· Private foundation
Sunshine Charitable 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 FY2018–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k40 grants · $114k
- $10k–50k14 grants · $201k
- $50k–250k4 grants · $385k
- $250k+5 grants · $2.6M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Ducks Unlimited Inc | $1,028,000 |
| Door County YMCA | $510,000 |
| National Wrestling Coaches Association Inc | $450,000 |
| FARE | $333,333 |
| Northwestern Memorial Foundation | $250,000 |
| Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center | $150,000 |
| Delta Waterfowl Foundation | $100,000 |
| University of Chicago | $85,000 |
| Start Early (FKA Ounce of Prevention Fund) | $50,000 |
| National Alopecia Areata Foundation | $40,000 |
| USA Wrestling | $29,757 |
| Ann & Robert H Lurie Children's Foundation | $20,000 |
| Gorton Community Center | $11,000 |
| Help Our Military Heroes Inc | $10,000 |
| Galena School District #120 | $10,000 |
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 (FY18–25, $92k) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 1% 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 5% of Sunshine Charitable 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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +42% since the first grant, against +27% for the ones you funded once.
80 repeat relationships — 57 still active in FY2025, 23 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, 100% 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
Northwestern University5× · 2018–2023 · $5.4M · revenue +33%- LPLUCILE PACKARD FOUNDATION FOR CHILDREN'S HEALTH4× · 2018–2021 · $2.8M · revenue +19%
- NWNATIONAL WRESTLING COACHES ASSOCIATION7× · 2018–2025 · $1.4M · revenue +68%
Funded once
- CCChicago Cred Incgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $250k · revenue +41%
- MGMassachusetts General Hospitalone grant, 2024 · $250k
- NWNATIONAL WRESTLING HALL OF FAMEone grant, 2018 · $200k · revenue +13%
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.
Lake Forest Graduate School of Management's mission is to bring the real world to business education and leadership development.
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.
Provide post-secondary education leading to a baccalaureate degree. Program service expenditures are made in conjunction with the operation of a liberal arts college spread over 107 acres with approximately 63 educational and support…
Depauw university develops leaders the world needs through an uncommon commitment to the liberal arts. depauw's diverse and inclusive learning and living experience, distinctive in its rigorous intellectual engagement and its global and…
The Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, is an independent and separate nonprofit entity from the University of Illinois. Our mission is to encourage and administer private gifts and serve the UI System by working closely with…
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 team at kipp chicago schools is guided by a simple, yet powerful mission: to create a network of excellent schools in chicago that teach our students the character and academic skills necessary to succeed in college and beyond, and to…
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.
We value excellence and innovation in clinical and basic research, coordinated and comprehensive patient care, ongoing physician education, and evidence-based child advocacy. our goal is to provide leadership in endeavors that promote the…
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…
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
To Prepare Students for Success in Four-Year Colleges.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Team Impact Inc and the most unlike its peers is Chicago Cred Inc. 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 31 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 13% 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.
81 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. 81 of the 121 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 LUCILE PACKARD FOUNDATION FOR CHILDREN'S HEALTH ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL WRESTLING COACHES ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds Door County YMCA INC ↗
- Who funds CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL MEDICAL CENTER ↗
- Who funds Delta Waterfowl Foundation ↗
- Who funds National Alopecia Areata Foundation ↗
- Who funds Chicago Cred Inc ↗
- Who funds Boys & Girls Club of Lake County ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL WRESTLING HALL OF FAME ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds Ann & Robert H Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago ↗
- Who funds DES PLAINES WETLANDS CONSERVANCY INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN PARTNERSHIP FOR EOSINOPHILIC DISORDERS ↗
- Who funds AMES EDUCATION FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Gorton Community Center ↗
- Who funds TRUSTEES OF BOSTON COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds BOYS & GIRLS CLUB OF DOOR COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds TEAM IMPACT INC ↗
- Who funds Help Our Military Heroes Inc ↗
- Who funds NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HARVARD VARSITY CLUB INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION ↗
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 · Baxter International Foundation · Greater Green Bay Community Foundation Inc · The Gorter Family Foundation · The Grainger Foundation Inc · John and Kathleen Schreiber Foundation D/B/A Schreiber Philanthropy · Door County Community Foundation Inc · AbbVie Foundation · Mmg Foundation Inc · Lutsey Family Foundation · The Ayco Charitable Foundation · Baird Foundation 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 Sunshine 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.
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston College — 3% 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 Sunshine Charitable Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Sunshine 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.