· Private foundation
The Robert and Karen Sobel Charitable 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 FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k11 grants · $33k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $35k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| UJA FEDERATION OF NEW YORK | $25,000 |
| CMC FOUNDATION FOR CHANGE | $10,000 |
| BLYTHEDALE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL | $8,500 |
| FIDF | $5,000 |
| COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | $5,000 |
| THE 1898 FOUNDATION | $3,600 |
| TEMPLE SHOLOM | $3,600 |
| COMMUNITY ACCESS | $2,500 |
| JCCA | $1,800 |
| HARLEM CHILDRENS ZONE | $1,250 |
| CHRON'S & COLITIS FOUNDATION OF AMERICA | $1,000 |
| JEWISH FEDERATION OF METROWEST NJ | $360 |
| THANC FOUNDATION | $180 |
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, $11k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 29% 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.
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 +39% since the first grant, against +16% for the ones you funded once.
12 repeat relationships — 5 still active in FY2024, 7 since wound down; 7 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, 77% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $15k 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
- UJUNITED JEWISH APPEAL-FEDERATION OF JEWISH PHILANTHROPIES OF NEW YORK INC7× · 2017–2024 · $250k · revenue +39%
- TATHE ADMINISTRATORS OF THE TULANE EDUCATIONAL FUND5× · 2017–2022 · $165k · revenue +72%
- RCRYE COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL2× · 2017–2018 · $90k · revenue +26%
Funded once
- FLFORDHAM LAW SCHOOLone grant, 2021 · $100k
- TOTHE ORPHAN DISEASE PATHWAY PROJECTone grant, 2020 · $13k · revenue -29%
- CCCOLEL CHABADone grant, 2019 · $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.
Nyu is a private university with approximately 60,000 matriculating students in 20 schools and institutes. nyu's primary missions are education, research and scholarship, and patient care.
Operate a state-of-the-art, world-class genomic research center that creates and uses advanced genomics to understand the genetic basis of disease. for more information, see schedule o.
We educate the next generation of leaders to improve the health of our society.
Leadership in the prevention, treatment, and cure of cancer through excellence, vision and cost effectiveness in patient care, outreach programs, research, and education.
The graduate center foundation is committed to promoting and safe-guarding the success of the graduate center by raising funds and managing and investing donations for use by the graduate center. the board of trustees of the foundation…
Sanford burnham prebys medical discovery institute's mission is to advance the biomedical sciences by cultivating the next generation of scientific leaders, providing meaningful opportunities for researchers of all backgrounds to learn,…
Fred hutch cancer center ("fred hutch") unites innovative research and compassionate care to prevent and eliminate cancer and infectious disease. continued on schedule o
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
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 Community Access Inc and the most unlike its peers is American Museum of Natural History. 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 36 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) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 10% 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.
31 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. 31 of the 47 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 THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds UNITED JEWISH APPEAL-FEDERATION OF JEWISH PHILANTHROPIES OF NEW YORK INC ↗
- Who funds THE ADMINISTRATORS OF THE TULANE EDUCATIONAL FUND ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ↗
- Who funds RYE COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds CMC FOUNDATION FOR CHANGE ↗
- Who funds 1898 FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds BLYTHEDALE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL ↗
- Who funds THE ORPHAN DISEASE PATHWAY PROJECT ↗
- Who funds YELLOWSTONE CLUB COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE BREAST CANCER RESEARCH FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds SUNRISE DAY CAMPS ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds BIG SKY COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION ↗
- Who funds FEEDING WESTCHESTER INC ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES ↗
- Who funds CROHN'S & COLITIS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY ACCESS INC ↗
- Who funds LETS WIN PANCREATIC CANCER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds East End Hospice Inc ↗
- Who funds OLD PINE COMMUNITY CENTER ↗
- Who funds HARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE INC ↗
- Who funds MOVING TRADITIONS ↗
- Who funds CITY PARKS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds SHATTERPROOF A NONPROFIT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds SWISS INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds American Museum of Natural History ↗
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 Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Jewish Communal Fund · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · National Philanthropic Trust · Boston Foundation Inc · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · American Endowment Foundation · Donor Advised Charitable Giving 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 Robert and Karen Sobel Charitable 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.
- Shatterproof a Nonprofit Corporation — 2% 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 Robert and Karen Sobel Charitable Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Robert and Karen Sobel Charitable 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.