· Public charity
Burning Man Project
BURNING MAN PROJECT facilitates and extends burning man culture into the larger world.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 19 grants below total $316,967 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $1,576,720 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $1,259,753 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 $10k4 grants · $29k
- $10k–50k15 grants · $288k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| CONECOPHONY COLLECTIVE LLC | $40,000 |
| ROCKET CAR COLLECTIVE LLC | $30,000 |
| O CHELSY PRODUCTIONS LLC | $24,000 |
| TYLER FUQUA CREATIONS INC | $22,000 |
| BARNACLE BROS SCULPTURE & CUSTOM FABRICATION INC | $20,000 |
| POETIC KINETICS INC | $20,000 |
| PRODUCT OF MARS INC | $20,000 |
| GOODLY HOUSE PRODUCTIONS LLC | $19,000 |
| THE NEXT EARTH PROJECT | $15,223 |
| CIRCAFORM | $15,000 |
| BRS STUDIOS CORP | $14,760 |
| THE HONORS ACADEMY OF LITERATURE | $13,984 |
| CARBON PICTURES | $12,000 |
| ARTBUILDS COLLECTIVE LTD | $12,000 |
| LOOKING UP ARTS FOUNDATION INC | $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 (FY17–19, $18k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, 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.
Which US states your grants reach
Grants abroad, by region — $325k on the FY2024 return
Schedule F, as filed: 5 regions, $124k to organizations and $201k to individuals. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: HONORARIA ART GRANT · INTERNATIONAL ART GRANT
Stated purpose: DESIGN GRANT · HONORARIA ART GRANT
Stated purpose: COMMUNITY BASED PROJECT GRANT · DESIGN GRANT · HONORARIA ART GRANT
Stated purpose: HONORARIA ART GRANT
Stated purpose: DESIGN GRANT
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. Grants abroad on Schedule F are filed by region, purpose and amount with no recipient name, so they are shown by region and cannot be placed on the country map or matched to a grantee.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 10% of Burning Man Project’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. Read by recipient address, 54% of the giving stays in CA; read by stated purpose it is 40% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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 +8% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
28 repeat relationships — 7 still active in FY2024, 21 since wound down; 12 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, 29% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $225k 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
- RIREARED IN STEEL LLC2× · 2017–2019 · $110k
- XPXIAN PRODUCTIONS3× · 2018–2021 · $102k
- JLJEN LEWIN STUDIOS LLC3× · 2017–2023 · $99k
Funded once
- PPPLAYA PROJECTS LLCone grant, 2017 · $161k
- TOTEMPLE OF DIRECTION LLCone grant, 2019 · $115k
- BPBig Picture Builders LLCone grant, 2019 · $65k
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.
Pro Arts supports art that pushes boundaries, generates critical discourse, and challenges the status quo. Annually Pro Arts presents over 200 artists, working in diverse artistic fields
Develop commuities with art
ChinatownMuralProject brings vibrant, large-scale murals to Chinatown and beyond. These culturally resonant artworks celebrate the communitys heritage, history, and daily life in a whimsical, accessible style. The project aims to brighten…
We produce, manage and direct events, programs and exhibitions for the purpose of developing artist - audience relationships throughout important Los Angeles communities. Passionate about promoting all contemporary art-forms and their…
Art education and awareness.
ARTNOIR is a global collective and a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with a mission to celebrate and highlight the work of creatives of color from around the world while catalyzing cultural equity across the arts and culture industries.…
We provide artwork to the community
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Black Burner Project Co and the most unlike its peers is Mayhem Snail Art Collective Ltd. 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 11 years old; the field is 14. You back the younger end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 21% of your grantees by number, and just 18% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 3% lost their exemption, against 14% 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.
21 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. 21 of the 134 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 Black Rock Labs ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF BLACK ROCK HIGH ROCK INC ↗
- Who funds LOOKING UP ARTS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PINTO ART INC ↗
- Who funds Community Through Colors ↗
- Who funds Black Joy Parade ↗
- Who funds BLACK BURNER PROJECT CO ↗
- Who funds PROTECTORS OF TULE SPRINGS ↗
- Who funds Participatory Safety 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: Network for Good · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · Amazonsmile 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 Burning Man Project 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.