· Private foundation
Richard & Deborah Polonsky Charitable Foundation
Its FY2020 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
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 47% of RICHARD & DEBORAH POLONSKY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| TEMPLE BAT YAHM | $7,330 |
| PHILHARMONICA SOCIETY OF ORANGE COUNTY | $2,000 |
| CA LITERARY & PROLOGUE SOCIETY | $505 |
| US HOLOCAUST MUSEUM | $330 |
| ALZHEIMER'S ASSOCIATION | $300 |
| AARP FOUNDATION | $249 |
| Individual grant recipient | $200 |
| YIDDISH BOOK CENTER | $154 |
| BOSTON UNIVERSITY | $150 |
| DISABLED VETERANS NATIONAL FOUNDATION | $150 |
| PACIFIC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $100 |
| WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS | $100 |
| HOAG HOSPITAL FOUNDATION | $100 |
| SEGERSTROM CENTER FOR THE ARTS | $100 |
| SHRINERS HOSPITAL | $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 (FY17–19, $3k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 0% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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.
22 repeat relationships — 13 still active in FY2020, 9 since wound down; 6 grantees were first funded in FY2020 (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 FY2020, 96% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $525 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
- PSPHILHARMONIC SOCIETY OF ORANGE COUNTY4× · 2017–2020 · $11k · revenue +16%
- TUThe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum3× · 2018–2020 · $790 · revenue +16%
- NYNATIONAL YIDDISH BOOK CENTER INC4× · 2017–2020 · $662 · revenue +99%
Funded once
- TWTHE WILLOWS COMMUNITY SCHOOLone grant, 2017 · $350 · revenue +24%
- FOFriends of the Academy of Music Incgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $200 · revenue +67%
PANCREATIC CANCER ACTION NETWORK INCone grant, 2018 · $150 · revenue -19%
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.
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.
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 central mission of the university of southern california is the development of human beings and society as a whole through the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit. the principal means by which our mission is…
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.
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
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…
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
The Academy's mission is to enhance member career fulfillment and promote brain health for all.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is University of California Irvine Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Friends of the Academy of Music 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 46 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
27 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. 27 of the 49 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 PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY OF ORANGE COUNTY ↗
- Who funds JEWISH HOME FOR THE AGING OF ORANGE COUNTY ↗
- Who funds The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ↗
- Who funds AARP FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL YIDDISH BOOK CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds NEWPORT BEACH PUBLIC LIBRARY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE WILLOWS COMMUNITY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART LOS ANGELES ↗
- Who funds HOAG HOSPITAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds JEWISH FEDERATION OF ORANGE COUNTY ↗
- Who funds NEWPORT BEACH POLICE ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Friends of the Academy of Music Inc ↗
- Who funds BIRTHRIGHT ISRAEL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds DISABLED VETERANS NATIONAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PANCREATIC CANCER ACTION NETWORK INC ↗
- Who funds CRYSTAL COVE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds Segerstrom Center for the Arts ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds MAZON A Jewish Response to Hunger ↗
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: Argyros Family Foundation · Jewish Community Foundation of Orange County · Samueli Foundation · Orange County Community Foundation · The Bassman Family Charitable Trust · California Community Foundation · American Endowment Foundation · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · National Philanthropic Trust · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · American Online Giving Foundation Inc
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 Richard & Deborah Polonsky Charitable 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.
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- National Yiddish Book Center Inc — 2% 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.