· Private foundation
Rocking Chair 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 placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2019–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k49 grants · $60k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $10k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| LYMPHOMA RESEARCH FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| NEW YORK STUDIO SCHOOL | $7,600 |
| NATIONAL NETWORK OF ABORTION FUNDS | $5,500 |
| MEMORIAL SLOAN-KETTERING CANCER CENTER | $5,000 |
| BRONX HIGH SCHOOL OF SCIENCE | $3,000 |
| PREGNANCY JUSTICE | $2,500 |
| HOSPITAL FOR SPECIAL SURGERY FOUNDATION | $2,500 |
| LEADING FOR CHILDREN | $2,000 |
| COALITION FOR SOUTHERN EQUALITY | $2,000 |
| WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY | $2,000 |
| NATIONAL DANCE INSTITUTE | $2,000 |
| BANK STREET COLLEGE | $1,500 |
| OUR JOURNEY | $1,500 |
| NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW | $1,500 |
| NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE | $1,500 |
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 (FY19–25, $50k) land where the poverty rate runs at 16%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 86% 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 +15% since the first grant, against +13% for the ones you funded once.
62 repeat relationships — 44 still active in FY2025, 18 since wound down; 6 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, 89% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $8k 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
- TLTHE LEGAL AID SOCIETY3× · 2022–2024 · $150k · revenue +25%
- NYNEW YORK STUDIO SCHOOL6× · 2019–2025 · $66k · revenue +40%
- NDNATIONAL DANCE INSTITUTE6× · 2019–2025 · $12k · revenue +28%
Funded once
BANK STREET COLLEGE OF EDUCATIONgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $35k · revenue +33%- CCCHARLOTTE COUNTRY DAY SCHOOLgraduatedone grant, 2019 · $27k · revenue +29%
- HCHARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE INCone grant, 2019 · $22k · revenue -31%
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.
New york school of interior design provides the most innovative, immersive, and transformative interior design education in the world, demonstrating the impact of professionally designed interiors on the health, happiness, and well-being…
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
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…
School in the square ("s2") engages, educates and empowers adolescents to respond mindfully and creatively to life's opportunities and challenges. s2 is a place where students, families and educators are seen, heard, and inspired and where…
Fordham university, the jesuit university of new york, is committed to the discovery of wisdom and the transmission of learning, through research and through education of the highest quality. for more information, see schedule o.
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…
As a diverse community of learners, we cultivate integrity, curiosity, connection and resilience.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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.
The manhattan institute is a community of scholars, journalists, activists, and civic leaders dedicated to advancing opportunity, individual liberty, and the rule of law in america and its great cities.
Nysci's mission is to nurture generations of passionate learners, critical thinkers, and active citizens through design make play - an approach to learning and engagement that is deeply rooted in research on stem learning and guides the…
At sarah lawrence college, our mission is to graduate citizens of the world who are diverse in every definition of the word, who take intellectual and creative risks, and who are able to focus exceptional intellectual discipline (continued…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is New Visions for Public Schools Inc and the most unlike its peers is American Museum of Natural History. 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 37 years old; the field is 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 19% startups (under 5 years old) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 10% 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.
64 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. 64 of the 94 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 LEGAL AID SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds JACKIE ROBINSON FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK STUDIO SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds BANK STREET COLLEGE OF EDUCATION ↗
- Who funds LYMPHOMA RESEARCH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CHARLOTTE COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds HARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE INC ↗
- Who funds Southern Center for Human Rights ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL NETWORK OF ABORTION FUNDS INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL DANCE INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds THE OSBORNE ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds LEADING FOR CHILDREN ↗
- Who funds CLIMB DBA CLIMB WYOMING ↗
- Who funds SHADY HILL SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds CITYMEALS-ON-WHEELS ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK FOUNDLING ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR DEATH PENALTY LITIGATION ↗
- Who funds CASTING FOR RECOVERY ↗
- Who funds JEWISH BOARD OF FAMILY & CHILDREN'S SERVICES INC ↗
- Who funds THE NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE INC ↗
- Who funds FUND FOR THE AGED INC ↗
- Who funds BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB OF DUBOIS ↗
- Who funds CONCORD ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds ALVIN AILEY DANCE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE NEW YORK TIMES COMMUNITIES FUND ↗
- Who funds NORTHERN WESTCHESTER HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds NEW VISIONS FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS 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: The New York Community Trust · The Chicago Community Trust · Jewish Communal Fund · Fidelity Foundation · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · The Lazard Charitable Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · Boston 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 Rocking Chair 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.
- Leading for Children — 1% of income from government
- Wesleyan University — 1% of income from government
- Beacon Academy Inc — 1% of income from government
- Amherst College Trustees — 0% of income from government
- Milton Academy — 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.