· Private foundation
Sonja & F Conrad Fischer Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k5 grants · $11k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $97k
- $50k–250k4 grants · $445k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| RAY OF HOPE CANCER FOUNDATION | $125,000 |
| KALAMAZOO COLLEGE | $120,000 |
| THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO BOOTH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS | $100,000 |
| JOFFREY BALLET | $100,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $45,000 |
| CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE THEATER | $16,500 |
| Art Institute of Chicago | $15,000 |
| GREATER CHICAGO FOOD BANK | $10,000 |
| THE CENTER FOR INTUITIVE AND OUTSIDER ART | $10,000 |
| CATO INSTITUTE | $4,000 |
| DEERFIELD ACADEMY | $3,000 |
| SALVATION ARMY | $2,500 |
| HARVARD COLLEGE | $1,000 |
| SPECIAL OLYMPICS | $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 (FY18–24, $300k) 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.
37 repeat relationships — 10 still active in FY2024, 27 since wound down; 4 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, 78% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $121k 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
- TJTHE JOFFREY BALLET6× · 2017–2024 · $1.3M · revenue +90%
- KCKALAMAZOO COLLEGE7× · 2017–2024 · $255k · revenue +41%
- TOTRUSTEES OF DEERFIELD ACADEMY6× · 2017–2024 · $118k · revenue +122%
Funded once
- RWRAYMOND WENTZ FOUNDATIONone grant, 2017 · $25k
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2020 · $15k
- ICILLINOIS CHARITY BOARDone grant, 2021 · $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.
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
Chicago opera theater expands the tradition of opera as a living art form by engaging lovers of music and storytelling through innovative experiences, predominantly of new and rarely performed works.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University ("The Auditorium"), an Illinois not-for-profit corporation, is committed to presenting the finest in international, cultural, community and educational programming to Chicago and to the…
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.
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 music institute of chicago ("music institute") leads people toward a lifelong engagement with music, by providing widely accessible resources for high quality music teaching, performing, and service activities.
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…
Achieving international impact through world-class research and education in fundamental computer science and information technology.
Education and Research
Illinois college is a co-educational institution of higher education learning providing a four-year educational program leading to the baccalaureate degree. illinois college is a community committed to the highest standards of scholarship…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Chicago Theatre Group Inc and the most unlike its peers is Ray of Hope Inc. 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 48 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) — 7% of your grantees by number, and just 3% 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.
41 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. 41 of the 73 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 JOFFREY BALLET ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE THEATER ↗
- Who funds KALAMAZOO COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds RAY OF HOPE CANCER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF DEERFIELD ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds RAY OF HOPE INC ↗
- Who funds Lyric Opera of Chicago ↗
- Who funds THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds MAKE-A-WISH FOUNDATION OF ILLINOIS INC ↗
- Who funds METROSQUASH NFP ↗
- Who funds Writers Theatre Inc ↗
- Who funds CATO INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds Kalamazoo Nature Center ↗
- Who funds LINCOLN PARK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds Music Theatre Works Inc ↗
- Who funds WINDOW TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds SMILE TRAIN INC ↗
- Who funds THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY ↗
- Who funds SPECIAL OLYMPICS INC ↗
- Who funds THE FORTNIGHTLY OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds HILLSDALE COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
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 Chicago Community Trust · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Amazonsmile 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 Sonja & F Conrad Fischer 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.
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% 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 Sonja & F Conrad Fischer Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Sonja & F Conrad Fischer 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.