· Private foundation
Minow Family Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- $10k–50k2 grants · $40k
- $50k–250k8 grants · $670k
- $250k+1 grant · $250k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| OSHER LIFELONG LEARNING INSTITUTE | $250,000 |
| NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY | $150,000 |
| WGBH EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION | $120,000 |
| NNMJBM PLANT FOR OUR CHILDREN | $75,000 |
| COMBINED JEWISH PHILANTHROPIES OF GREATER BOSTON | $75,000 |
| CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM | $75,000 |
| JEWISH COMMUNAL FUND | $75,000 |
| SORENSEN CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND JUSTICE | $50,000 |
| RAVINIA FESTIVAL | $50,000 |
| KANOON MAGNET SCHOOL | $20,000 |
| BEYOND LEGAL AID | $20,000 |
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 (FY24–24, $20k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, 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 +47% since the first grant, against -2% for the ones you funded once.
36 repeat relationships — 3 still active in FY2024, 33 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, 59% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $335k 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
- WTWINDOW TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS INC4× · 2020–2023 · $650k · revenue +16%
Northwestern University4× · 2020–2024 · $225k · revenue +33%
The Rand Corporation4× · 2020–2023 · $103k · revenue +21%
Funded once
- CSCHICAGO SINAI CONGREGATIONone grant, 2023 · $100k
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2023 · $100k
- WEWGBH EDUCATION FUNDone grant, 2022 · $40k
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 university of chicago has been to sustain at the highest level of excellence, the communication of knowledge, the creation of knowledge and the fostering of a dynamic community of scholars and students.
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
We are chicago's jesuit, catholic university - a diverse community seeking god in all things and working to expand knowledge in the service of humanity through learning, justice, and faith.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
Chartered by a unanimous act of congress, the museum is america's national institution for the documentation, study, interpretation, and education of holocaust history and serves as our country's memorial to the victims of the holocaust.…
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.
Saint xavier university, a catholic institution inspired by the heritage of the sisters of mercy, educates persons to search for truth, think critically, communicate effectively and serve wisely and compassionately in support of human…
The adler planetarium ('adler') is a not-for-profit cultural institution whose mission is to connect people to the universe and each other under the sky we all share. it aspires to be the world's premier center for engaging in astronomy…
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Biu produces students who excel in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business & the arts.
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.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Lincoln Presidential Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Adlai Stevenson Center On Democracy. 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 54 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) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 18% 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.
36 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. 36 of the 65 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 WINDOW TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds WGBH Educational Foundation ↗
- Who funds The Rand Corporation ↗
- Who funds University of Notre Dame du Lac ↗
- Who funds Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc ↗
- Who funds JEWISH COMMUNAL FUND ↗
- Who funds SHRIVER CENTER ON POVERTY LAW ↗
- Who funds RAVINIA FESTIVAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds JEWISH FEDERATION OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds JEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds MILLENNIUM PARK FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BEYOND LEGAL AID ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO COUNCIL ON GLOBAL AFFAIRS ↗
- Who funds DEPAUL UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY ↗
- Who funds LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds WEITZMAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY ↗
- Who funds Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago ↗
- Who funds GOLDEN APPLE FOUNDATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING ↗
- Who funds LEGAL AID CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds Big Shoulders Fund ↗
- Who funds MIKVA CHALLENGE GRANT FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds COMMON SENSE MEDIA ↗
- Who funds TOP BOX FOODS ↗
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 Sidley Austin Foundation · The Chicago Community Trust · Lloyd a Fry Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Hobsonlucas Family Foundation · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · California Community Foundation · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · National Philanthropic Trust · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Jpmorgan Chase 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 Minow 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.
- Hias Inc — 88% of income from government
- Wgbh Educational Foundation — 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.