· Private foundation
Arts Equity & Education Fund
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 $10k4 grants · $16k
- $10k–50k22 grants · $417k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $125k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| PITTSBURGH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $75,000 |
| CARNEGIE MUSEUMS | $50,000 |
| PITTSBURGH BALLET THEATRE | $35,000 |
| THE ELLIS SCHOOL | $30,000 |
| KELLY STRAYHORN THEATER | $27,500 |
| ALLENTOWN SYMPHONY ASSOCIATION | $25,000 |
| BREW HOUSE ASSOCIATION | $25,000 |
| PEARL ARTS MOVEMENT & SOUND | $25,000 |
| CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS | $25,000 |
| MATRESS FACTORY | $25,000 |
| NEW HAZLETT THEATER CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS | $25,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $20,000 |
| SILVER EYE CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY | $20,000 |
| TEXTURE CONTEMPORARY BALLET | $15,000 |
| ASSOCIATED ARTISTS OF PITTSBURGH | $15,000 |
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, $108k) land where the poverty rate runs at 11%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 0% 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.
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 +17% since the first grant, against -4% for the ones you funded once.
52 repeat relationships — 23 still active in FY2025, 29 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, 81% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $104k 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
- PBPITTSBURGH BALLET THEATRE INC5× · 2019–2025 · $350k · revenue +22%
- PSPITTSBURGH SYMPHONY INC5× · 2021–2025 · $310k · revenue +80%
- TETHE ELLIS SCHOOL7× · 2019–2025 · $230k · revenue +33%
Funded once
- TATHE AUGUST WILSON CENTERone grant, 2018 · $35k
- AAPERTUREone grant, 2022 · $30k
- OPOAKLAND PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONone grant, 2020 · $28k · revenue -50%
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 mission of pittsburgh public theater is to provide artistically diverse theatrical experiences of the highest quality. pittsburgh public theater also strives to serve, challenge, stimulate, and (continued on schedule o)
We connect the people and places of philadelphia through art and partnership. the organization is a free-standing platform that endeavors to show forward-thinking, high-quality contemporary visual and performance art in the city. the…
The corporation advances excellence in the arts, including studio, media, and creative writing. to achieve its mission, the corporation provides equipment and facilities for individual artists, conducts educational programs, and stimulates…
Pittsburgh festival opera presents innovative opera for imaginative audiences. pittsburgh festival opera is pittsburgh's modern music drama company and, as such, focuses on creating new works, on reinterpreting older works in new ways, on…
The mission of artphilly is to amplify philadelphia's arts and culture by commissioning, presenting, producing, and promoting art of all kinds for local audiences and the world. its vision is to spotlight(continued on schedule o)the city…
Pennsylvania college of art & design is a professional art college offering a bfa degree, certificates, credentials, and curricula that enable students of all ages to pursue art as their life's work.
Artpace san antonio is a nonprofit residency program which supports texas, national, and international artists in the creation of new art. see schedule o for continuation.
The association for public art (apa, formerly the fairmount park art association) commissions, preserves, interprets and promotes public art in philadelphia. dedicated to creating a museum without walls that informs, engages and inspires…
Dedicated to the creation, presentation and advancement of contemporary art through its exhibitions, educational programming and studio art program.
See schedule o.inspired by our home city, baltimore center stage acts as a cultural catalyst for all communities to access theater in every form and engage in compelling conversations. programming: capture the collective imagination and…
Balletx expands the vocabulary of contemporary ballet for all audiences through innovative performances, world premiere choreography, dance education, and community programs.
On the Boards' mission is to invest in leading contemporary performing artists near and far and connect them to a diverse range of communities interested in forward-thinking art and ideas.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and the most unlike its peers is Not Forgotten Home and Community Services. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 30 years old; the field is 19. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 17% startups (under 5 years old) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% 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.
61 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. 61 of the 82 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 PITTSBURGH BALLET THEATRE INC ↗
- Who funds PITTSBURGH SYMPHONY INC ↗
- Who funds THE ELLIS SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds HILL DANCE ACADEMY THEATRE ↗
- Who funds Braddock Carnegie Library Assoc ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds ALMA LEWIS ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY THEATER PROJECT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds THE NEIGHBORHOOD ACADEMY ↗
- Who funds BUNKER PROJECTS INC ↗
- Who funds UNIQUE PROJECTS INC ↗
- Who funds WESTMORELAND MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART ↗
- Who funds FAME ↗
- Who funds CREATIVE TIME INC ↗
- Who funds PITTSBURGH GLASS CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds THE MATTRESS FACTORY LTD ↗
- Who funds BREW HOUSE ARTS ↗
- Who funds PEARLARTS MOVEMENT & SOUND ↗
- Who funds WOMEN OF VISIONS INC ↗
- Who funds SILVER EYE CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY ↗
- Who funds CENTER OF LIFE ↗
- Who funds THE SOCIETY FOR ART IN CRAFTS ↗
- Who funds CREATIVE CITIZEN STUDIOS ↗
- Who funds NOT FORGOTTEN HOME AND COMMUNITY SERVICES ↗
- Who funds ART21 INC ↗
- Who funds GREATER PITTSBURGH ARTS COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds QUANTUM THEATRE INC ↗
- Who funds ASSOCIATED ARTISTS OF PITTSBURGH ↗
- Who funds The City Theatre Company Inc ↗
- Who funds OAKLAND PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ↗
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 Heinz Endowments · Opportunity Foundation · Hillman Family Foundations · The Pittsburgh Foundation · The Fine Foundation · McKinney Charitable Foundation · The Grable Foundation · Program to Aid Citizen Enterprise Inc · The Jack Buncher Foundation · Richard King Mellon Foundation · McCune Foundation Pnc Bank Na · The Buhl 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 Arts Equity & Education Fund 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 Arts Equity & Education Fund?
Find your warmest path to Arts Equity & Education Fund 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.