· Private foundation
The Karla Scherer 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.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k9 grants · $25k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $89k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $205k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| HEALTH NETWORK FOUNDATION | $78,797 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO | $75,000 |
| PROJECT FREEDIVE | $51,110 |
| PLANNED PARENTHOOD | $28,890 |
| NEWBERRY LIBRARY | $20,000 |
| THOMAS JEFFERSON FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $10,000 |
| LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO | $10,000 |
| FIELD MUSEUM | $10,000 |
| ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO | $5,000 |
| COMMITTEE OF ARTS OF THE AMERICAS | $5,000 |
| LEADER DOGS FOR THE BLIND | $5,000 |
| PROVIDENCE ST MEL SCHOOL | $5,000 |
| ACLU | $1,000 |
| WFMT | $1,000 |
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, $312k) land where the poverty rate runs at 16%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 94% 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 +29% since the first grant, against +14% for the ones you funded once.
32 repeat relationships — 14 still active in FY2025, 18 since wound down; 4 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, 86% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $44k 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
HEALTHNETWORK FOUNDATION FKA HEALTH NET FOUNDATION INC9× · 2017–2025 · $294k · revenue +229%
University of Chicago4× · 2017–2025 · $87k · revenue +56%- CSChicago Symphony Orchestra9× · 2017–2025 · $65k · revenue +58%
Funded once
- OCOCEAN CONNECT INCone grant, 2022 · $75k
- HMHELLENIC MUSEUM OF MICHIGANone grant, 2024 · $10k · revenue -14%
- FOFRIENDS OF NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS INCgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $5k · revenue +51%
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 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 organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
The driehaus museum engages and inspires the global community through exploration and ongoing conversations in art, architecture, and design of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. its permanent collection and temporary…
The Detroit Historical Society tells Detroit's stories and why they matter through its exhibits, programs, outreach, and the preservation and dissemination of its artifacts and collections.
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.
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
The chicago theatre group is committed to producing both classic and contemporary works giving full voice to a wide range of artists and visions. by dedicating itself to three guiding principles - quality, equity, and community - the…
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 Chicago History Museum strives to be a destination for learning, inspiration, and civic engagement. Through dynamic exhibitions, tours, programs, digital resources, and special events, the Museum connects people to Chicago's history…
The Morgan Library & Museum celebrates and shares the history and process of human creativity from antiquity to the present day through the preservation, study, and interpretation of a dynamic and growing collection.
The Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry (the Museum), a 501(c)(3) corporation, is the largest science museum in the Western hemisphere and home to thousands of artifacts. For 90 years, the Museum has been a premier…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the most unlike its peers is Court Theatre Fund. 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 41 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 12% 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.
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 46 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 NEWBERRY LIBRARY ↗
- Who funds HEALTHNETWORK FOUNDATION FKA HEALTH NET FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds Chicago Humanities Festival ↗
- Who funds FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY ↗
- Who funds Chicago Symphony Orchestra ↗
- Who funds PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds Lyric Opera of Chicago ↗
- Who funds THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds Providence St Mel School ↗
- Who funds ILLINOIS POLICY INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE THEATER ↗
- Who funds LEADER DOGS FOR THE BLIND ↗
- Who funds THOMAS JEFFERSON FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds HELLENIC MUSEUM OF MICHIGAN ↗
- Who funds THIRD COAST PERCUSSION NFP ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS INC ↗
- Who funds Lifeline Productions Inc ↗
- Who funds MICHIGAN SUPREME COURT HISTORICAL SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds RepresentUs Education Fund ↗
- Who funds THOROUGHBRED RETIREMENT FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds PARAGON SERVICE DOGS ↗
- Who funds The River School ↗
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: Lloyd a Fry Foundation · The Chicago Community Trust · National Philanthropic Trust · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · 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 The Karla Scherer 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 Karla Scherer Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Karla Scherer 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.