· Private foundation
Walter S Mander 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 FY2021–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k41 grants · $151k
- $10k–50k14 grants · $171k
- $50k–250k3 grants · $216k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| FOREFRONT | $116,393 |
| UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW SCHOOL | $50,000 |
| NORTHWESTERN MEMORIAL FOUNDATION | $50,000 |
| STAR FARM CHICAGO | $20,350 |
| OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS | $15,000 |
| JEWISH UNITED FUND | $15,000 |
| GARFIELD PARK COMMUNITY COUNCIL | $15,000 |
| CHICAGO BOTANIC GARDEN | $15,000 |
| COURT THEATRE | $10,750 |
| OAK PARK TEMPLE | $10,000 |
| BABSON COLLEGE | $10,000 |
| THE FORWARD ASSOCIATION INC | $10,000 |
| NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY | $10,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS SPRINGFIELD | $10,000 |
| BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY | $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 (FY21–25, $132k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 99% 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 +28% since the first grant, against +4% for the ones you funded once.
55 repeat relationships — 41 still active in FY2025, 14 since wound down; 16 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, 89% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $60k 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
- FFOREFRONT5× · 2021–2025 · $477k · revenue +81%
- GPGarfield Park Community Council5× · 2021–2025 · $83k · revenue +6%
- GHGROWING HOME INC5× · 2021–2025 · $82k · revenue +47%
Funded once
- AAAMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCESone grant, 2024 · $10k · revenue -40%
- UCU CHICAGO HILLELone grant, 2024 · $10k
- GFGOOD FOOD CATALYSTone grant, 2024 · $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.
The chicago bar foundation brings the legal community together through advocacy, funding, and innovation to improve access to justice for people in need and to make the legal system more fair, equitable, and effective.
A better chicago is changing how chicago fights poverty by investing in bold ideas that create opportunity for our youth.
To inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy
Illinois college is a co-educational institution of higher education learning providing a four-year educational program leading to the baccalaureate degree. illinois college is a community committed to the highest standards of scholarship…
We provide exemplary interdisciplinary programs for a community of scholar-practitioners within a distributed learning model grounded in student-driven inquiry and leading to enhanced knowledge.
The chicago psychoanalytic institute transforms the lives of individuals, families and communities, using psychoanalytic knowledge to help them grow and thrive.
Arise chicago builds partnerships between faith communities and workers to fight workplace injustice through education, organizing, and advocating for public policy changes.
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…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
A grass roots civil rights activisim, community outreach and political empowerment to the community members.
Connecting and amplifying the power of individuals to build a just, equitable, and inclusive city.
To Prepare Students for Success in Four-Year Colleges.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Chicago Horticultural Society and the most unlike its peers is Kinderhaus. 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 28 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) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% 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.
55 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. 55 of the 101 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 FOREFRONT ↗
- Who funds Garfield Park Community Council ↗
- Who funds GROWING HOME INC ↗
- Who funds STAR FARM CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds ADVOCATES FOR URBAN AGRICULTURE NFP ↗
- Who funds JEWISH UNITED FUND OF METROPOLITAN CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds THE SELFHELP HOME INC ↗
- Who funds ALLIES FOR COMMUNITY BUSINESS INC ↗
- Who funds BABSON COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds Plant Chicago NFP ↗
- Who funds NEW ISRAEL FUND ↗
- Who funds URBAN GROWERS COLLECTIVE INC ↗
- Who funds The Forward Association Inc ↗
- Who funds Jewish Council on Urban Affairs ↗
- Who funds SEVEN GENERATIONS AHEAD ↗
- Who funds THE DELTA INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds UNC HEALTH FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds Bucknell University ↗
- Who funds Sweet Water Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Inc ↗
- Who funds NEIGHBORSPACE ↗
- Who funds JUST ROOTS JUST ROOTS CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE ↗
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 · Forefront · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · The Lumpkin Family Foundation · Field Foundation of Illinois · Polk Bros Foundation Inc · The Joyce Foundation · Builders Vision Foundation · Arie and Ida Crown Memorial · Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago · Circle of Service Foundation · United Way of Metropolitan Chicago 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 Walter S Mander 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.
- American Academy of Arts & Sciences — 3% of income from government
- Babson 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.