· Public charity
Jewish Federation of Columbus
Make Jewish life vibrant, accessible and secure in Columbus, Israel and around the world.
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.
The 32 grants below total $5,873,618 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $9,243,187 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $3,369,569 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k4 grants · $29k
- $10k–50k12 grants · $268k
- $50k–250k7 grants · $699k
- $250k+9 grants · $4.9M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Jewish Federations-North America | $1,476,148 |
| American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Inc | $819,000 |
| Jewish Community Center Of Greater Columbus | $476,500 |
| Jewish Agency For Israel-North American Council | $444,000 |
| Wexner Heritage Village | $367,133 |
| Friends Of The Israel Defense Forces | $330,000 |
| Jewish Family Services | $322,500 |
| Columbus Torah Academy | $322,000 |
| Merkaz Hatzedaka Corp | $320,000 |
| OSU Hillel | $153,979 |
| American Friends Of ORR Shalom Inc | $128,000 |
| Birthright Israel Foundation | $114,979 |
| Ohio Jewish Communities | $99,848 |
| Columbus Jewish Day School | $78,176 |
| Columbus Community Kollel | $64,500 |
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, $3.8M) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 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 15% of Jewish Federation of Columbus’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, 70% of the giving stays in OH; read by stated purpose it is 66% — 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.
25 repeat relationships — 18 still active in FY2025, 7 since wound down; 12 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, 68% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1.4M 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
- TJTHE JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF GREATER COLUMBUS8× · 2017–2025 · $5.9M · revenue +110%
- JFJEWISH FAMILY SERVICES8× · 2017–2025 · $3.8M · revenue +133%
- WHWEXNER HERITAGE VILLAGE8× · 2017–2025 · $3.0M · revenue +16%
Funded once
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2017 · $214k
- GEGan Ephraim Incgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $32k · revenue +237%
- LMLITTLE MINYANone grant, 2019 · $1k
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 jewish agency binds jews across ideologies and civilizations together in a worldwide jewish family with israel at its center. it provides the global framework for aliyah, ensures global jewish safety, strengthens jewish identity and…
The mission of the hebrew academy is to imbue all students with a love of god, torah and eretz yisroel and to prepare them to achieve excellence in torah and general knowledge based on successful cooperation among family, judaic and…
To prepare students for the rabbinate and to issue the traditional certificate of ordination in connection therewith. the seminary is authorized to confer the degree of master of hebrew literature (m.h.l.), doctor of hebrew literature…
Make Jewish life vibrant, accessible and secure in Columbus, Israel and around the world.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Jewish Community Center of Greater Columbus and the most unlike its peers is Camp Moshava of Wild Rose 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 33 years old; the field is 19. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% 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 12% 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.
27 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. 27 of the 42 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 THE JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF GREATER COLUMBUS ↗
- Who funds THE JEWISH FEDERATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds JEWISH FAMILY SERVICES ↗
- Who funds WEXNER HERITAGE VILLAGE ↗
- Who funds COLUMBUS TORAH ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds THE BNAI BRITH HILLEL FOUNDATION AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Inc ↗
- Who funds THE COLUMBUS JEWISH DAY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS COMMITTEE OF OHIO JEWISH COMMUNITIES INC ↗
- Who funds JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL - NORTH AMERICAN COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES ↗
- Who funds MERKAZ HATZEDAKA CORP ↗
- Who funds BIRTHRIGHT ISRAEL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF ORR SHALOM INC ↗
- Who funds Chabad of Columbus Inc ↗
- Who funds TAMID ISRAEL INVESTMENT GROUP LTD ↗
- Who funds THE LAWFARE PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds TEMPLE ISRAEL FOUNDATION OF COLUMBUS OHIO ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF REICHMAN UNIVERSITY INC ↗
- Who funds Gan Ephraim Inc ↗
- Who funds COLUMBUS JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds ORT AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds JEWISH FEDERATION OF CLEVELAND ↗
- Who funds MIDWEST CAMPERS INC ↗
- Who funds CAMP MOSHAVA OF WILD ROSE INC ↗
- Who funds The Mandel Jewish Community Center of Cleveland ↗
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: Columbus Jewish Foundation · Columbus Foundation · Jay and Jean Schottenstein Foundation · Nutis Foundation Inc · Lori Schottenstein Foundation · Jewish Federation of Cleveland · Saul Schottenstein Foundation D · Jewish Communal Fund · The Donald E & Eydie R Garlikov Family Foundation · Jon and Susan Diamond Family Foundation · Ann and Ari Deshe Foundation · Saul Schottenstein Foundation C
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 Jewish Federation of Columbus 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.