· Private foundation
The Neisser Family 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 $10k5 grants · $18k
- $10k–50k10 grants · $151k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $92k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| FULCRUM POINT NEW MUSIC PROJECT | $92,160 |
| ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO | $26,000 |
| ERICKSON INSTITUTE | $25,000 |
| FRANCIS W PARKER SCHOOL | $20,000 |
| DESIGN MUSEUM OF CHICAGO | $20,000 |
| WINDOW TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS INC | $10,000 |
| CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE CENTER | $10,000 |
| MERIT SCHOOL OF MUSIC | $10,000 |
| SNOW CITY ARTS | $10,000 |
| SKIDMORE COLLEGE | $10,000 |
| NPR | $10,000 |
| ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECH | $5,000 |
| PLANNED PARENDHOOD OF ILLINOIS | $5,000 |
| SOCIETY FOR CONTEMPORARY ART (ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO) | $5,000 |
| MOADON KOL CHADASH | $1,800 |
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 (FY17–19, $24k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 96% 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 +32% since the first grant, against +18% for the ones you funded once.
29 repeat relationships — 11 still active in FY2025, 18 since wound down; 5 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, 91% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $23k 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
- EIErikson Institute9× · 2017–2025 · $300k · revenue +5%
- MOMUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART8× · 2017–2024 · $283k · revenue +0%
- TATHE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO7× · 2017–2025 · $180k · revenue +45%
Funded once
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2018 · $50k
- OCORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ARTone grant, 2022 · $13k · revenue -57%
- IGIndividual grant recipientone 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.
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
To collect, display and interpret objects in craft art and design.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
We believe in the life-changing, transformational, revelatory power of great art and opera. Lyric Opera of Chicago exists to provide a broad, deep, and relevant cultural service to the Chicago region and the nation, and to advance the…
The museum of contemporary art san diego invites all audiences to experience our world, our region, and ourselves through the prism of contemporary art.
The Frick Collection (the "Collection") operates an internationally recognized art museum and library program for the inspiration and enjoyment of the public and for the advancement of the study of fine arts and kindred subjects.
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 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 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.
California college of the arts educates students to shape culture and society through the practice and critical study of art, architecture, design, and writing. benefitting from its san francisco bay area location, the college prepares…
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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Museum of Contemporary Art and the most unlike its peers is Fulcrum Point New Music Project. 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 48 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 21% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% 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.
49 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. 49 of the 68 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 FULCRUM POINT NEW MUSIC PROJECT ↗
- Who funds Erikson Institute ↗
- Who funds MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART ↗
- Who funds THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds MUSIC AND DANCE THEATER CHICAGO INC ↗
- Who funds SKIDMORE COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds SNOW CITY ARTS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Design Museum of Chicago ↗
- Who funds Francis W Parker School ↗
- Who funds SOUTH COAST REPERTORY INC ↗
- Who funds Society for Contemporary Art C-O The Art Institute of Chicago ↗
- Who funds Chicago Architecture Foundation ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE BIENNIAL INC ↗
- Who funds NEWPORT BEACH PUBLIC LIBRARY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MERIT SCHOOL OF MUSIC ↗
- Who funds ARTS ORANGE COUNTY ↗
- Who funds PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY OF ORANGE COUNTY ↗
- Who funds ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART ↗
- Who funds ANDERSON RANCH ARTS CENTER ↗
- Who funds WINDOW TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds Illinois Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds Planned Parenthood of Illinois ↗
- Who funds Yale University ↗
- Who funds Pacific Symphony ↗
- Who funds ANGEL CITY CHORALE ↗
- Who funds THE ASPEN INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds CHARLES W BOWERS MUSEUM CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds MOADON KOL CHADASH ↗
- Who funds PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA 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: Orange County Community Foundation · Ibm International Foundation · The Chicago Community Trust · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · California Community Foundation · Huang Family Foundation · Spenuzza-Velastegui Family Foundation · Jack & Sandra Guthman Fdn · The Millstream Fund Inc · Nancy and Geoffrey Stack Family Foundation · Macgillivray Family Foundation · The William Gillespie 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 Neisser 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.
- St Patrick's Manor Inc — 16% of income from government
- Yale University — 12% 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 Neisser Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Neisser 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.