· Private foundation
Randy and Michele Mehrberg Schara 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 $10k9 grants · $21k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $73k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| LINCOLN PARK ZOO | $35,000 |
| CURE | $15,000 |
| NORTHWESTERN MEMORIAL FOUNDATION | $12,500 |
| HISTORY MAKERS | $10,000 |
| NATIONAL MILL DOG RESCUE | $5,000 |
| COLLEGE POSSIBLE | $5,000 |
| UNITED WAY OF METRO CHICAGO | $5,000 |
| MEMORIAL SLOAN KETTERING CANCER CENTER | $1,500 |
| CHALLENGED ATHLETES FOUNDATION | $1,000 |
| THE CYCLE EFFECT | $1,000 |
| THE LEGAL AID SOCIETY OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA | $1,000 |
| JEWISH UNITED FUND | $500 |
| CHICAGO BAR FOUNDATION | $500 |
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 (FY21–25, $8k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, 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 +28% since the first grant, against +21% for the ones you funded once.
16 repeat relationships — 8 still active in FY2025, 8 since wound down; 5 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, 77% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $21k 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
- MPMILLENNIUM PARK FOUNDATION4× · 2018–2024 · $275k · revenue +340%
- TLTHE LATIN SCHOOL OF CHICAGO6× · 2017–2022 · $256k · revenue +34%
- LPLINCOLN PARK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY8× · 2018–2025 · $180k · revenue +16%
Funded once
PRINCETON DAY SCHOOL INCgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $30k · revenue +32%- UOUNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA CIRIGLIANO CLINICAL CARE ENDOWMENT FUNDone grant, 2022 · $25k
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2020 · $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 chicago public education fund (the fund) is a nonprofit organization that improves public schools in chicago by investing in the talented educators who lead them.
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
Uchicago medicine network, inc. supports and encourages health and human service by providing support, directly or indirectly to ingalls memorial hospital, the university of chicago medical center, and other related tax-exempt…
The common application is a not-for-profit membership organization of over 1,100 colleges and universities across the globe committed to access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process. every year, over 1.5 million students…
To inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy
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 primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
See schedule onorc at the university of chicago conducts research and data science on critical societal issues to guide decision-making and the development of programs and public policy. our experts identify relationships and trends, and…
Chicago scholars is transforming the leadership landscape of our city by resolving the fundamental barriers to success for academically driven, first generation college students from under-resourced communities.
Central indiana corporate partnership (cicp) is an alliance of indiana's business and research university leaders coming together to foster long-term prosperity for the region. cicp's mission is to transform the economy of indiana in order…
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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is United Way of Metropolitan Chicago Inc and the most unlike its peers is Be a Gift Foundation. 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 46 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.
32 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. 32 of the 55 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 MILLENNIUM PARK FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE LATIN SCHOOL OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds LINCOLN PARK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds THE HISTORYMAKERS ↗
- Who funds University of Michigan ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO INC ↗
- Who funds Jupiter Medical Center Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds PRINCETON DAY SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds COLLEGE POSSIBLE INC ↗
- Who funds SOS OUTREACH ↗
- Who funds COORDINATED ADVICE & REFERRAL PROGRAM FOR LEGAL SERVICES ↗
- Who funds WALKING MOUNTAINS ↗
- Who funds JEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds EAGLE VALLEY LAND TRUST ↗
- Who funds CHALLENGED ATHLETES INC ↗
- Who funds MEMORIAL SLOAN-KETTERING CANCER CENTER ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL TENNIS HALL OF FAME INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds GARY COMER YOUTH CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds BREAKTHROUGH T1D ↗
- Who funds NOURISHING HOPE ↗
- Who funds BE A GIFT FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds LEGAL AID SOCIETY OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA ↗
- Who funds FAMILY FOCUS LEGACY ↗
- Who funds The Cycle Effect ↗
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 · The Sidley Austin Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · Baird Foundation Inc · Borgen Family Foundation · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · United Way of Metropolitan Chicago Inc · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · 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 Randy and Michele Mehrberg Schara 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.
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.