· Private foundation
John & Jacolyn Bucksbaum Family Found
Its FY2024 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k103 grants · $269k
- $10k–50k21 grants · $369k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $351k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE FOCUS FOUNDATION INC | $200,000 |
| ASPEN VALLEY SKI & SNOWBOARD CLUB | $101,000 |
| AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE | $50,000 |
| USA CYCLING FOUNDATION | $35,000 |
| THE FIELD MUSEUM | $35,000 |
| WORLD CUP DREAMS FOUNDATION | $31,000 |
| WORLD BICYCLE RELIEF | $27,500 |
| PEOPLEFORBIKES FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| ASPEN CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES | $25,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF DENVER | $20,000 |
| MOADON KOL CHADASH | $18,000 |
| TEACH FOR AMERICA | $17,500 |
| TEMPLE SHOLOM OF CHICAGO | $15,000 |
| ASPEN HISTORICAL SOCIETY | $14,000 |
| HIGH JUMP | $12,500 |
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 (FY20–24, $60k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 84% 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.
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.
112 repeat relationships — 93 still active in FY2024, 19 since wound down; 31 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, 93% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $72k 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
- UOUNIVERSITY OF DENVER6× · 2018–2024 · $1.7M · revenue +34%
THE BARACK OBAMA FOUNDATION6× · 2018–2023 · $1.5M · revenue +27%- TFTHE FOCUS FOUNDATION INC5× · 2017–2024 · $1.1M · revenue +56% · 72% of their budget
Funded once
- CCCHICAGO COMMUNITY FOUNDATIONone grant, 2020 · $100k
- PSPodium Society Incgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $100k · revenue +111%
- LOLyric Opera of Chicagograduatedone grant, 2017 · $50k · revenue +33%
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 organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
The mission of mit is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
The chicago public education fund (the fund) is a nonprofit organization that improves public schools in chicago by investing in the talented educators who lead them.
See schedule onorc at the university of chicago conducts research and data science on critical societal issues to guide decision-making and the development of programs and public policy. our experts identify relationships and trends, and…
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
To inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy
Lake Forest Graduate School of Management's mission is to bring the real world to business education and leadership development.
The chicago theatre group is committed to producing both classic and contemporary works giving full voice to a wide range of artists and visions. by dedicating itself to three guiding principles - quality, equity, and community - the…
Empowering the competitive excellence and well-being of team usa athletes, championing the power of sport, and inspiring the nation.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Aspen Institute Inc and the most unlike its peers is Feldman Family Foundation. 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 36 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) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.7% 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.
145 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. 145 of the 201 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 UNIVERSITY OF DENVER ↗
- Who funds THE BARACK OBAMA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE FOCUS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY ↗
- Who funds ASPEN VALLEY SKISNOWBOARD CLUB INC ↗
- Who funds THE LATIN SCHOOL OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE ↗
- Who funds ANDERSON RANCH ARTS CENTER ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Chicago International Film Festival Inc Cinema-Chicago ↗
- Who funds Teach for America Inc ↗
- Who funds USA Nordic Sport ↗
- Who funds Podium Society Inc ↗
- Who funds The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ↗
- Who funds ASPEN CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES ↗
- Who funds MOADON KOL CHADASH ↗
- Who funds HIGH JUMP ↗
- Who funds PEOPLEFORBIKES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Lyric Opera of Chicago ↗
- Who funds NAVY PIER INC ↗
- Who funds The YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago ↗
- Who funds MUSIC ASSOCIATES OF ASPEN INC ↗
- Who funds JOHN AUSTIN CHELEY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds WORLD CUP DREAMS FOUNDATION FKA SFI FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO COUNCIL ON GLOBAL AFFAIRS ↗
- Who funds ACTIVE TRANSPORTATION ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds START EARLY ↗
- Who funds WORLD BICYCLE RELIEF NFP ↗
- Who funds ASPEN ALPINE CLUB INC ↗
- Who funds LANDMARKS PRESERVATION COUNCIL OF ILLINOIS ↗
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: Aspen Community Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · Brady Foundation · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · Arie and Ida Crown Memorial · Alpenglow Foundation · The Chicago Community Trust · Circle of Service Foundation · Aspen Business Center Foundation · Arches Foundation · The Robert Thomas Bobins Foundation
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 John & Jacolyn Bucksbaum Family Found 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.
- City Year Inc — 11% of income from government
- Als Therapy Development Foundation Inc — 8% of income from government
- Community Rowing Inc — 2% of income from government
- Pan-Massachusetts Challenge Inc — 0% 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 John & Jacolyn Bucksbaum Family Found?
Find your warmest path to John & Jacolyn Bucksbaum Family Found 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.