· Private foundation
Shoemaker Family Foundation
Its FY2025 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
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 $10k9 grants · $37k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $70k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION | $15,000 |
| NEBRASKA HUMANITIES COUNCIL | $15,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $10,000 |
| NEBRASKA JOURNALISM TRUST | $10,000 |
| NEBRASKA APPLESEED | $10,000 |
| OPEN SKY POLICY INSTITUTE | $10,000 |
| CAMBRIDGE PUBLIC SCHOOLS | $5,000 |
| CAMBRIDGE PUBLIC SCHOOLS | $5,000 |
| MATT TALBOT KITCHEN AND OUTREACH | $5,000 |
| CAMBRIDGE PUBLIC SCHOOLS | $5,000 |
| FRIENDSHIP HOME OF LINCOLN | $5,000 |
| CITY OF CAMBRIDGE | $5,000 |
| CAMBRIDGE SENIOR CENTER INC | $3,000 |
| SMA FAMILY AND FRIENDS | $3,000 |
| TEAMMATES MENTORING PROGRAM | $1,000 |
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 (FY20–20, $10k) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 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.
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 6% of Shoemaker Family Foundation’s grant dollars are earmarked, by their stated purpose, for a different county than the recipient’s own address — money that lands at a nonprofit in one place but is meant to do its work in another. Read by recipient address, 92% of the giving stays in NE; read by stated purpose it is 88% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
Recipient view: each grant at its grantee’s ZIP, mapped to a county. Directed view: each grant at the county its stated purpose names, falling back to the recipient’s county when the purpose names no place; US grants only. A county shows only if it carries the top 95% of that view’s dollars. Purposes are read from the foundation’s own 990 grant descriptions.
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.
21 repeat relationships — 11 still active in FY2025, 10 since wound down; 2 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; $25k 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
- MTMATT TALBOT KITCHEN & OUTREACH8× · 2017–2025 · $46k · revenue +148%
- NJNEBRASKA JOURNALISM TRUST3× · 2023–2025 · $40k · revenue +75%
- CRCRANE RIVER THEATER COMPANY INC4× · 2018–2023 · $35k · revenue +78%
Funded once
- CSCAMBRIDGE SCHOOL FOUNDATIONone grant, 2022 · $22k
- FFFLATWATER FREE PRESS NEWSPAPERone grant, 2022 · $20k
- TCTHE CAMBRIDGE PUBLIC SCHOOL FOUNDATIONone grant, 2017 · $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.
Support for community colleges
The nebraska civic engagement table works with nonprofits to increase voting and build an engaged nebraska.
A restorative justice agency committed to habilitating justice in nebraska.
To promote, facilitate and develop or co-develop affordable housing in lincoln county, nebraska.
Mission: community action of nebraska strives to alleviate poverty through enhancing program development, providing technical assistance, and advocating public policy to support all community action agencies in nebraska.
Lincoln college uniquely empowers students to realize their full potential
To promote corn and corn products
The food bank of lincoln, inc. is a nonprofit corporation organized to meet the emergency food needs for the sixteen counties it serves in southeast nebraska.the food bank of lincoln serves as a key organization for receiving, inspecting,…
To promote credit unions in nebraska
The council of indepependent nebraska colleges foundation exists to provide operating funds and scholarship support for students attending nebraska's independent institutions of excellence.
Labor relations
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Nebraska Community Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Cambridge Community Daycare Foundation. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
16 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. 16 of the 35 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 MATT TALBOT KITCHEN & OUTREACH ↗
- Who funds NEBRASKA JOURNALISM TRUST ↗
- Who funds NEBRASKA HUMANITIES COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds CRANE RIVER THEATER COMPANY INC ↗
- Who funds NEBRASKA CULTURAL ENDOWMENT ↗
- Who funds OPENSKY POLICY INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds NEBRASKA LIONS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds CAMBRIDGE SENIOR CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds LINCOLN ORCHESTRA ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds FRIENDSHIP HOME OF LINCOLN INC ↗
- Who funds NEBRASKA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HASTINGS COLLEGE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NEBRASKA APPLESEED CENTER FOR LAW IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST ↗
- Who funds CAMBRIDGE COMMUNITY DAYCARE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Inner City Impact ↗
- Who funds FAMILIES OF SPINAL MUSCULAR ATROPHY DBA CURE SMA ↗
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: Kitty M Perkins Foundation · Lincoln Community Foundation Inc · The Sherwood Foundation · Cooper Foundation · Abel Foundation · Weitz Family Foundation · The Graff Charitable Foundation Inc Co P Mark Graff · Hormel Harris Foundation · James Stuart III Family Foundation · Annette and Paul Smith Charitable Fund · Bettenhausen Family Foundation · Acklie Charitable 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 Shoemaker 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to Shoemaker Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Shoemaker Family Foundation 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.