· Public charity
Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts Inc
The baltimore office of promotion & the arts (bopa) was created in 2002 with a mission to make baltimore a more vibrant and creative city.
What you funded, over time
Every grant clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 18 grants below total $232,249 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $537,411 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $305,162 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k12 grants · $88k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $86k
- $50k–250k1 grant · $58k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BALTIMORE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION INC | $58,459 |
| THE CENTRAL BALTIMORE PARTNERSHIP INC | $21,500 |
| FUSION PARTNERSHIPS INC | $19,400 |
| EMPACT ART INC | $19,000 |
| ARTS EVERY DAY INC | $16,000 |
| WIDE ANGLE YOUTH MEDIA | $10,000 |
| LEADERS OF TOMORROW YOUTH CENTER INC | $9,000 |
| BALTIMORE CHILDRENS CHOIR INC | $9,000 |
| FRACTURED ATLAS | $8,400 |
| MUSE 360 INC | $8,200 |
| MAKE STUDIO ART PROGRAM INC | $8,000 |
| CITYLIT PROJECT INC | $7,800 |
| BRISTOL PLAYERS INC | $7,600 |
| COLUMBIA COMMUNITY CARE INC | $6,690 |
| MAGICAL EXPERIENCES ART COMPANY LTD | $6,000 |
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 (FY17–24, $13k) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 47% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +54% since the first grant, against +29% for the ones you funded once.
30 repeat relationships — 9 still active in FY2024, 21 since wound down; 8 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (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 FY2024, 53% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $81k 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
- AFARTS FOR LEARNING MARYLAND INC5× · 2017–2021 · $115k · revenue +375%
- CPCityLit Project Inc8× · 2017–2024 · $80k · revenue +187%
- PAPENNSYLVANIA AVENUE BLACK ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT DISTRICT2× · 2021–2023 · $74k · revenue +225%
Funded once
- BFBALTIMORE FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS INCone grant, 2017 · $400k · revenue -79%
- NUNATIONAL URBAN FELLOWS INCone grant, 2022 · $35k · revenue -69%
- GMGALERIE MYRTISone grant, 2022 · $32k
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 baltimore office of promotion & the arts (bopa) was created in 2002 with a mission to make baltimore a more vibrant and creative city. bopa serves as baltimore city's designated arts council and film office and coordinates a wide…
To build an inclusive community by connecting diverse groups of artists and residents of baltimore county and beyond.
Opera baltimore creates a thrilling, meaningful shared experience between our audience and our artists. our streamlined format focuses on the primary element of opera: the unamplified human voice. featuring top flight professional opera…
Classic Theatre of Marylands mission is to produce bold re-imagined entertaining and accessible interpretations of classical works contemporary plays and musicals with a core commitment to the works of Shakespeare and other major…
The District of Columbia Arts Center serves the Washington DC area by presenting high caliber and challenging works. It encourages professionalism among artists by providing a forum for educational and cultural exchange. DCAC was founded…
Baltimore Improv Group is a group dedicated to advancing inprovisational theatre in the Baltimore area through an active program of performance, instruction, and outreach.
Our vision is to create a diverse and inclusive arts ecosystem where every artist, regardless of status, identity, or background, has the opportunity to achieve potential, flourish as a creative professional, and thrive in communities…
The Bromo Arts District was established in 2012 to encourage and support a thriving downtown arts neighborhood in Baltimore City.
Maryland art place was established to develop and maintain an environment for artists to exhibit their work and facilitate exchanges between artists and the public through educational leadership.
Founded in 2001, gbca is a leading nonprofit provider of services to artists and cultural organizations in the region. (see schedule o)
To provide innovative management of the silver spring black box theatre to both resident companies and other artists and organizations as the rental calendar allows
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Access Art Inc and the most unlike its peers is Columbia Community Care. 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 29 years old; the field is 22. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 19% startups (under 5 years old) — 5% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 1% 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.
