· Private foundation
Linda & Jeffrey Wolfson Family Foundation
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.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| NATIONAL MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SOCIETY | $5,200 |
| DIGESTIVE HEALTH FOUNDATION | $5,000 |
| KESHET | $600 |
| THE CHICAGO LIGHTHOUSE | $250 |
| LIBRARIES WITHOUT BORDERS | $215 |
| NORTHERN SUBURBAN SPECIAL RECREATION ASSOCIATION | $100 |
| JEWISH FAMILY SERVICE OF THE DESERT | $100 |
| NATIONAL ALLIANCE ON MENTAL ILLNESS | $100 |
| CONGREGATION B'NAI SHALOM | $100 |
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, $2k) 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.
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 +41% since the first grant, against +31% for the ones you funded once.
11 repeat relationships — 3 still active in FY2024, 8 since wound down; 6 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; $865 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
Northwestern University2× · 2017–2021 · $11k · revenue +41%
NATIONAL MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SOCIETY3× · 2020–2024 · $9k · revenue +4%- KKESHET4× · 2020–2024 · $3k · revenue +53%
Funded once
- ARANN & ROBERT H LURIE CHILDREN'S HOSPITALone grant, 2017 · $126k
- NMNORTHWESTERN MEDICINE DIGESTIVE HEALTH CENTERone grant, 2023 · $50k
- CFCCSA FOUNDATIONone grant, 2017 · $25k · revenue +18%
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 dfci is to provide expert, compassionate, and equitable care to children, adults, and their families, while advancing the understanding, diagnosis, treatment, cure, and prevention of cancer and related diseases. we train new…
We champion the health needs of children and families. we are committed to improving children's health by providing the highest-quality, family centered care, advanced through research and education.
Our mission at the university of chicago medicine is to provide superior health care through rigorous research, innovative education, and comprehensive care and healing. in partnership with our colleagues, we pursue life-changing…
Sanford burnham prebys medical discovery institute's mission is to advance the biomedical sciences by cultivating the next generation of scientific leaders, providing meaningful opportunities for researchers of all backgrounds to learn,…
Susan g. komen 's mission is to save lives by meeting the most critical needs in our communities & investing in breakthrough research to prevent & cure breast cancer.
Leadership in the prevention, treatment, and cure of cancer through excellence, vision and cost effectiveness in patient care, outreach programs, research, and education.
Dedicated to improving the quality of life of myeloma patients while working toward prevention and a cure.
As a leading academic healthcare organization, our mission is to elevate the health status of the communities we serve.(see schedule o for continuation)(continued)-we deliver exceptional healthcare enhanced by research and education-we…
For more than 125 years, the mission of the johns hopkins hospital has been to lead the world in the diagnosis and treatment of disease and to train tomorrow's great physicians, nurses and scientists. above all, we aim to provide the…
Our mission is to expand scientific knowledge and improve public health by designing and conducting world-class clinical trials and epidemiologic research.
Susan g. komen has an unmatched, comprehensive 360-degree approach to fighting breast cancer across all fronts and supporting millions of people in the u.s. and in countries worldwide. we advocate for policies to protect patients, drive…
Nyu is a private university with approximately 60,000 matriculating students in 20 schools and institutes. nyu's primary missions are education, research and scholarship, and patient care.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Chicago Lighthouse for People Who Are Blind Or Visually Impaired and the most unlike its peers is Helping Hands Network 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 42 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% 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.
37 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. 37 of the 64 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 DIGESTIVE HEALTH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CCSA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds JEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds KESHET ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO DEBATE COMMISSION ↗
- Who funds The Anti-Cruelty Society ↗
- Who funds CROHN'S & COLITIS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds LYNN SAGE BREAST CANCER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MISERICORDIA HOME ↗
- Who funds ADVOCATE CHARITABLE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BIG DOG RANCH RESCUE INC ↗
- Who funds SUTTER BAY MEDICAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PAWS INC ↗
- Who funds HELPING HANDS NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds MISERICORDIA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CYSTIC FIBROSIS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds JEWISH NATIONAL FUND (KEREN KAYEMETH LEISRAEL) INC ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO LIGHTHOUSE FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE BLIND OR VISUALLY IMPAIRED ↗
- Who funds PLAY FOR PINK INC ↗
- Who funds LIBRARIES WITHOUT BORDERS ↗
- Who funds American Heart Association 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: The Chicago Community Trust · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · National Philanthropic Trust · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · American Endowment Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · American Online Giving Foundation 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 Linda & Jeffrey Wolfson 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.
- Big Dog Ranch Rescue 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.
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How do I get to Linda & Jeffrey Wolfson Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Linda & Jeffrey Wolfson 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.