· Private foundation
Lewis-Sebring Family Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k37 grants · $87k
- $10k–50k14 grants · $221k
- $50k–250k13 grants · $1.4M
- $250k+2 grants · $1.4M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ETHS FOUNDATION | $1,121,991 |
| Individual grant recipient | $250,000 |
| A BETTER CHICAGO | $200,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO | $176,000 |
| FIRST REPAIR | $175,000 |
| MCGAW YMCA | $150,500 |
| BRAVEN | $150,000 |
| YOU | $100,000 |
| TEACH FOR AMERICA | $100,000 |
| AMERICAN RED CROSS | $75,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $75,000 |
| FORA | $50,500 |
| NORTHLIGHT THEATER | $50,000 |
| EVANSTON SCHOLARS | $50,000 |
| ILLINOIS COALITION FOR IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE RIGHTS | $50,000 |
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 (FY17–25, $952k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 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 39% of Lewis-Sebring 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, 84% of the giving stays in IL; 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 +30% since the first grant, against +13% for the ones you funded once.
67 repeat relationships — 49 still active in FY2025, 18 since wound down; 16 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, 83% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $521k 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
University of Chicago4× · 2017–2025 · $2.7M · revenue +56%- ETEVANSTON TOWNSHIP HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT 202 ED FOUNDATION5× · 2020–2025 · $1.8M · revenue +671%
- ACAMHERST COLLEGE TRUSTEES6× · 2017–2025 · $1.7M · revenue +141%
Funded once
- CPCHICAGO PUBLIC EDUCATION FUNDone grant, 2018 · $320k · revenue -68%
- TATHE AUXTHE GROWING SEASONone grant, 2023 · $50k
- PCPeace Corps Foundationone grant, 2024 · $50k · revenue -56%
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 team at kipp chicago schools is guided by a simple, yet powerful mission: to create a network of excellent schools in chicago that teach our students the character and academic skills necessary to succeed in college and beyond, and to…
The chicago psychoanalytic institute transforms the lives of individuals, families and communities, using psychoanalytic knowledge to help them grow and thrive.
Illinois college is a co-educational institution of higher education learning providing a four-year educational program leading to the baccalaureate degree. illinois college is a community committed to the highest standards of scholarship…
Central indiana corporate partnership (cicp) is an alliance of indiana's business and research university leaders coming together to foster long-term prosperity for the region. cicp's mission is to transform the economy of indiana in order…
The University of New Haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts and professional education. Our mission is to prepare our students to lead purposeful and fulfilling lives in a…
To Prepare Students for Success in Four-Year Colleges.
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 School educates the next generation of change-makers in innovative theory and culturally competent practice to strengthen the integrated health of individuals, organizations, and communities.
The common application is a not-for-profit membership organization of over 1,100 colleges and universities across the globe committed to access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process. every year, over 1.5 million students…
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 Connections for the Homeless Inc and the most unlike its peers is Chicago Cred 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 32 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) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 5% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 15% 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.
93 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. 93 of the 147 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 University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds EVANSTON TOWNSHIP HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT 202 ED FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds AMHERST COLLEGE TRUSTEES ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds Young Mens Christian Assoc McGaw Inc ↗
- Who funds FIRSTREPAIR ↗
- Who funds ONEGOAL ↗
- Who funds Teach for America Inc ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO PUBLIC EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds EVANSTON SCHOLARS ↗
- Who funds EVANSTONSKOKIE DISTRICT 65 EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION (FOUNDATION 65) ↗
- Who funds Kenneth C Griffin Museum of Science and Industry ↗
- Who funds A Better Chicago ↗
- Who funds BOOKS AND BREAKFAST ↗
- Who funds BRAVEN INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHLIGHT THEATRE INC ↗
- Who funds Evanston Community Foundation ↗
- Who funds Chicago Symphony Orchestra ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE ROBERT CROWN CENTER ↗
- Who funds UBUNTU GLOBAL CONNECTIONS ↗
- Who funds BRIGHT STAR COMMUNITY OUTREACH CORP ↗
- Who funds Peace Corps Foundation ↗
- Who funds EVANSTON REBUILDING WAREHOUSE ↗
- Who funds ILLINOIS COALITION FOR IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE RIGHTS ↗
- Who funds FACING HISTORY & OURSELVES INC ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO COUNCIL ON GLOBAL AFFAIRS ↗
- Who funds GIRLS PLAY SPORTS INC NFP ↗
- Who funds GOLDEN APPLE FOUNDATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING ↗
- Who funds CONNECTIONS FOR THE HOMELESS INC ↗
- Who funds SAMUEL DEWITT PROCTOR CONFERENCE 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: Evanston Community Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · The Chicago Community Trust · Arie and Ida Crown Memorial · Finnegan Family Foundation · Northwestern University · Robert R McCormick Foundation · Lloyd a Fry Foundation · Circle of Service Foundation · Elizabeth Beidler Tisdahl Foundation · The Kellcie Fund · United Way of Metropolitan Chicago 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 Lewis-Sebring 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.
- Save the Children Federation Inc — 30% of income from government
- City Year Inc — 11% of income from government
- Restless Books Inc — 5% of income from government
- University of Hartford — 1% of income from government
- New England Public Media Inc — 0% of income from government
- Amherst College Trustees — 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.
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How do I get to Lewis-Sebring Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Lewis-Sebring 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.