· Private foundation
Michael and Deborah Ratner Salzberg 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 clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k31 grants · $93k
- $10k–50k8 grants · $173k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $60k
- $250k+1 grant · $250k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| JEWISH FEDERATION OF GREATER WASHINGTON | $250,000 |
| NATIONAL ARCHIVES FOUNDATION | $60,000 |
| NATL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ASSOC OF WASHINGTON DC | $47,500 |
| EDLAVITCH JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF WASHINGTON DC | $40,000 |
| FEDERAL CITY COUNCIL | $25,000 |
| INDEPENDENCE INITIATIVE INC | $20,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA | $10,000 |
| SIBLEY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| MEDSTAR HEALTH | $10,000 |
| BROOKLYN COMMUNITY HOUSING & SERVICES | $10,000 |
| OHR KODESH CONGREGATION | $9,000 |
| THE WASHINGTON BALLET | $6,900 |
| CITY KIDS WILDERNESS PROJECT | $5,000 |
| FJC - FOUNDATION OF DONOR ADVISED FUNDS | $5,000 |
| PARK SYNAGOGUE | $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.
Your human-services grants (FY25–25, $10k) land where the poverty rate runs at 20%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 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 37% of Michael and Deborah Ratner Salzberg 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.
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 +16% since the first grant, against +10% for the ones you funded once.
38 repeat relationships — 25 still active in FY2025, 13 since wound down; 11 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, 78% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $69k 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
- EJEDLAVITCH JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF WASHINGTON DC INC6× · 2020–2025 · $283k · revenue +107%
- NANATIONAL ARCHIVES FOUNDATION8× · 2017–2025 · $213k · revenue +20%
- JFJOHN F KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS7× · 2017–2024 · $188k · revenue +28%
Funded once
- JCJCF - CAMPAIGN FOR JEWISH NEEDSone grant, 2020 · $50k
- JAJUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT OF GREATER WASHINGTONone grant, 2021 · $30k · revenue +10%
- UOUJAF OF GREATER WASHINGTONone grant, 2021 · $15k
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.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
Meridian international center is a nonpartisan diplomacy institution founded in 1960 to advance american leadership. headquartered on a historic campus in washington dc, our mission is to empower leaders to advance the next era of…
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 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 graduate people of uncommon integrity, competence, and maturity, who are effective lifelong learners and responsible citizens, and who are prepared to contribute substantially to the world in which they live.
Biu produces students who excel in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business & the arts.
The organization's mission is to engage in non partisan analysis of u.s. foreign policy in the middle east, with special emphasis on the middle east peace process, and to present policymakers in the united states, in the region and in the…
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
To inform and enrich the intellectual lives of 20,000 alumni of harvard university in the washington, dc area and to assist harvard university with respect to applicants and undergraduates from the dc area.
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 mission of gw hillel is to provide an open, warm, and pluralistic environment in which students can shape their college experience by connecting socially, culturally, and spiritually to their judaism. hillel aims to foster students'…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Greater Washington Community Foundation and the most unlike its peers is The Tikvah Fund. 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 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 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
70 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. 70 of the 90 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 FEDERATION OF GREATER WASHINGTON INC ↗
- Who funds EDLAVITCH JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF WASHINGTON DC INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL ARCHIVES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds JOHN F KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS ↗
- Who funds JEWISH FEDERATION OF CLEVELAND ↗
- Who funds FEDERAL CITY COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL SYMPHONY ORCH ASSN OF WASHINGTON DC ↗
- Who funds KENYON COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ↗
- Who funds Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum ↗
- Who funds Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum ↗
- Who funds The George Washington University ↗
- Who funds MARTHA'S TABLE INC ↗
- Who funds MEDSTAR HEALTH INC ↗
- Who funds JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT OF GREATER WASHINGTON ↗
- Who funds THE WASHINGTON BALLET ↗
- Who funds INDEPENDENCE INITIATIVE INC ↗
- Who funds JEWBELONG INC ↗
- Who funds City Kids to Wilderness Project Inc ↗
- Who funds THE WASHINGTON HOUSING CONSERVANCY INC ↗
- Who funds The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage ↗
- Who funds THE JAMES BEARD FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE ULI FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SIBLEY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds FJC ↗
- Who funds Mary's Center for Maternal and Child Care Inc ↗
- Who funds THE MIRIAM WEINER ROUTES TO ROOTS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds AT THE WELL PROJECT 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: Greater Washington Community Foundation · The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation · The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington Inc · Galena-Yorktown Foundation · Clark Charitable Foundation Inc Dba a James & Alice B Clark Foundation · Clark-Winchcole Foundation · The Julius and Dorothy Lazarus Foundation Inc · The Nussdorf Family Foundation Inc · James and Susan Ratner Family Foundation · S Kann Sons Foundation Inc · Duber Family Foundation · Leo M Bernstein Family 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 Michael and Deborah Ratner Salzberg 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.
- Medstar Health Inc — 23% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- All Faiths Food Bank Inc — 1% of income from government
- Yeshiva of Greater Washington Inc — 1% 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 Michael and Deborah Ratner Salzberg Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Michael and Deborah Ratner Salzberg 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.