· Private foundation
The Aaron and Betty Lee Stern 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
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 63% of THE AARON AND BETTY LEE STERN FOUNDATION’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 · FY2025
- Under $10k6 grants · $30k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $160k
- $50k–250k5 grants · $400k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| DAVID LYNCH FOUNDATION | $125,000 |
| WEIL CORNELL MEDICAL COLLEGE | $125,000 |
| FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER | $50,000 |
| COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | $50,000 |
| BREAST CANCER ALLIANCE | $50,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA | $40,000 |
| THE NATIONAL EDUCATION EQUITY LAB | $25,000 |
| DARTMOUTH COLLEGE | $25,000 |
| JEWISH FEDERATION | $25,000 |
| DELACORTE THEATER | $25,000 |
| WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART | $20,000 |
| SQUASH HAVEN | $7,000 |
| GENERATION SOS | $5,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $5,000 |
| SOCIETY MSK | $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 (FY22–25, $34k) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 85% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 100% of The Aaron and Betty Lee Stern 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, 4% of the giving stays in CT; read by stated purpose it is 0% — 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.
13 repeat relationships — 7 still active in FY2025, 6 since wound down; 7 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, 70% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $140k 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
- WMWHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART6× · 2017–2025 · $115k · revenue +161%
- NYNEW YORK SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL4× · 2018–2023 · $80k · revenue +6%
- BSBRUNSWICK SCHOOL INC2× · 2017–2024 · $60k · revenue +69%
Funded once
- WCWEIL CORNELL MEDICAL Cone grant, 2022 · $125k
- UOUNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA FOUNDATIONone grant, 2022 · $90k · revenue -16%
- UJUNITED JEWISH APPEAL-FEDERATION OF JEWISH PHILANTHROPIES OF NEW YORK INCone grant, 2022 · $35k · revenue +19%
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.
Dickinson college provides a useful, innovative and interdisciplinary education in the liberal arts and sciences to prepare students to lead rich and fulfilling lives of engaged global citizenship
See Form 990, Part I, Line 1, Description of Organization Mission.
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.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
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 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 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…
The new school's mission is to prepare our students to understand, contribute to, and succeed in a rapidly changing society, and thus make the world a better and more just place. (continued on schedule o)
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is National Philanthropic Trust and the most unlike its peers is David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness -Based Education and World Peace. 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 38 years old; the field is 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 19% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 10% 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.
24 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. 24 of the 40 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 TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds DAVID LYNCH FOUNDATION FOR CONSCIOUSNESS -BASED EDUCATION AND WORLD PEACE ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL ↗
- Who funds Trustees of Dartmouth College ↗
- Who funds BRUNSWICK SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds Museum of Modern Art ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds BREAST CANCER ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds UNITED JEWISH APPEAL-FEDERATION OF JEWISH PHILANTHROPIES OF NEW YORK INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL PHILANTHROPIC TRUST ↗
- Who funds SQUASH HAVEN INC ↗
- Who funds READ TO LEAD INC ↗
- Who funds National Education Opportunity Network Inc ↗
- Who funds Young Leadership Addiction Awareness Inc ↗
- Who funds THE PAPER BAG PLAYERS INC ↗
- Who funds Glades Academy Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds ADULT CONGENITAL HEART ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM ASSOCIATES ↗
- Who funds MORSELIFE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ROBIN HOOD FOUNDATION ↗
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: Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · National Philanthropic Trust · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund
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 The Aaron and Betty Lee Stern 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.
- Squash Haven Inc — 4% 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 The Aaron and Betty Lee Stern Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Aaron and Betty Lee Stern 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.