· Community foundation
The Chicago Community Trust
The Trust is the Chicago region's community foundation and a public charity supported by public donations since its founding in 1915 to provide assistance and relief to the people of the region.
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 · FY2025
- Under $10k471 grants · $3.3M
- $10k–50k2125 grants · $41M
- $50k–250k1109 grants · $116M
- $250k+611 grants · $1.1B
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ImpactAssets Inc | $47,000,000 |
| Climate Imperative Foundation | $40,000,000 |
| Breakthrough Energy Catalyst Foundation | $30,000,000 |
| National Fish and Wildlife Foundation | $30,000,000 |
| Low Income Investment Fund | $30,000,000 |
| The Pew Charitable Trusts | $25,000,000 |
| Taproot Earth | $25,000,000 |
| Community Reinvestment Fund Inc | $20,000,000 |
| Climate Lead Inc | $20,000,000 |
| Craft3 | $15,000,000 |
| National Philanthropic Trust | $13,785,239 |
| Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund | $13,577,161 |
| Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham | $12,500,000 |
| Allied Climate Partners Inc | $12,500,000 |
| Vanderbilt University Medical Center | $12,005,000 |
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, $544.5M) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 90% 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 6% of The Chicago Community Trust’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.
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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +49% since the first grant, against -9% for the ones you funded once.
1230 repeat relationships — 961 still active in FY2025, 269 since wound down; 86 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, 69% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $281M 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
- BGBOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF AMERICA5× · 2017–2024 · $65M · revenue +62%
- CCChicago Cred Inc8× · 2017–2025 · $62M · revenue +653% · 84% of their budget
- CICAPITAL IMPACT PARTNERS2× · 2020–2024 · $60M · revenue +110% · 39% of their budget
Funded once
- BSBOWIE STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION INCone grant, 2021 · $25M · revenue -64% · 84% of their budget
COMMUNITIES IN SCHOOLSgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $20M · revenue +40% · 43% of their budget- JFJOBS FOR THE FUTURE INCone grant, 2023 · $20M · revenue -12%
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 central indiana corporate partnership (cicp) is transforming our regional economy, bringing together the ceos of central indiana's largest and most civically engaged employers and university presidents to advance "big picture"…
Uniting communities to alleviate hunger.
A higher educational institution, providing both undergraduate and graduate degrees.
The common application promotes access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process.
Deliver world-class resources and mentoring to enable every entrepreneur across the globe to realize their maximum potential.
See schedule ouniversity of new haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts & professional education.
Building a movement of diverse, upwardly mobile college grads overcoming underemployment through digital skills and peer connections.
Illinois college is a co-educational institution of higher learning in the liberal arts.
To advance health and social justice for all members of our community.
To improve patient care through research that shapes medical policies and practice.
the organization provides professional investment management services for endowed gifts and financial assets entrusted to the UCSF Foundation.
Provide health services to improve the health of asian pacific islander and other communities.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Health and Medicine Policy Research and the most unlike its peers is Enchanted Backpack. 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) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% lost their exemption, against 11% 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.
1874 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. 1874 of the 2,000 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 Breakthrough Energy Catalyst Foundation ↗
- Who funds CLIMATE IMPERATIVE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds IMPACTASSETSINC ↗
- Who funds TIDES CENTER ↗
- Who funds Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Rights ↗
- Who funds BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds Chicago Cred Inc ↗
- Who funds CAPITAL IMPACT PARTNERS ↗
- Who funds Metropolitan Family Services ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL PHILANTHROPIC TRUST ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds Save The Children Federation Inc ↗
- Who funds MONTEREY BAY AQUARIUM FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds DUKE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds National Council of YMCAs of the USA ↗
- Who funds FIDELITY INVESTMENTS CHARITABLE GIFT FUND ↗
- Who funds LOW INCOME INVESTMENT FUND ↗
- Who funds HOPE ENTERPRISE CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds ACCION OPPORTUNITY FUND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY REINVESTMENT FUND INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE ↗
- Who funds UNITED STATES FUND FOR UNICEF ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL FISH AND WILDLIFE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HAMPTON UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds MAYO CLINIC ↗
- Who funds TIDES FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK WOMEN'S FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN INDIAN COLLEGE FUND ↗
- Who funds Youth Guidance ↗
- Who funds HABITAT FOR HUMANITY INTERNATIONAL INC ↗
- Who funds SECOND HARVEST FOOD BANK GREATER NEW ORLEANS AND ACADIANA ↗
- Who funds Taproot Earth ↗
- Who funds BOWIE STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY FIRST FUND ↗
- Who funds CRAFT3 ↗
- Who funds The Pew Charitable Trusts ↗
- Who funds RIGHTS AND RESOURCES INSTITUTE 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: Field Foundation of Illinois · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · The Albert Pick Jr Fund · United Way of Metropolitan Chicago Inc · Lloyd a Fry Foundation · Chicago Foundation for Women · Robert R McCormick Foundation · Woods Fund of Chicago · Alphawood Foundation · Forefront · Michael Reese Health Trust · Healthy Communities 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 The Chicago Community Trust 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.
- Health Resources in Action Inc — 39% of income from government
- Save the Children Federation Inc — 30% of income from government
- Champlain Housing Trust — 15% of income from government
- Habitat for Humanity Portland Metro East — 14% of income from government
- Vermont Law School — 14% of income from government
- Icivics Inc — 13% of income from government
- Vermont Foodbank — 13% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Jobs for the Future Inc — 11% of income from government
- Citizen Schools Inc — 8% of income from government
- Ywca Hartford Region Inc — 7% of income from government
- Care Resource Community Health Centers Incorporated — 4% of income from government
- Ochin Inc — 4% of income from government
- The Achievement Network Ltd — 1% of income from government
- CRAFT3 — 1% 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.