· Private foundation
William M Hales 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 FY2019–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k6 grants · $19k
- $10k–50k19 grants · $348k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| CENTER OF HOPE | $30,000 |
| OGLALA LAKOTA COLLEGE | $30,000 |
| CLEARWATER CAMP FOUNDATION | $30,000 |
| SIERRA CLUB FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY | $25,000 |
| FOOD BANK FOR LAMIER COUNTY | $20,000 |
| CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $20,000 |
| BELOIT COLLEGE | $20,000 |
| LIVING LANDS & WATERS | $20,000 |
| MEDIATORS FOUNDATION INC | $20,000 |
| BIG CITY MOUNTAINEERS | $20,000 |
| ONE SPIRIT | $15,000 |
| ST JUDES CHILDREN'S RESEARCH HOSPITAL | $12,500 |
| HADLEY SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND | $10,000 |
| MERCY HOME FOR BOYS & GIRLS | $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 (FY19–25, $7k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, 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.
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.
32 repeat relationships — 21 still active in FY2025, 11 since wound down; 4 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (too recent to call).
How the two cohorts compare
Organizations
Total granted
Still filing today
New vs renewed · share of each year
In FY2025, 82% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $65k 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
- CCClearwater Camp Foundation Inc5× · 2019–2025 · $220k · revenue +700%
BELOIT COLLEGE5× · 2019–2025 · $147k · revenue +6%- OLOGLALA LAKOTA COLLEGE5× · 2019–2025 · $65k · revenue +30%
Funded once
- OSONE SPIRITone grant, 2024 · $10k
- WTWINDOWN TO THE WORLD COMMone grant, 2019 · $1k
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.
We are chicago's jesuit, catholic university - a diverse community seeking god in all things and working to expand knowledge in the service of humanity through learning, justice, and faith.
The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is a world-renowned center for biological discovery and training that is notably affiliated with more than 60 Nobel Prize winners. Research is conducted by full-time faculty as well as hundreds of the…
The organization's mission is to educate students for creative occupations in diverse fields of arts and media.
Lake Forest Graduate School of Management's mission is to bring the real world to business education and leadership development.
Saint xavier university, a catholic institution inspired by the heritage of the sisters of mercy, educates persons to search for truth, think critically, communicate effectively and serve wisely and compassionately in support of human…
The mission of the university of chicago has been to sustain at the highest level of excellence, the communication of knowledge, the creation of knowledge and the fostering of a dynamic community of scholars and students.
The museum's mission statement is: "to discover, interpret, and disseminate - through scientific research and education - knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe."
The university's goal in the coming decade is to advance learning through the integration of teaching, research and service to others. the core of this goal is to prepare graduates to engage with the world and lead lives of meaning. to do…
The bac is committed to provide excellence in design education grounded in practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Lake forest academy strives to embody in its practices - and to cultivate in its students -excellence of character, scholarship, citizenship, and responsibility.
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…
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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Chicago Horticultural Society and the most unlike its peers is Endeavor Health Clinical Operations. 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 64 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.
29 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. 29 of the 38 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 URANTIA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Clearwater Camp Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds BELOIT COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds OGLALA LAKOTA COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds GREATER CHICAGO FOOD DEPOSITORY ↗
- Who funds Chicago Symphony Orchestra ↗
- Who funds UNION LEAGUE BOYS AND GIRLS CLUBS ↗
- Who funds LIVING LANDS & WATERS ↗
- Who funds SIERRA CLUB FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BIG CITY MOUNTAINEERS ↗
- Who funds GOOD NEWS PARTNERS ↗
- Who funds CHICAGO HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds HADLEY INSTITUTE FOR THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED ↗
- Who funds The Food Bank for Larimer County ↗
- Who funds MEDIATORS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ST JUDE CHILDREN'S RESEARCH HOSPITAL INC ↗
- Who funds ONE SPIRIT ↗
- Who funds BEACON ACADEMY A MONTESSORI HIGH SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds THE JOSSELYN CENTER NFP ↗
- Who funds Endeavor Health Clinical Operations ↗
- Who funds Wellness House ↗
- Who funds THE ADLER PLANETARIUM ↗
- Who funds THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ↗
- Who funds NORTH SHORE SENIOR CENTER ↗
- Who funds Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana ↗
- Who funds COUNSELING CENTER OF THE NORTH SHORE INC ↗
- Who funds LINCOLN PARK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY ↗
- Who funds THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY ↗
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 · American Endowment Foundation · Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · The Blackbaud Giving Fund · National Philanthropic Trust · Jpmorgan Chase Foundation · The Pfizer Foundation Inc · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund
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 William M Hales 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.
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 William M Hales Foundation?
Find your warmest path to William M Hales 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.