIS CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR INFORMATION OF ELGIN (CENTRO DE INFORMACION) ↗
- Who funds ELGIN YOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ↗
- Who funds LADDER UP (F/K/A CITY-WIDE TAX ASSISTANCE PROGRAM) ↗
- Who funds Project Mobility Cycles For Life ↗
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: Efs Foundation · Seigle Foundation · Grand Victoria Foundation · Community Foundation of the Fox River Valley · Motorola Solutions Foundation · United Way of Metropolitan Chicago Inc · Arthur J Gallagher Foundation · The Bersted Foundation · United Way of Elgin Inc · Harvey and Ethel Daeumer Foundation · Northern Illinois Food Bank · The Chicago Community Trust
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 Hoffer 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 Hoffer Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Hoffer 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.