· Public charity
Joseph and Sherry Felson Family Foundation
Supports the charitable, educational, & religious purposes of the jewish community foundation
Read this first · the figures below need context
100% of Joseph and Sherry Felson Family Foundation’s FY2020 grant dollars went to Jewish Community Federation Of San Francisco The Peninsula Marin & Sonoma, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2020 names 0 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it. Everything below is therefore FY2018, the last year Joseph and Sherry Felson Family Foundation named its own grantees at scale: 15 organizations, $372k. It is dated, not current.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
What you funded, over time
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 44% of JOSEPH AND SHERRY FELSON FAMILY FOUNDATI’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 15 grants below total $371,900 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $385,010 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $13,110 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 · FY2018
- Under $10k4 grants · $28k
- $10k–50k8 grants · $140k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $204k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| AMERICAN ISRAEL EDUCATION FOUNDATION | $90,000 |
| ASPEN ART MUSEUM | $62,500 |
| JEWISH FEDERATION OF THE EAST BAY | $51,000 |
| TULANE UNIVERSITY | $40,000 |
| ANDERSON RANCH ARTS CENTER | $26,000 |
| SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART | $20,000 |
| JEWISH PARTISAN EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION | $13,000 |
| WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY | $11,000 |
| THE ASPEN INSTITUTE | $10,000 |
| EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE | $10,000 |
| JAZZ AT ASPEN-SNOWMASS | $10,000 |
| HILLEL FOUNDATION OF NEW ORLEANS | $9,000 |
| HILLEL INTERNATIONAL | $9,000 |
| URBAN ADAMAH | $5,400 |
| CHABAD JEWISH CENTER OF OAKLAND | $5,000 |
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 (FY17–20) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 24% of your 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 29% of Joseph and Sherry Felson Family 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, 50% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 48% — 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 +31% since the first grant, against +24% for the ones you funded once.
11 repeat relationships — 11 still active in FY2018, 0 since wound down; 8 grantees were first funded in FY2018 (too recent to call). Read against FY2018, the last year this funder named its own grantees directly; its giving has since run through a sponsor, which reports no donor behind each grant.
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 FY2019, 95% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $26k 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
- TATHE ADMINISTRATORS OF THE TULANE EDUCATIONAL FUND3× · 2017–2019 · $170k · revenue +72%
- ARANDERSON RANCH ARTS CENTER3× · 2017–2019 · $73k · revenue +29%
- SFSAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART3× · 2017–2019 · $60k · revenue +37%
Funded once
THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INCgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $10k · revenue +192%
EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVEgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $10k · revenue +92%
HILLEL THE FOUNDATION FOR JEWISH CAMPUS LIFEgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $9k · revenue +40%
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 mission of the jewish museum is to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret art and jewish culture. see schedule o for more information.
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For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma and the most unlike its peers is San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
19 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. 19 of the 21 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 FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ASPEN ART MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ISRAEL EDUCATION FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE ADMINISTRATORS OF THE TULANE EDUCATIONAL FUND ↗
- Who funds JEWISH COMMUNITY FEDERATION OF THE GREATER EAST BAY ↗
- Who funds ANDERSON RANCH ARTS CENTER ↗
- Who funds JEWISH COMMUNITY FEDERATION OF SAN FRANCISCO THE PENINSULA MARIN & SONOMA ↗
- Who funds SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART ↗
- Who funds JAZZ AT ASPEN-SNOWMASS ↗
- Who funds HILLEL THE FOUNDATION FOR JEWISH CAMPUS LIFE ↗
- Who funds Jewish Partisan Education Foundation ↗
- Who funds WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY ↗
- Who funds THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds HILLEL THE FOUNDATION FOR JEWISH CAMPUS LIFE ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE ISRAEL MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds Urban Adamah ↗
- Who funds BIRTHRIGHT ISRAEL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 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: Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · Amazonsmile 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 Joseph and Sherry Felson Family 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 Joseph and Sherry Felson Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Joseph and Sherry Felson Family 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.