· Community foundation
Oak Park-River Forest Community Foundation
Unite community members to mobilize resources to advance a racially just society and equitable outcomes for residents of oak park, river forest and surrounding communities.
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.
The 73 grants below total $2,624,168 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $4,335,727 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $1,711,559 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k21 grants · $145k
- $10k–50k44 grants · $820k
- $50k–250k6 grants · $637k
- $250k+2 grants · $1.0M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| LAWRENCE TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY | $535,000 |
| HEPH FOUNDATION | $487,332 |
| ANIMAL CARE LEAGUE | $169,717 |
| CHICAGO PUBLIC MEDIA INC | $125,000 |
| THRIVE COUNSELING CENTER | $107,480 |
| PARK DISTRICT OF OAK PARK | $101,112 |
| SEVEN GENERATIONS AHEAD | $81,014 |
| COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS FUND | $52,441 |
| GRACE LUTHERAN CHURCH AND SCHOOL | $42,250 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST FOUNDATION | $40,000 |
| THE FIREHOUSE DREAM INC | $34,750 |
| BEYOND HUNGER | $33,450 |
| HEPHZIBAH CHILDREN'S ASSOCIATION | $30,726 |
| CHICAGO COALITION TO END HOMELESSNESS | $30,000 |
| OAK PARK PUBLIC LIBRARY | $25,757 |
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, $883k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 94% 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 +35% since the first grant, against +21% for the ones you funded once.
100 repeat relationships — 56 still active in FY2025, 44 since wound down; 17 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, 91% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $233k 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
- THTHE HEPH FOUNDATION5× · 2021–2025 · $1.8M · revenue +7% · 77% of their budget
- CPCHICAGO PUBLIC MEDIA INC8× · 2017–2025 · $980k · revenue +38%
- SGSEVEN GENERATIONS AHEAD8× · 2017–2025 · $825k · revenue +25%
Funded once
- UBUlta Beauty Charitable Foundationone grant, 2017 · $865k · revenue +24%
- DUDEPAUL UNIVERSITYone grant, 2021 · $50k · revenue +11%
- FLFUTURE LEADERS OF CHICAGOone grant, 2019 · $34k
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.
A better chicago is changing how chicago fights poverty by investing in bold ideas that create opportunity for our youth.
Live Free Illinois is a statewide organization partnering with over 120 congregations and directly impacted individuals to build safer more equitable communities across Illinois. Operating at the intersection of criminal justice reform and…
The chicago psychoanalytic institute transforms the lives of individuals, families and communities, using psychoanalytic knowledge to help them grow and thrive.
Providing academic support to children experiencing homelessness in Chicago and providing resources and services to families experiencing homelessness in Chicago.
Connecting and amplifying the power of individuals to build a just, equitable, and inclusive city.
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.
To provide high-quality early learning and out-of-school time enrichment in under-resourced neighborhoods to holistically support children of all ages, their families, and their communities.
To Prepare Students for Success in Four-Year Colleges.
The chicago children's advocacy center unites public, private, and community partners to ensure the safety, health, and well-being of abused children.
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…
Thrive chicago's mission is to prepare chicago's youth for a vibrant future by aligning efforts and outcomes from cradle to career.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Health and Medicine Policy Research Group and the most unlike its peers is The Sapling Foundation. 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 34 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) — 6% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% lost their exemption, against 14% 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.
157 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2026.
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 2017–2026, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 157 of the 188 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 HEPH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds University of Notre Dame du Lac ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO PUBLIC MEDIA INC ↗
- Who funds Ulta Beauty Charitable Foundation ↗
- Who funds SEVEN GENERATIONS AHEAD ↗
- Who funds THE DUPAGE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ANIMAL CARE LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds THRIVE COUNSELING CENTER ↗
- Who funds LAWRENCE TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT TRUST ↗
- Who funds Kenneth C Griffin Museum of Science and Industry ↗
- Who funds HOUSING FORWARD ↗
- Who funds BEYOND HUNGER ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO COALITION TO END HOMELESSNESS ↗
- Who funds HEPHZIBAH CHILDREN'S ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds YEMBA INC ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO INC ↗
- Who funds TED FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Oak Park River Forest Infant Welfare S ↗
- Who funds THE CHILDREN'S CLINIC 'SERVING CHILDREN AND THEIR FAMILIES' ↗
- Who funds Growing Community Media NFP ↗
- Who funds OAK PARK REGIONAL HOUSING CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds Community Connections Fund ↗
- Who funds THE SAPLING FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds COLLABORATION FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S RESEARCH TRIANGLE ↗
- Who funds SARAH'S INN ↗
- Who funds SPECULATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds NEW MOMS INC ↗
- Who funds ALLIANCE TO END HOMELESSNESS IN SUBURBAN COOK COUNTY ↗
- Who funds HARMONY COMMUNITY CARES NFP ↗
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: Good Heart Work Smart Foundation · United Way of Metropolitan Chicago Inc · Healthy Communities Foundation · Westlake Health Foundation · The Chicago Community Trust · Robert R McCormick Foundation · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · George M Eisenberg Foundation for Charities · The Christopher Family Foundation · Helen V Brach Foundation · Chicago Foundation for Women
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 Oak Park-River Forest Community 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.
- Friends of the Children-Portland — 5% 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.