· Private foundation
Cullen Foundation of Western New York Inc
Its FY2024 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
Every grant clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2023–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k14 grants · $88k
- $10k–50k76 grants · $1.9M
- $50k–250k29 grants · $2.5M
- $250k+2 grants · $725k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| TNTP | $400,000 |
| SAY YES BUFFALO SCHOLARSHIP INC | $325,000 |
| EDUCATION COLLABORATIVE OF WNY | $213,050 |
| BRICK EDUCATION NETWORK | $200,000 |
| CHAPIN HALL CENTER FOR CHILDREN | $149,533 |
| BUFFALO COMMONS CHARTER SCHOOL | $115,884 |
| BRICK EDUCATION NETWORK | $111,790 |
| PERSISTENCE PREPARATORY ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL | $101,900 |
| PERSISTENCE PREPARATORY ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL | $100,000 |
| CITY YEAR INC | $100,000 |
| BUFFALO PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA | $100,000 |
| BUFFALO ACADEMY OF SCIENCE | $90,000 |
| ACHIEVING THE DREAM INC | $83,850 |
| THE BISON CHILDREN'S SCHOLARSHIP FUND INC | $83,210 |
| TNTP | $82,500 |
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 (FY23–24, $280k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 12%. 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
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 13% of Cullen Foundation of Western New York Inc’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, 82% of the giving stays in NY; read by stated purpose it is 89% — more 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 +14% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
63 repeat relationships — 63 still active in FY2024, 0 since wound down; 27 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, 80% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1.0M 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
SAY YES BUFFALO SCHOLARSHIP INC2× · 2023–2024 · $625k · revenue +33%- PPPERSISTENCE PREPARATORY ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL2× · 2023–2024 · $579k · revenue +36%
CITY YEAR INC2× · 2023–2024 · $445k · revenue +3%
Funded once
- KMKLEINHANS MUSIC HALL MANAGEMENT INCone grant, 2023 · $400k · revenue -21%
- CHCHAPIN HALL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGOone grant, 2023 · $166k
- SPSHEA'S PERFORMING ARTS CENTERone grant, 2023 · $100k
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.
Buffalo academy of science is a tuition-free, college-preparatory charter school teaching students in a diverse community to be successful in a globally-oriented environment, using innovative and dynamic teaching methods with a small…
To provide quality, affordable child care for the families of students, faculty and staff of the college, as well as families of other new york state employees and community members.
With unrelenting determination and a commitment to excellence, buffalo collegiate charter school educated students in grades 4 through 12 to graduate from the college of their choice and serve as our next generation of leaders. the…
The mission of new york city center is to be new york city's leading center for dance and musical theater. dedicated to making the arts accessible to the broadest possible audience, city center seeks to create a welcoming environment and…
The Buffalo Institiute for Contemporary Art (Bica) is a art and educational project for Buffalo, NY. Through Innovative exhibitions, cross-discipplinary skills-based programming, and arts ecology development, bica mission is to break down…
Charter school of inquiry (csi) will achieve breakthrough outcomes for city of buffalo children in kindergarten through grade 6 by creating an inquiry-based learning environment with an intense focus on learning to read and write well in…
The mission of the Binghamton Philharmonic is building community through the power of live music.
Brooklyn children's theatre empowers youth through musical theatre, reimagining arts education by centering the whole child and prioritizing belonging and equity.
Syracuse stage tells stories that engage, entertain, and inspire us to see life beyond our own experiences.
CNY Arts' mission is to promote, support, and celebrate arts and culture in Central New York.
The organization's exempt purpose is to promote and cultivate the quality of education and activities for students of the state university of new york at buffalo. the organization carries out those charitable and educational purposes by…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Buffalo String Works Inc and the most unlike its peers is Vocalis Chamber Choir. 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 31 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) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 9% 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.
90 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. 90 of the 112 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 TNTP INC ↗
- Who funds SAY YES BUFFALO SCHOLARSHIP INC ↗
- Who funds PERSISTENCE PREPARATORY ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds CITY YEAR INC ↗
- Who funds EDUCATION COLLABORATIVE OF WNY INC ↗
- Who funds KLEINHANS MUSIC HALL MANAGEMENT INC ↗
- Who funds CANISIUS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds BUFFALO PREP INC ↗
- Who funds READ TO SUCCEED BUFFALO INC ↗
- Who funds ACHIEVING THE DREAM INC ↗
- Who funds THE BISON CHILDREN'S SCHOLARSHIP FUND INC ↗
- Who funds CHAPIN HALL CENTER FOR CHILDREN ↗
- Who funds THE SERVICE COLLABORATIVE OF WNY ↗
- Who funds BUFFALO STATE COLLEGE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds BUFFALO COMMONS CHARTER SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds BURCHFIELD PENNEY ART CENTER ↗
- Who funds SHAKESPEARE IN DELAWARE PARK INC ↗
- Who funds KING URBAN LIFE CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds SPRINGVILLE CENTER FOR THE ARTS INC ↗
- Who funds ARTPARK & COMPANY INC ↗
- Who funds BUFFALO ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds LEARNING DISABILITIES ASSOCIATION OF WESTERN NEW YORK INC ↗
- Who funds BUFFALO HEARING & SPEECH CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds PEACE OF THE CITY MINISTRIES INC ↗
- Who funds IRISH CLASSICAL THEATER CO ↗
- Who funds ENTERPRISE CHARTER SCHOOL ↗
- Who funds D'YOUVILLE UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds CHARTER SCHOOL FOR APPLIED TECHNOLOGIES ↗
- Who funds SHAW FESTIVAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ALLEYWAY THEATRE 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: Cullen Foundation · Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo Inc · The John R Oishei Foundation · First Niagara Foundation · United Way of Buffalo and Erie County · The Western New York Foundation · The Margaret L Wendt Foundation · Children's Foundation of Erie County Inc · James H Cummings Foundation Inc · The Peter and Elizabeth C Tower Foundation · Rich Family Foundation · The Baird 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 Cullen Foundation of Western New York 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 or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
- City Year Inc — 11% of income from government
- Achieving the Dream Inc — 0% 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.
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Find your warmest path to Cullen Foundation of Western New York Inc 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.