· Private foundation
Simons 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 $10k35 grants · $144k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $30k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ARCHDIOCESE OF CHICAGO GEN-TO-GEN | $20,000 |
| KOLBE HOUSE | $10,000 |
| MERCY HOME FOR BOYS & GIRLS | $8,000 |
| ONE MILLION DEGREES | $8,000 |
| AVENUES OF INDEPENDENCE | $8,000 |
| WINGS PROGRAM INC | $8,000 |
| WEST SUBURBAN SPECIAL RECREATION | $8,000 |
| LA CASA NORTE | $8,000 |
| TALLER DE JOSE | $8,000 |
| HORIZONS FOR YOUTH | $8,000 |
| RONALD MCDONALD HOUSE | $8,000 |
| NET MINISTRIES FOUNDATION | $8,000 |
| REFUGEE ONE | $8,000 |
| ST SABINA ACADEMY | $8,000 |
| GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY | $8,000 |
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, $21k) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, 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 +27% since the first grant, against +8% for the ones you funded once.
98 repeat relationships — 26 still active in FY2025, 72 since wound down; 10 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, 93% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $12k 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
- ATAVENUES TO INDEPENDENCE5× · 2021–2025 · $31k · revenue +70%
- MUMarquette University5× · 2018–2024 · $30k · revenue +36%
- RREFUGEEONE5× · 2021–2025 · $29k · revenue +193%
Funded once
- CMCARMELITE MONASTERYone grant, 2023 · $5k
- AOASSEMBLIES OF GOD WORLD MISSIONone grant, 2021 · $5k
- TNTHE NEEDY FAMILY FUNDgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $5k · revenue +760%
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.
Central indiana corporate partnership (cicp) is an alliance of indiana's business and research university leaders coming together to foster long-term prosperity for the region. cicp's mission is to transform the economy of indiana in order…
Our mission: to improve the quality of health care.our vision: better health care. better choices. better health.
Chi prepares graduates of the christel house schools operated by its affiliated entities, which chi funds and oversees, to achieve upward economic mobility, demonstrate good citizenship, and become empowered to identify and realize their…
See schedule onorc at the university of chicago conducts research and data science on critical societal issues to guide decision-making and the development of programs and public policy. our experts identify relationships and trends, and…
The organization provides medical care to improve, maintain, and restore the health of the people in the communities we serve.
Commonwealth care alliance, inc.'s mission is to improve the health and well-being of people with significant needs by innovating, coordinating and providing the highest quality, individualized care.
To serve our communities by provding innovative and compassionate healthcare.
The common application is a not-for-profit membership organization of over 1,100 colleges and universities across the globe committed to access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process. every year, over 1.5 million students…
We empower directors and transform boards to be future ready.
Saint xavier university, a catholic institution inspired by the heritage of the sisters of mercy, educates persons to search for truth, think critically, communicate effectively and serve wisely and compassionately in support of human…
Our institutional mission is to educate and prepare students to be ethical leaders and socially responsible global citizens who incorporate the dominican values of study, reflection, community and service into their lives.
To eliminate disparities in health care access and outcomes by providing superior quality health and human services through an integrated world-class delivery system for latino, multi-ethnic underserved communities in southern california.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Heritage Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Father Flanagan's Boys' Home. 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 41 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 8% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
82 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. 82 of the 184 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 AVENUES TO INDEPENDENCE ↗
- Who funds Marquette University ↗
- Who funds REFUGEEONE ↗
- Who funds Cristo Rey St Martin College Prep ↗
- Who funds Horizons for Youth ↗
- Who funds ONE MILLION DEGREES ↗
- Who funds GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY ↗
- Who funds Big Shoulders Fund ↗
- Who funds WINGS PROGRAM INC ↗
- Who funds LA CASA NORTE ↗
- Who funds STAR LEGACY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MORNING STAR MISSION MINISTRIES INC ↗
- Who funds WOMEN EMPLOYED ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO COALITION TO END HOMELESSNESS ↗
- Who funds TALLER DE JOSE ↗
- Who funds THE NEEDY FAMILY FUND ↗
- Who funds HOMEBOY INDUSTRIES ↗
- Who funds Guadalupe Center 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 Service Club of Chicago · Fifth Third Chicagoland Foundation · Helen V Brach Foundation · AbbVie Foundation · United Way of Metropolitan Chicago Inc · The Chicago Community Trust · Pulte Family Charitable Foundation · Dr Scholl Foundation · Robert R McCormick Foundation · Baird Foundation Inc · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Conrad N Hilton 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 Simons 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.
- Americares Foundation Inc — 0% of income from government
- Food for the Poor Inc — 0% of income from government
- Guadalupe Center Inc — 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 Simons Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Simons 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.