· Private foundation
Shames 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 placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k37 grants · $93k
- $10k–50k14 grants · $179k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $95k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| DAVIDSON COLLEGE ANNUAL FUND | $95,000 |
| FAMILY & CHILDRENS AGENCY INC | $25,000 |
| NORWALK ACTS | $25,000 |
| CARLETON COLLEGE | $15,000 |
| CAMPAIGN LEGAL CENTER INC | $12,500 |
| FOCUS FOR DEMOCRACY FOUNDATION | $11,000 |
| BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE | $10,000 |
| NUVANCE HEALTH MEDICAL PRACTICE CT INC | $10,000 |
| DOROT INC | $10,000 |
| A BETTER CHANCE OF WILTON INC | $10,000 |
| PALLATIVE CARE FOR UGANDA LLC | $10,000 |
| WEST SIDE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HUNGER | $10,000 |
| RENAISSANCE SCHOOL ANNUAL FUND | $10,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $10,000 |
| ANTI DEFAMATION LEAGUE | $10,000 |
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 (FY17–25, $181k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 29% 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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +35% since the first grant, against +23% for the ones you funded once.
48 repeat relationships — 32 still active in FY2025, 16 since wound down; 19 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, 84% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $59k 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
Davidson College8× · 2017–2025 · $261k · revenue +42%- NHNuvance Health Medical Practice CT Inc4× · 2022–2025 · $180k · revenue +20%
- NANORWALK ACTS INC6× · 2020–2025 · $175k · revenue +34%
Funded once
- SSSTEPPING STONES MUSEUM FOR CHILDREN INCgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $25k · revenue +69%
- WAWORKING AMERICA EDUCATION FUNDgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $10k · revenue +36%
- TDThe Danbury Hospitalone grant, 2019 · $10k · revenue +22%
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 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…
The children's hospital of philadelphia, the oldest hospital in the united states dedicated exclusively to pediatrics, strives to be the world leader in the advancement of health care for children by integrating excellent patient care,…
Provider of pediatric healthcare, education, research & community service
Improve the health of every person in our community through the efficient delivery of excellent, innovative and compassionate care.
Northeast college of health sciences (the college) is committed to academic excellence, leadership, and professional best practices in the health sciences.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
Wnet is a multi-media public service non-profit that delivers lifelong learning and meaningful experiences to our communities. our content inspires curiosity, encourages action and nurtures dreams.
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.
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 bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The mission of the george washington university (gw) is to educate individuals in liberal arts, languages, sciences, learned professions, and other courses and subjects of study, and to conduct scholarly research and publish the findings…
Operate a state-of-the-art, world-class genomic research center that creates and uses advanced genomics to understand the genetic basis of disease. for more information, see schedule o.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Norwalk Acts Inc and the most unlike its peers is Metropolitan Museum of Art. 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 32 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 — 0.0% 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.
67 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. 67 of the 98 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 Davidson College ↗
- Who funds Nuvance Health Medical Practice CT Inc ↗
- Who funds NORWALK ACTS INC ↗
- Who funds Norwalk Hospital Foundation ↗
- Who funds FAMILY & CHILDREN'S AGENCY INC ↗
- Who funds A BETTER CHANCE OF WILTON INC ↗
- Who funds WILTON LIBRARY ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE CAMPAIGN LEGAL CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds CARLETON COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds WEST SIDE CENTER FOR COMMUNITY LIFE ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF COASTAL FAIRFIELD COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds DOROT INC ↗
- Who funds WILLIAM J BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE INC ↗
- Who funds THE VOTER PARTICIPATION CENTER ↗
- Who funds PALLIATIVE CARE AND EDUCATION FOR RURAL ↗
- Who funds THE CHILD CENTER OF NY INC ↗
- Who funds CITY OF PROMISE INC ↗
- Who funds LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds STEPPING STONES MUSEUM FOR CHILDREN INC ↗
- Who funds COMMON CAUSE EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds WORKING AMERICA EDUCATION FUND ↗
- Who funds The Danbury Hospital ↗
- Who funds CHARLOTTESVILLE FREE CLINIC ↗
- Who funds SOUTHERN VISION ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds PEABODY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THE YOUNG MEN'S AND YOUNG WOMEN'S HEBREW ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART ↗
- Who funds BREAKTHROUGH T1D ↗
- Who funds ST ANNE'S-BELFIELD 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: Charlottesville Area Community Foundation · Alexander Family Foundation Inc · S&P Global Foundation Fka the McGraw-Hill Research Foundation · Fairfield County's Community Foundation Inc · Perakis Foundation James Perakis Trustee · The Charles Fund Inc · Caplin Foundation · The Rimora Foundation · Elizabeth Raymond Ambler Trust · Manning Family Foundation · The Oak Hill Fund · The Dawn and Jeff Padovan 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 Shames 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Family & Children's Agency Inc — 47% of income from government
- Norwalk Acts Inc — 6% of income from government
- Wilton Historical Society Inc — 1% of income from government
- Wgbh Educational Foundation — 1% of income from government
- Stepping Stones Museum for Children Inc — 1% of income from government
- The Danbury Hospital — 1% of income from government
- Wilton Library Association Inc — 0% of income from government
- Nuvance Health Medical Practice Ct Inc — 0% of income from government
- Partners in Health a Nonprofit Corporation — 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.