· Private foundation
Lff 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 FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k19 grants · $13k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $100k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MEDICAL COLLEGE OF WISCONSIN | $100,000 |
| CIRCLE OF FRIENDS | $2,500 |
| SETTLEMENT MUSIC SCHOOL | $2,000 |
| HOOVER INSTITUTION | $1,000 |
| REASON FOUNDATION | $1,000 |
| ST JOHN NEUMANN CATHOLIC HIGH SCH | $1,000 |
| MILWAUKEE RESCUE MISSION | $1,000 |
| MERCATUS CENTER | $700 |
| INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE | $500 |
| NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE | $500 |
| SALVATION ARMY | $500 |
| CHARLES E KUBLY FOUNDATION | $500 |
| JOHN MICHAEL KOHLER ARTS | $300 |
| FRIENDS OF GREENWOOD CEMETARY | $272 |
| DANIEL BUNN TAX FOUNDATION | $200 |
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 (FY17–18, $2k) land where the poverty rate runs at 17%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 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.
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 +50% since the first grant, against -6% for the ones you funded once.
38 repeat relationships — 13 still active in FY2025, 25 since wound down; 6 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, 7% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $104k 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
- IFINSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE9× · 2017–2025 · $9k · revenue +57%
- NRNATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE9× · 2017–2025 · $6k · revenue +61%
- CICATO INSTITUTE8× · 2017–2024 · $5k · revenue +70%
Funded once
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2018 · $10k
- SJST JOHN THE EVANGELIST CHURCHone grant, 2024 · $5k
- NCNAPLES CIRCLE OF FRIENDSone grant, 2023 · $2k
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.
Wilson college empowers students to be confident and critical thinkers, creative visionaries, effective communicators, honorable leaders, and agents of justice.
The american enterprise institute is a community of scholars and supporters committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise. aei pursues these ideals through independent thinking and the…
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.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
The open markets institute works to help people relearn how to use competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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.
The university's goal in the coming decade is to advance learning through the integration of teaching, research and service to others. the core of this goal is to prepare graduates to engage with the world and lead lives of meaning. to do…
The peterson institute for international economics (piie) is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to strengthening prosperity and human welfare in the global economy through expert analysis and practical…
See detailed description of organization's primary mission provided on schedule o
See schedule o.founded in 1866, carleton college is a private, coeducational liberal arts college of 2,007 students located in the historic river town of northfield, minnesota. nationally recognized as the nation's top college for…
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is National Review Institute and the most unlike its peers is Teens Grow Greens Inc. 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 41 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 17% 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 8% 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.
26 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. 26 of the 74 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 MEDICAL COLLEGE OF WISCONSIN INC ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds CATO INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE REASON FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE CHARLES E KUBLY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds TAX FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SETTLEMENT MUSIC SCHOOL OF PHILADELPHIA ↗
- Who funds The League Club Inc ↗
- Who funds UNITED COMMUNITY CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds RADIO MILWAUKEE INC ↗
- Who funds Mercatus Center Inc ↗
- Who funds VERTEX PARTNERSHIP ACADEMIES INC ↗
- Who funds COLLIER COMMUNITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC ↗
- Who funds THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds TEENS GROW GREENS 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: Rite-Hite Foundation Inc · The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Inc · Bradley Impact Fund Inc · United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County Inc · Herbert H Kohl Charities Inc · Greater Milwaukee Foundation Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · Baird Foundation Inc · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · American Endowment Foundation · Natl Christian Charitable Fdn 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 Lff 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 Lff Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Lff 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.