· Private foundation
The Satter 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 FY2018–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k6 grants · $22k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $80k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $50k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| SHIRLEY RYAN ABILITY LAB | $50,000 |
| NEW HORIZON HOUSE | $25,000 |
| RENEW VENTURE LAB 2 | $25,000 |
| GATEWAY FOR CANCER RESEARCH | $10,000 |
| BRIGHT STAR COMMUNITY OUTREACH | $10,000 |
| VET JOBS | $10,000 |
| PREVENT CHILD ABUSE IN AMERICA | $5,000 |
| THE GOLDEN APPLE FOUNDATION | $5,000 |
| NORTHWESTERN MEMORIAL FOUNDATION | $5,000 |
| INVEST FOR KIDS | $5,000 |
| PMC JIMMY FUND | $1,000 |
| HIPPOCRATIC CANCER RESEARCH FOUNDATION | $1,000 |
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 (FY18–24, $381k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 84% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 10% of The Satter Foundation’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.
82 repeat relationships — 6 still active in FY2024, 76 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, 50% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $76k 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
Northwestern University5× · 2018–2022 · $1.6M · revenue +33%- GFGATEWAY FOR CANCER RESEARCH6× · 2018–2024 · $624k · revenue +131%
NAVY SEAL FOUNDATION INC6× · 2018–2023 · $584k · revenue +26%
Funded once
- NCNATURE CONSERVANCY OF ILLINOISone grant, 2021 · $500k
- CFCENTER FOR APPLIED NON-VIOLENT ACTION AND STRATEGIES (CANVAS)one grant, 2020 · $250k
- CCCCF - CENTRAL INVESTMENT FUND ILLINOIS COVID-19 RESPONSEone grant, 2020 · $100k
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.
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.
See schedule onorc at the university of chicago conducts research and data science on critical societal issues to guide decision-making and the development of programs and public policy. our experts identify relationships and trends, and…
Central indiana corporate partnership (cicp) is an alliance of indiana's business and research university leaders coming together to foster long-term prosperity for the region. cicp's mission is to transform the economy of indiana in order…
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
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 chicago public education fund (the fund) is a nonprofit organization that improves public schools in chicago by investing in the talented educators who lead them.
The University of New Haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts and professional education. Our mission is to prepare our students to lead purposeful and fulfilling lives in a…
Aacsb international provides quality assurance of business school programs, the latest in business education intelligence, thought leadership, and learning and development services.
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
The primary mission of furman as a liberal arts institution is to provide a distinctive education in fine arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and the sciences, as well as selected professional disciplines.
The mission of the george washington university (gw) is to educate individuals in liberal arts, languages, sciences, learned professions, and other courses and subjects of study, and to conduct scholarly research and publish the findings…
Help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Junior Achievement of Chicago and the most unlike its peers is Wildlife Conservation Society. 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 34 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% 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.
97 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. 97 of the 140 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 Northwestern University ↗
- Who funds FIDELITY INVESTMENTS CHARITABLE GIFT FUND ↗
- Who funds Accelerate Institute ↗
- Who funds GATEWAY FOR CANCER RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds NAVY SEAL FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago ↗
- Who funds THE NATURE CONSERVANCY ↗
- Who funds PERSPECTIVES CHARTER SCHOOLS ↗
- Who funds LAKE FOREST COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds UNITED STATES OLYMPIC AND PARALYMPIC FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Beyond Sports Foundation ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INC ↗
- Who funds THE JOFFREY BALLET ↗
- Who funds THE TRUST FOR PUBLIC LAND ↗
- Who funds END RAPE ON CAMPUS ↗
- Who funds The Chicago Community Trust ↗
- Who funds Edify ↗
- Who funds CHILD MIND INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds MARINE CORPS SCHOLARSHIP FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds OPPORTUNITY INTERNATIONAL INC D/B/A OPPORTUNITY INTERNATIONAL-US ↗
- Who funds UNLEASH PROSPERITY INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICARES FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds NOBLE NETWORK OF CHARTER SCHOOLS ↗
- Who funds Wildlife Conservation Society ↗
- Who funds ONE ACRE FUND ↗
- Who funds WORLD BUSINESS CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT OF CHICAGO ↗
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 Chicago Community Trust · The Canning Foundation · Patrick G and Shirley W Ryan Foundation · The Robert Thomas Bobins Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · Lavin Family Foundation · Baird Foundation Inc · Stearns Family Charitable Fund · Frank Family Foundation · The Gorter Family 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 Satter 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.
- Americares Foundation Inc — 0% of income from government
- Pan-Massachusetts Challenge 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 Satter Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Satter 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.