· Private foundation
The Shau-Wai & Marie Lam 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 clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k31 grants · $37k
- $10k–50k6 grants · $83k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $100k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| NEW JERSEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $50,000 |
| CHINATOWN HEALTH CLINIC FDN | $50,000 |
| OHANA PADDLING ASSOCIATION INC | $28,000 |
| ACE FOUNDATION | $12,500 |
| THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART | $12,000 |
| NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC | $10,000 |
| BRIGHTFOCUS FOUNDATION | $10,000 |
| AMERICAN FRIENDS OF SHANGHAI MUSEUM | $10,000 |
| NJ CHINESE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE | $7,000 |
| CHINESE AMERICAN PLANNING COUNCIL | $5,000 |
| RWJ BARNABAS HEALTH FOUNDATION | $4,000 |
| ORGANIZATION OF CHINESE AMERICANS | $3,000 |
| THE REEVES-REED ARBORETUM | $3,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $3,000 |
| THE CHILDREN'S ORCHESTRA SOCIETY | $2,500 |
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 (FY17–25, $110k) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, 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 +36% since the first grant, against -1% for the ones you funded once.
67 repeat relationships — 36 still active in FY2025, 31 since wound down; 2 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, 94% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $14k 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
- NJNEW JERSEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA8× · 2017–2025 · $310k · revenue +53%
- CHCHINATOWN HEALTH CLINIC FOUNDATION INC8× · 2017–2025 · $282k · revenue +33%
- AFACE FOUNDATION6× · 2017–2025 · $73k · revenue +643%
Funded once
- AAASIAN ART MUSEUM OF SAN FRANCISCOone grant, 2020 · $125k
- CICHINA INSTITUTE IN AMERICA INCORPORATEDgraduatedone grant, 2017 · $25k · revenue +83%
- NANational Automobile Dealers Associationone grant, 2017 · $12k · revenue -7%
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 society is an international nonprofit, nonpartisan organization which connects people and institutions in asia and the world to build understanding, address challenges and maximize opportunities.
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 Academy's mission is to enhance member career fulfillment and promote brain health for all.
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.
Ci works to spotlight and secure the critical benefits that nature provides to humanity.
To enhance both the global competitiveness of u.s. business and the u.s. quality of life by promoting and facilitating voluntary consensus standards and conformity assessment systems, and safeguarding their integrity.
Airlines for america (a4a) vigorously advocates for america's airlines as models of safety, customer service, and environmental responsibility; and as the indispensable network that drives our nation's economy and global…
Cna is a non-profit research organization that operates the center for naval analyses, a federally funded research center that has supported the navy and marine corps for nearly seventy years, and the institute for public research that…
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.
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.
American psychological association is a national membership organization created to promote the advancement, communication, and application of psychological science and knowledge to benefit society and improve lives. apa fulfills these…
2025 was a turbulent year for the medical and health research community, but our commitment to advocating for science never wavered. from pushing back against funding threats to elevating researchers' voices and equipping advocates, we…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Chinese-American Planning Council Inc and the most unlike its peers is Father Flanagan's Boys' Home. 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 43 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) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% 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.
78 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2026.
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 2017–2026, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 78 of the 119 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 NEW JERSEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ↗
- Who funds CHINATOWN HEALTH CLINIC FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds COMMITTEE OF 100 INC ↗
- Who funds ACE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds OHANA PADDLING ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE SHANGHAI MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds CHINESE-AMERICAN PLANNING COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds CLASSICALLY CONNECTED INC ↗
- Who funds CHINA INSTITUTE IN AMERICA INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds THE DUNHUANG FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR TEEN SAFE DRIVING INC ↗
- Who funds THE CHILDREN'S ORCHESTRA SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds THE PHILHARMONIC SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NY INC ↗
- Who funds National Automobile Dealers Association ↗
- Who funds BRIGHTFOCUS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ACE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds REEVES - REED ARBORETUM ↗
- Who funds THE ASIA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ASIA ART ARCHIVE IN AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds ORGANIZATION OF CHINESE AMERICANS INC ↗
- Who funds White Plains Hospital Medical Center ↗
- Who funds MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES USA INC ↗
- Who funds PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds Community Food Bank Of New Jersey 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: The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund · Gofundmeorg · The Tang Fund · The Coca-Cola Foundation Inc · The Henry Luce Foundation Inc · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · Tides Foundation · American Express Foundation · Ibm International Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Gs Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management Inc
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 Shau-Wai & Marie Lam 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, a single department, or state — and drag the year to watch it move.
- New Jersey Symphony Orchestra — 21% of income from government
- The National Federation of the Blind — 2% of income from government
- Feed the Children Inc — 1% of income from government
- Reeves - Reed Arboretum — 1% of income from government
- New Jersey Performing Arts Center Corporation — 0% of income from government
- Wounded Warrior Project Inc — 0% of income from government
- Food for the Poor Inc — 0% of income from government
- Shriners Hospitals for Children — 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 Shau-Wai & Marie Lam Family Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Shau-Wai & Marie Lam 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.