· Private foundation
The Lowell Milken 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 FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k31 grants · $41k
- $10k–50k4 grants · $65k
- $50k–250k11 grants · $933k
- $250k+11 grants · $9.0M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MILKEN COMMUNITY SCHOOL | $2,500,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES - SCHOOL OF LAW | $2,440,000 |
| STEPHEN WISE TEMPLE | $527,500 |
| FRIENDS OF THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES | $500,000 |
| JERUSALEM CENTER FOR SECURITY & FOREIGN AFFAIRS | $500,000 |
| LETTER OF THE LAW - SHURAT HADIN ISRAEL LAW CENTER | $500,000 |
| THE LAWFARE PROJECT | $500,000 |
| UCLA HERB ALPERT SCHOOL OF MUSIC | $425,000 |
| ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN | $400,000 |
| JEWISH NEWS SERVICE INC | $400,000 |
| MEMRI - THE MIDDLE EAST MEDIA AND RESEARCH INSTITUTE | $275,000 |
| AMERICAN FRIENDS OF AISH HATORAH-WESTERN REGION | $150,000 |
| RONALD REAGAN PRESIDENTIAL FOUNDATION & INSTITUTE | $106,000 |
| PROSTATE CANCER FOUNDATION | $102,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES | $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 (FY20–24, $86k) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +30% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
39 repeat relationships — 18 still active in FY2024, 21 since wound down; 39 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, 47% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $5.4M 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
- MCMILKEN COMMUNITY SCHOOL5× · 2020–2024 · $4.0M · revenue +135%
- ACART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN5× · 2020–2024 · $2.4M · revenue +30%
- AFAMERICAN FRIENDS OF ARIEL INC2× · 2022–2023 · $2.0M · revenue +207% · 49% of their budget
Funded once
- UFUCLA FOUNDATION HERB ALPERT SCHOOL OF MUSICone grant, 2020 · $2.5M
- JCJERUSALEM CENTER FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRSone grant, 2023 · $500k
- NINATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHINGone grant, 2023 · $225k · revenue 0%
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.
Biu produces students who excel in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business & the arts.
The organization's mission is to engage in non partisan analysis of u.s. foreign policy in the middle east, with special emphasis on the middle east peace process, and to present policymakers in the united states, in the region and in the…
The university is composed of several colleges and schools providing undergraduate, graduate, professional and post-doctoral education and training and research and clinical programs.
The american technion society supports the technion's critical research and (continued on sch o)
The mission of the institute is to translate basic genetic and molecular mechanisms of schizophrenia and related developmental brain disorders into clinical advances that change the lives of affected individuals. it is catalyzing a new…
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 institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
The weizmann institute of science, located in rehovot, israel, is one of the worlds top-ranking, multidisciplinary research institutions. at any one time, several thousand scientists, staff and students are involved in hundreds of research…
To create an informed, celebratory and satisfying jewish community for students at the university of southern california, to deepen jewish identity through social, intellectual and spiritual participation, to offer diversified…
The israel institute, inc. (the institute) enhances knowledge about modern israel by ensuring that more students have access to courses about israel during their time on campus.
Support the hebrew univ. of jerusalem, israel's foremost center of higher edu. & research.
We fundraise in the u.s. to support, and raise awareness of, bar-ilan university in israel.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Foster Nation and the most unlike its peers is The Milken Family 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 32 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) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
53 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. 53 of the 112 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 UCLA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MILKEN COMMUNITY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF ARIEL INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL PHILANTHROPIC TRUST ↗
- Who funds NAMI WESTSIDE LA ↗
- Who funds THE LAWFARE PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds LOWELL MILKEN CENTER FOR UNSUNG HEROES INC ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES ↗
- Who funds PARKINSON'S FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE MICHAEL J FOX FOUNDATION FOR PARKINSON'S RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds PROSTATE CANCER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds JEWISH NEWS SERVICE INC ↗
- Who funds ISRAEL GLOBAL INITIATIVE FUND INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN PARKINSON DISEASE ASSOC ↗
- Who funds VENICE FAMILY CLINIC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING ↗
- Who funds CONNECT ISRAEL ↗
- Who funds THE RONALD REAGAN PRESIDENTIAL FOUNDATION AND INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds THE MILKEN FAMILY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PEF ISRAEL ENDOWMENT FUNDS INC ↗
- Who funds BATON ROUGE AREA 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 Michael and Lori Milken Family Foundation · Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles · California Community Foundation · Richard and Ellen Sandler Family Foundation · National Philanthropic Trust · The Milken Family Foundation · Ruby Family Foundation · Beatrix Finston Padway Charitable Trust for Arts and Education · David & Janet Polak Foundation · The Newton D & Rochelle F Becker Foundation · The Milstein Family Foundation · Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles Group
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 Lowell Milken 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.
- City Year Inc — 11% of income from government
- Wounded Warrior Project 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 Lowell Milken Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Lowell Milken 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.