65 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. 65 of the 71 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 BALTIMORE FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS INC ↗
- Who funds FUSION PARTNERSHIP INC ↗
- Who funds ARTS FOR LEARNING MARYLAND INC ↗
- Who funds CityLit Project Inc ↗
- Who funds PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE BLACK ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT DISTRICT ↗
- Who funds ARTS EVERY DAY INC ↗
- Who funds STRONG CITY BALTIMORE INC ↗
- Who funds WIDE ANGLE YOUTH MEDIA INC ↗
- Who funds BALTIMORE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds MUSE 360 INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds MARYLAND LAWYERS FOR THE ARTS INC ↗
- Who funds CREATIVE ALLIANCE INC ↗
- Who funds CENTER STAGE ASSOCIATES INC ↗
- Who funds NEIGHBORHOOD DESIGN CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL URBAN FELLOWS INC ↗
- Who funds MAKE STUDIO ART PROGRAM INC ↗
- Who funds FRACTURED ATLAS INC ↗
- Who funds COLLEGEBOUND FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BALTIMORE THEATRE PROJECT ↗
- Who funds EVERYMAN THEATRE INC ↗
- Who funds CHESAPEAKE SHAKESPEARE COMPANY ↗
- Who funds EUBIE BLAKE NATIONAL JAZZ INSTITUTE & CULTURAL CENTER ↗
- Who funds BALTIMORE SCHOOL FOR THE ARTS FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds BLACK CHERRY INC ↗
- Who funds BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART ↗
- Who funds LEADERS OF TOMORROW YOUTH CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds FEDERAL HILL NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds CENTRAL BALTIMORE PARTNERSHIP INC ↗
- Who funds Single Carrot Theatre Inc ↗
- Who funds INTERSECTION OF CHANGE INC ↗
- Who funds EMPACT ART INC ↗
- Who funds HIPPODROME FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM INC ↗
- Who funds EPISCOPAL HOUSING CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds Maryland Humanities Council Inc ↗
- Who funds GREATER REMINGTON IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds BALTIMORE ROCK OPERA SOCIETY 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: Baltimore Community Foundation Inc · France-Merrick Foundation Inc · T Rowe Price Foundation · The William G Baker Jr Memorial Fund · The United Way of Central Maryland Inc · The Abell Foundation Inc · Robert W Deutsch Foundation · Annie E Casey Foundation Inc · The John J Leidy Foundation Inc · The Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation Inc · The Morris Goldseker Foundation of Maryland Inc · The Bunting Family 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 Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts Inc 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.
- Baltimore Arts Realty Corporation — 77% of income from government
- Reservoir Hill Improvement Council Inc — 68% of income from government
- Baltimore Heritage Incorporated — 63% of income from government
- Maryland Humanities Council Inc — 60% of income from government
- Central Baltimore Partnership Inc — 46% of income from government
- Parks and People Inc — 43% of income from government
- Greater Remington Improvement Association — 43% of income from government
- Federal Hill Main Street Inc — 37% of income from government
- Intersection of Change Inc — 20% of income from government
- Chesapeake Shakespeare Company — 16% of income from government
- Magical Experiences Arts Company — 16% of income from government
- CityLit Project Inc — 15% of income from government
- Everyman Theatre Inc — 15% of income from government
- Neighborhood Design Center Inc — 14% of income from government
- The Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture Inc — 8% of income from government
- Episcopal Housing Corporation — 8% of income from government
- Baltimore Museum of Industry Inc — 7% of income from government
- The Morgan State University Foundation Inc — 7% of income from government
- Center Stage Associates Inc — 7% of income from government
- Banner Neighborhoods Community Corp — 6% of income from government
- The American Visionary Art Museum Inc — 6% of income from government
- Columbia Community Care — 5% of income from government
- Baltimore Clayworks Inc — 5% of income from government
- Make Studio Art Program Inc — 4% of income from government
- Arts Every Day Inc — 4% of income from government
- Baltimore Museum of Art — 4% of income from government
- Art With a Heart Inc — 4% of income from government
- Hippodrome Foundation Inc — 4% of income from government
- Access Art Inc — 4% of income from government
- Fusion Partnership Inc — 3% of income from government
- Leaders of Tomorrow Youth Center Inc — 3% of income from government
- Wide Angle Youth Media Inc — 3% of income from government
- Baltimore Festival of the Arts Inc — 2% of income from government
- Arts for Learning Maryland Inc — 1% 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.