· Private foundation
The Joelson 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.
The 74 grants below total $405,900 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $482,235 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $76,335 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k63 grants · $138k
- $10k–50k10 grants · $168k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $100k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| HIAS | $100,000 |
| New York City Ballet | $30,000 |
| Children's Health Alliance for Israel | $25,000 |
| Facing History and Ourselves | $15,000 |
| American Friends of Magen David Adom | $15,000 |
| Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fund | $15,000 |
| Sandy Hook Promise Foundation | $15,000 |
| DOROT | $15,000 |
| PEF Israel Endowment Funds | $15,000 |
| Lehigh University | $12,500 |
| JGive - Friends of Keren Asor | $10,000 |
| Syracuse University | $9,000 |
| Connecticut College | $7,000 |
| Innocence Project New Orleans | $5,000 |
| City Harvest, Inc. | $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 (FY19–21, $43k) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 81% 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 +36% since the first grant, against +25% for the ones you funded once.
130 repeat relationships — 31 still active in FY2024, 99 since wound down; 28 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, 70% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $116k 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
- NYNEW YORK CITY BALLET INC4× · 2017–2024 · $292k · revenue +21%
- MTMANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB INC4× · 2017–2021 · $275k · revenue +35%
- NYNEW YORK CITY CENTER INC3× · 2017–2020 · $135k · revenue +16%
Funded once
- HIHebrew Immigrant Aid Societyone grant, 2023 · $100k
- MTManhattan Theatre Clubone grant, 2023 · $53k
- NYNew York City Ballet, Inc.one grant, 2023 · $50k
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.
To educate students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
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…
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…
New york school of interior design provides the most innovative, immersive, and transformative interior design education in the world, demonstrating the impact of professionally designed interiors on the health, happiness, and well-being…
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.
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 mission of the brooklyn institute of arts and sciences, d/b/a brooklyn museum (the "museum") is to bring people together through art and experiences that inspire celebration, compassion, courage, and the will to act. (see schedule o).
Manhattan university is an independent catholic instituion of higher learning that embraces qualified men and women of all faiths, cultures, and traditions. the mission of manhattan university is to provide a contemporary, person-centered…
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
The new york botanical garden is a museum of plants and a scientific research center devoted to the study of plants and their uses. it is the garden's mission to improve public understanding of the natural world, horticulture, and the…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is New York Landmarks Conservancy Inc and the most unlike its peers is Lucky Dog Refuge 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 47 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) — 1% 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.
188 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. 188 of the 368 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 NEW YORK CITY BALLET INC ↗
- Who funds MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB INC ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK CITY CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds HIAS INC ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR JEWISH CULTURE & CREATIVITY ↗
- Who funds LEHIGH UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds NANTUCKET ATHENEUM INC ↗
- Who funds ECHOING GREEN INC ↗
- Who funds LINCOLN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS INC ↗
- Who funds UNITED JEWISH APPEAL-FEDERATION OF JEWISH PHILANTHROPIES OF NEW YORK INC ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL ↗
- Who funds CONNECTICUT COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF MAGEN DAVID ADOM ↗
- Who funds BROWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds ROBIN HOOD FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE BREARLEY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds REGIONAL PLAN ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds FACING HISTORY & OURSELVES INC ↗
- Who funds DOROT INC ↗
- Who funds SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds CITY PARKS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds SOCIETY FOR NEUROSCIENCE ↗
- Who funds THE ACTORS' FUND OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds THE VIVIAN BEAUMONT THEATERINC D/B/A LINCOLN CENTER THEATER ↗
- Who funds ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY 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: Jewish Communal Fund · The Hyde and Watson Foundation · The New York Community Trust · Charina Foundation Inc Richard Menschel · The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Lily Auchincloss Foundation Inc · Pinkerton Foundation · The Ford Foundation · Community Foundation for Nantucket Inc · Altman Foundation · The Rudin Foundation Inc · Ira M Resnick Foundation Inc
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 Joelson 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.
- Hias Inc — 88% of income from government
- Transitions Centers Inc — 82% of income from government
- Marine Biological Laboratory — 20% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Pine Street Inn Inc — 11% of income from government
- Children's Hospital Corporation — 10% of income from government
- Brandeis University — 9% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc — 7% of income from government
- Nantucket Dreamland Foundation Inc — 4% of income from government
- Nantucket Conservation Foundation Inc — 4% of income from government
- The Trustees of Reservations — 2% of income from government
- Grub Street Inc — 2% of income from government
- The Institute of Contemporary Art Inc — 1% of income from government
- Wesleyan University — 1% of income from government
- Nantucket Historical Association — 1% of income from government
- Bruce Museum Inc — 0% of income from government
- Connecticut College — 0% of income from government
- Amherst College Trustees — 0% of income from government
- Rosie's Place Inc — 0% of income from government
- Housing Partnership 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 The Joelson Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Joelson 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.