· Private foundation
Samuel J & Ethel Lefrak Charitable Trust
Its FY2024 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: 61% of SAMUEL J & ETHEL LEFRAK CHARITABLE TRUST’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.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k59 grants · $144k
- $10k–50k10 grants · $156k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $50k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MERCY FOR ANIMALS (MATCHING TUESDAY CONTRIBUTION) | $50,000 |
| MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN (DONATION) | $25,000 |
| AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ACHIEVEMENT (CONTRIBUTION) | $25,000 |
| SOLOMON R GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION (INTERNATIONAL DIRECTOR'S FUND) | $20,000 |
| THE BAKER INSTITUTE FOR CHILDREN WITH HEARING LOSS (DONATION IN HONOR OF JE | $20,000 |
| ROWDY GIRL SANCTUARY INC (FARM EQUIPMENT MATCH) | $12,500 |
| WILDLIFE SOS (2024 GRANT REQUEST CONTRIBUTION) | $12,000 |
| THE ALLEN STEVENSON SCHOOL (DONATION ON BEHALF OF ALLISON BANDIER KOFFMAN A | $11,500 |
| FOOD BANK FOR NEW YORK CITY (DONATION) | $10,000 |
| POINTS OF LIGHT FOUNDATION (IN HONOR OF THE 2024 GW BUSH POINTS OF LIGHT AW | $10,000 |
| RACE TO ERASE MS (2024 GALA DONATION) | $10,000 |
| ROWDY GIRL SANCTUARY INC (DONATION TO MATCH CAMPAIGN) | $9,000 |
| THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (DONATION) | $7,000 |
| GABRIELLES ANGEL FOUNDATION FOR CANCER RESEARCH (DONATION) | $5,450 |
| INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE & ART (DONATION) | $5,000 |
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 (FY20–24, $129k) land where the poverty rate runs at 17%, 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 +18% since the first grant, against +11% for the ones you funded once.
64 repeat relationships — 21 still active in FY2024, 43 since wound down; 47 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, 33% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $235k 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
CHARITY GLOBAL INC2× · 2020–2021 · $120k · revenue +2%- WSWILDLIFE SOS2× · 2020–2021 · $93k · revenue +83%
- MFMERCY FOR ANIMALS INC2× · 2020–2021 · $80k · revenue +86%
Funded once
- MFMERCY FOR ANIMALS (MATCHING CONTRIBUTION)one grant, 2022 · $67k
- MFMERCY FOR ANIMALS (MATCH CONTRIBUTION)one grant, 2023 · $53k
- HKHARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL (CPL LEADERSHIP COUNCIL FUND)one grant, 2022 · $50k
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.
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.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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…
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 institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
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.
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…
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 museum's mission statement is: "to discover, interpret, and disseminate - through scientific research and education - knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe."
The new york botanical garden is a museum of plants and a scientific research center devoted to the study of plants and their uses. it is the garden's mission to improve public understanding of the natural world, horticulture, and the…
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Farm Sanctuary Inc and the most unlike its peers is The Tom Gold Dance Foundation 51 West 81ST Street. 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 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% lost their exemption, against 13% 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.
99 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. 99 of the 299 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 CHARITY GLOBAL INC ↗
- Who funds WILDLIFE SOS ↗
- Who funds MERCY FOR ANIMALS INC ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds THE AMERICAN HOSPITAL OF PARIS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Rowdy Girl Sanctuary Inc ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN ↗
- Who funds LIFE CAMPS INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds BEAUTIFUL SELF INC ↗
- Who funds RUTGERS UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE KING'S TRUST USA INC ↗
- Who funds GREENWICH HOSPITAL ↗
- Who funds THE PARRISH ART MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds THE INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE AND ART INC ↗
- Who funds BARNARD COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds RAMAPO-BERGEN ANIMAL REFUGE INC ↗
- Who funds Young Leadership Addiction Awareness 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 Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · The New York Community Trust · Jewish Communal Fund · Select Equity Group Foundation · Dalia and Larry Leeds Family Foundation · Pledgeling Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · The Bessemer Giving Fund · California Community Foundation · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · The Loreen Arbus Foundation · Paulson Family 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 Samuel J & Ethel Lefrak Charitable Trust 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.
- Christopher Reeve Foundation — 49% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Best Buddies International Inc — 4% of income from government
- The Palm Beach Symphony Society Inc — 0% of income from government
- Greenwich Hospital — 0% of income from government
- Rutgers University Foundation — 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to Samuel J & Ethel Lefrak Charitable Trust?
Find your warmest path to Samuel J & Ethel Lefrak Charitable Trust through trustees and officers whose names appear on both boards. Search for your organization and Plinth traces the shortest route it can evidence.
Each link is a name appearing on two organizations’ public IRS 990 filings, matched on that name and, where the filings support it, on location. A same-state match has geographic support, which is a second matching feature rather than confirmation that the two are one person; a cross-state one is the likeliest to be two people who share a name. Every hop shows its tier, low-confidence and distant paths are held back rather than guessed, and it is worth confirming the person before you use the introduction.