· Private foundation
The Nelson & Sara Fishman Family Foundation Inc
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
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 46% of The Nelson & Sara Fishman Family Foundation Inc’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k27 grants · $111k
- $10k–50k10 grants · $133k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $100k
Anchored by a single position — about 94% of reported assets are held in Simon & Quick Bv.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Individual grant recipient | $50,000 |
| Baltimore Symphony Orchestra | $50,000 |
| Planned Parenthood National | $20,000 |
| Enoch Pratt Free Library | $15,000 |
| Jewish National Fund | $15,000 |
| WYPR | $15,000 |
| Technion | $12,500 |
| Planned Parenthood of MD | $12,000 |
| Maryland Public Television | $12,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $11,934 |
| The Associated | $10,000 |
| Baltimore Museum of Art | $10,000 |
| Mazon | $9,000 |
| Fuel Fund of Maryland | $9,000 |
| The Forward | $7,500 |
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 (FY21–24, $11k) land where the poverty rate runs at 19%, 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.
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 9% of The Nelson & Sara Fishman Family Foundation Inc’s grant dollars are earmarked, by their stated purpose, for a different county than the recipient’s own address — money that lands at a nonprofit in one place but is meant to do its work in another.
Recipient view: each grant at its grantee’s ZIP, mapped to a county. Directed view: each grant at the county its stated purpose names, falling back to the recipient’s county when the purpose names no place; US grants only. A county shows only if it carries the top 95% of that view’s dollars. Purposes are read from the foundation’s own 990 grant descriptions.
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 +41% since the first grant, against +39% for the ones you funded once.
32 repeat relationships — 30 still active in FY2024, 2 since wound down; 6 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, 81% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $59k 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
- BSBALTIMORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC6× · 2019–2024 · $220k · revenue +82%
- EPENOCH PRATT FREE LIBRARY OF BALTIMORE CITY6× · 2019–2024 · $69k · revenue +37%
- BPBALTIMORE PUBLIC MEDIA CORPORATION6× · 2019–2024 · $63k · revenue +41%
Funded once
- TAThe Associated - Emergency Fundone grant, 2023 · $25k
MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INCgraduatedone grant, 2020 · $3k · revenue +39%- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2020 · $3k
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.
Jews united for justice advances economic, racial, and social justice in the baltimore-washington region by educating and mobilizing our local jewish communities to action.
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…
To foster cooperation and understanding within the jewish community, build relationships and mutual understanding with ethnic, racial, and religious groups across maryland, advocate at all levels of government (continued on schedule o)for…
Enhance the lives of jewish students as that they may enrich the jewish people and the world. hillel actively seeks to engage jewish students on their own terms, to provide them with opportunities to participate in jewish life.
To cultivate career advancement opportunities for local talent, facilitate talent acquisition for local employers, increase access to capital for local entrepreneurs' social ventures, and foster cross-sector collaboration to address city…
The associated: jewish community federation of baltimore strengthens and nurtures jewish life by engaging and supporting community partners in greater baltimore, israel, and around the world. continued on schedule osince 1920, the…
The weitzman national museum of american jewish history, on independence mall in philadelphia, presents educational programs and experiences that preserve, explore, and celebrate the history of jews in america. its purpose is to connect…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
For more than 125 years, the mission of the johns hopkins hospital has been to lead the world in the diagnosis and treatment of disease and to train tomorrow's great physicians, nurses and scientists. above all, we aim to provide the…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Jewish Museum of Maryland Inc and the most unlike its peers is Mica Inc. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 41 years old; the field is 18. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 19% startups (under 5 years old) — 7% of your grantees by number, and just 2% 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.
30 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. 30 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 BALTIMORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA INC ↗
- Who funds JEWISH NATIONAL FUND (KEREN KAYEMETH LEISRAEL) INC ↗
- Who funds ENOCH PRATT FREE LIBRARY OF BALTIMORE CITY ↗
- Who funds BALTIMORE PUBLIC MEDIA CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds PLANNED PARENTHOOD OF MARYLAND INC ↗
- Who funds MAZON A Jewish Response to Hunger ↗
- Who funds FUEL FUND OF MARYLAND INC ↗
- Who funds BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART ↗
- Who funds JEWISH MUSEUM OF MARYLAND INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN JEWISH WORLD SERVICE INC ↗
- Who funds The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Inc ↗
- Who funds The Fistula Foundation ↗
- Who funds THE MARYLAND FOOD BANK INC ↗
- Who funds CENTER STAGE ASSOCIATES INC ↗
- Who funds CHESAPEAKE BAY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds EVERYMAN THEATRE INC ↗
- Who funds THE GIL SANDLER FUND INC ↗
- Who funds MICA INC ↗
- Who funds INNOVATION AFRICA ↗
- Who funds BALTIMORE JEWELRY CENTER ↗
- Who funds HAZON INC ↗
- Who funds NEW ISRAEL FUND ↗
- Who funds BLUE WATER BALTIMORE ↗
- Who funds THE CENTRAL SCHOLARSHIP BUREAU INC ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA 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: Baltimore Community Foundation Inc · The Abell Foundation Inc · Associated Jewish Charities of Baltimore · The Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation Inc · France-Merrick Foundation Inc · Annie E Casey Foundation Inc · T Rowe Price Program for Charitable Giving Inc · The William G Baker Jr Memorial Fund · The Henry and Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Foundation Inc · The Joseph Meyerhoff Fund Inc · The Morris Goldseker Foundation of Maryland Inc · T Rowe Price 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 Nelson & Sara Fishman Family Foundation Inc 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- Everyman Theatre Inc — 15% of income from government
- The Maryland Food Bank Inc — 11% of income from government
- Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Inc — 11% of income from government
- Center Stage Associates Inc — 7% of income from government
- Baltimore Clayworks Inc — 5% of income from government
- Baltimore Museum of Art — 4% of income from government
- Chesapeake Bay Foundation Inc — 2% of income from government
- Jewish Museum of Maryland Inc — 2% of income from government
- Planned Parenthood of Maryland 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 Nelson & Sara Fishman Family Foundation Inc?
Find your warmest path to The Nelson & Sara Fishman Family Foundation Inc 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.