· Private foundation
The Louise Merage 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.
Read this first · the figures below need context
84% of The Louise Merage Family Foundation’s FY2024 grant dollars went to Orange County Community Foundation, not to grantees.
Its money now reaches organizations through that sponsor, which does not report who recommended each grant. FY2024 names 3 organizations directly, so a portfolio cannot be read from it. Everything below is therefore FY2021, the last year The Louise Merage Family Foundation named its own grantees at scale: 9 organizations, $239k. It is dated, not current.
Organizations named directly on the return
Amber years are those where most dollars went to a sponsor.
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 · FY2021
- Under $10k6 grants · $12k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $25k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $201k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| PACIFIC SYMPHONY | $111,401 |
| AMERICAN ISRAEL EDUCATION FOUNDATION | $90,000 |
| CEDARS-SINAI | $15,000 |
| HOAG HOSPITAL FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| THE MEND PROJECT | $5,000 |
| SEGERSTROM CENTER FOR THE ARTS | $4,500 |
| LAGUNA GREENBELT INC | $1,000 |
| UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM | $1,000 |
| LAGUNA BEACH POLICE FOUNDATION | $500 |
| LAGUNA CANYON FOUNDATION | $250 |
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 (FY24–24, $5k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 0% 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.
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 +80% since the first grant, against +20% for the ones you funded once.
16 repeat relationships — 7 still active in FY2021, 9 since wound down; 4 grantees were first funded in FY2021 (too recent to call). Read against FY2021, the last year this funder named its own grantees directly; its giving has since run through a sponsor, which reports no donor behind each grant.
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, 86% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $5k 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
- PSPacific Symphony8× · 2017–2024 · $349k · revenue +87%
- SCSegerstrom Center for the Arts7× · 2017–2024 · $138k · revenue +57%
CEDARS-SINAI MEDICAL CENTER5× · 2018–2022 · $58k · revenue +52%
Funded once
- TATHE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTEone grant, 2018 · $19k · revenue +20%
- UOUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IRVINE FOUNDATIONgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $10k · revenue +51%
- UIUC IRVINE GIFT ADMINISTRATIONone grant, 2020 · $10k
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.
Committed to exceptional healthcare quality for all and actively engaged with our community, einstein drives scientific discovery and educates compassionate leaders in health and science.
San Diego Jewish Academy empowers each student to learn for life, guided by Jewish values and rooted in strength of community.
Ihds utilizes a dual general and judaic studies curriculum. the judaic studies curriculum emphasizes the fundamentals of hebrew reading, writing and speaking, jewish history, holidays, jewish values, torah, the jewish life cycle, the land…
The association serves its members by creating resources that enable california school administrators to develop and apply creative leadership and management skills and in turn, improve the educational process for all students.
The ucla foundation is the giving, receiving, and investing arm of the ucla campus. the foundation enables private donors to help build, sustain and advance one of the world's finest academic and research institutions. private philanthropy…
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.
Biu produces students who excel in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business & the arts.
Based on jewish values, the jewish federation of greater los angeles convenes and leads the community and leverages its resources to assure the continuity of the jewish people, support a secure state of israel, care for jews in need here…
Golden gate university prepares individuals to lead and serve by providing high quality, practice-based educational programs in law, taxation, business and related professions - as a nonprofit institution - in an innovative and challenging…
The mission of the silicon schools fund is to improve education through supporting the launch of excellent new schools, improving academic instruction in existing schools, and by funding some of the boldest innovations in education…
The institute's mission, as set out in its certificate of incorporation, is to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs, to secure the better administration of justice, and to…
Guided by the principles of academic rigor and diversity, the international school of san francisco offers programs of study in french and english to prepare its graduates for a world in which the ability to think critically and to…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Orange County Community Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Laguna Beach Police 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 37 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 3% lost their exemption, against 14% 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.
29 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. 29 of the 36 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 AMERICAN ISRAEL EDUCATION FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ORANGE COUNTY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Pacific Symphony ↗
- Who funds Segerstrom Center for the Arts ↗
- Who funds CEDARS-SINAI MEDICAL CENTER ↗
- Who funds HOAG HOSPITAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Redline ↗
- Who funds MOUNTAIN VILLAGE MONTESSORI CHARTER SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds YAMPA VALLEY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MOISHE HOUSE ↗
- Who funds GIRLS INCORPORATED OF ORANGE COUNTY ↗
- Who funds THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds TILLY'S LIFE CENTER ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IRVINE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds JEWISH NATIONAL FUND (KEREN KAYEMETH LEISRAEL) INC ↗
- Who funds Adi Israel Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE ↗
- Who funds COLORADO LEAGUE OF CHARTER SCHOOLS ↗
- Who funds The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ↗
- Who funds EMERALD MOUNTAIN SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds M3nd Project ↗
- Who funds GLENNWOOD HOUSING FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN JEWISH UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds BEYOND BLINDNESS ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN YOUTH SYMPHONY INC ↗
- Who funds DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds LAGUNA GREENBELT INC ↗
- Who funds Laguna Beach Police Foundation ↗
- Who funds LAGUNA CANYON 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: Orange County Community Foundation · The Devto Support Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · 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 Louise Merage 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 Louise Merage Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Louise Merage 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.