· Private foundation
The Griffith Family 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 $10k12 grants · $37k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $89k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $150k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| PEGGY NOTEBAERT NATURE MUSEUM | $100,000 |
| GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY | $50,000 |
| AMERICAN CONSERVATION COALITION | $25,000 |
| CHRIST IN THE DESERT | $23,000 |
| GENEVA LAKE CONSERVANCY INC | $10,300 |
| HOLIDAY HOME CAMP | $10,203 |
| FRIENDS OF KISHWAUKETOE | $10,000 |
| PROJECT DRAWDOWN | $10,000 |
| AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY | $5,181 |
| GENEVA LAKE WATER SAFETY PATROL | $5,050 |
| MERIDIAN INSTITUTE | $5,000 |
| GENEVA AREA FOUNDATION HORTICULTURA | $5,000 |
| HIGHER GROUND | $5,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $5,000 |
| LAKE GENEVA COUNTRY CLUB FOUNDATION | $2,500 |
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 (FY22–24, $7k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 31% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-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.
36 repeat relationships — 13 still active in FY2024, 23 since wound down; 7 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, 85% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $42k 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
- TCTHE COLORADO COLLEGE4× · 2019–2023 · $502k · revenue +25%
GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY2× · 2023–2024 · $100k · revenue +23%- GLGENEVA LAKE CONSERVANCY INC6× · 2017–2024 · $88k · revenue +203%
Funded once
- TMTRINITY METHODIST CHURCHone grant, 2018 · $50k
- GLGENEVA LAKE SAILING SCHOOL INCone grant, 2017 · $15k · revenue -8%
- RMRONALD MCDONALD HOUSEone grant, 2021 · $7k
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.
Ci works to spotlight and secure the critical benefits that nature provides to humanity.
Lake Forest Graduate School of Management's mission is to bring the real world to business education and leadership development.
Wwf's mission is to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on earth. (continued on schedule o)
The purpose of the water research foundation (wrf) is a definitive research organization to advance the science of all things water to better meet the evolving needs of its subscribers and the water sector. to engage exclusively in…
The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is a world-renowned center for biological discovery and training that is notably affiliated with more than 60 Nobel Prize winners. Research is conducted by full-time faculty as well as hundreds of the…
The wildlife society's mission is to inspire, empower, and enable wildlife professionals to sustain wildlife populations and habitats through science-based management and conservation.
Agu's mission is to advance and support an inclusive community of earth and space scientists and partners dedicated to discovery and solutions to societal challenges. agu seeks to catalyze discovery and solutions to scientific and societal…
Provide post-secondary education leading to a baccalaureate degree. Program service expenditures are made in conjunction with the operation of a liberal arts college spread over 107 acres with approximately 63 educational and support…
To promote public health, safety, and welfare through the improvement of the quality and quantity of drinking water and the development and furtherance of understanding of the problems relating thereto.
To protect wisconsin's lands, waters, and wildlife by providing funding, leading partnerships, and connecting all people with nature.
The endowment works collaboratively with partners in the public and private sectors to advance systemic, transformative, and sustainable change for the health and vitality of the nation's working forests and forest reliant communities.
Our mission is conserving West Michigans ecologically critical land. We protect land by creating public nature preserves, providing support to communities and local governments in creating natural areas, and helping private landowners…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is The Chicago Lighthouse for People Who Are Blind Or Visually Impaired and the most unlike its peers is The International Dark-Sky Association 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 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 13% 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.
32 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. 32 of the 69 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 COLORADO COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds NET IMPACT ↗
- Who funds THE CHICAGO ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ↗
- Who funds GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY ↗
- Who funds GENEVA LAKE CONSERVANCY INC ↗
- Who funds ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE & RELATED DISORDERS ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds LAKE GENEVA FRESH AIR ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE INTERNATIONAL DARK-SKY ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN CONSERVATION COALITION INC ↗
- Who funds PROJECT DRAWDOWN ↗
- Who funds GENEVA AREA FOUNDATION INC HORTICULTURAL HALL ↗
- Who funds GENEVA LAKE SAILING SCHOOL INC ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF KISHWAUKETOE ↗
- Who funds TABOR ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds SPUR COMMUNITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Meridian Institute ↗
- Who funds LAKE GENEVA COUNTRY CLUB FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds HIGHER GROUND USA INC ↗
- Who funds Chicago Zoological Society ↗
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: Dean L & Rosemarie Buntrock Foundation · Carol Bernick Family Foundation · A G Cox Charity Trust Xxxxx9001 · John & Linda Anderson Charitable Foundation · Otzen Family Foundation Incorporated · The John a Miller Family Foundation · Milton R Brown Family Foundation · The Simms Family Foundation · Kunes Family Foundation · Alliant Energy Foundation Inc · The Chicago Community Trust · Sbk Stearns Family 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 Griffith 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 The Griffith Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Griffith 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.