· Private foundation
The Lefkofsky Family Foundation
Its FY2024 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 FY2018–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 76 grants below total $5,055,902 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $7,113,731 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $2,057,829 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 · FY2023
- Under $10k25 grants · $74k
- $10k–50k29 grants · $515k
- $50k–250k16 grants · $1.8M
- $250k+6 grants · $2.7M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Steppenwolf Theatre Company | $1,050,000 |
| Jewish United Fund | $500,000 |
| University of Wisconsin Foundation | $333,334 |
| American Brain Tumor Association | $333,334 |
| Gateway for Cancer Research | $250,000 |
| Anti-Defamation League | $250,000 |
| Northwestern University | $200,000 |
| Art Institute of Chicago | $175,000 |
| Friends of Israel Defence Forces | $175,000 |
| Peer Health Exchange | $166,667 |
| Friends of Israel Defence Forces | $166,667 |
| Museum of Contemporary Art | $135,000 |
| Lake Forest Academy | $125,000 |
| Ravinia | $100,000 |
| Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center | $100,000 |
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 (FY18–19, $92k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 100% 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.
101 repeat relationships — 37 still active in FY2023, 64 since wound down; 30 grantees were first funded in FY2023 (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 FY2023, 79% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1.1M 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
- JUJEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO2× · 2018–2019 · $500k · revenue +34%
Northwestern University2× · 2018–2019 · $400k · revenue +33%- MOMUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART2× · 2018–2019 · $332k · revenue +21%
Funded once
- MPMILLENNIUM PARK FOUNDATIONgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $900k · revenue +340%
- UOUniversity of Michigangraduatedone grant, 2018 · $353k · revenue +195%
- KCKenneth C Griffin Museum of Science and Industryone grant, 2019 · $300k · revenue -1%
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.
See schedule onorc at the university of chicago conducts research and data science on critical societal issues to guide decision-making and the development of programs and public policy. our experts identify relationships and trends, and…
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
To inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy
The chicago psychoanalytic institute transforms the lives of individuals, families and communities, using psychoanalytic knowledge to help them grow and thrive.
Central indiana corporate partnership (cicp) is an alliance of indiana's business and research university leaders coming together to foster long-term prosperity for the region. cicp's mission is to transform the economy of indiana in order…
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.
Lake Forest Graduate School of Management's mission is to bring the real world to business education and leadership development.
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 chicago bar foundation brings the legal community together through advocacy, funding, and innovation to improve access to justice for people in need and to make the legal system more fair, equitable, and effective.
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…
Help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis.
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Kids First Chicago for Education and the most unlike its peers is Dynami Foundation. 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 33 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) — 1% of your grantees by number, and just 0% 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.
93 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. 93 of the 311 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 STEPPENWOLF THEATRE COMPANY ↗
- Who funds MILLENNIUM PARK FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds JEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds University of Michigan ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART ↗
- Who funds Kenneth C Griffin Museum of Science and Industry ↗
- Who funds THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN FIRST FUND THE CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS 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: The Chicago Community Trust · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · The Irving Harris Foundation · Lloyd a Fry Foundation · Robert R McCormick Foundation · Arie and Ida Crown Memorial · Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation · Gates Foundation · Best Portion 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 Lefkofsky 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.
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Sandy Hook Promise Foundation — 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 Lefkofsky Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Lefkofsky 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.