· Public charity
Equity in the Arts Fund
The organization is organized and operated exclusively for the benefit, of and to carry out the charitable and educational functions of the cleveland foundation.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2020–2023.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ASSEMBLY FOR THE ARTS | $45,000 |
| ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH WATCH INC | $27,000 |
| BALANCE POINT STUDIOS | $27,000 |
| E66TH STREET SERVICES | $23,000 |
| BUCK OUT FOUNDATION | $22,000 |
| LIFE EXCHANGE CENTER | $15,000 |
| PEEL DEM LAYERS BACK | $15,000 |
| DUFFY LITURGICAL DANCE ENSEMBLE | $15,000 |
| DJAPO CULTURAL ARTS INSTITUTE INC | $15,000 |
| LATINUS THEATER EXPERIENCE COMPANY | $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 (FY20–22, $23k) land where the poverty rate runs at 17%, against an area that typically sits at 15%. 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 7% of Equity in the Arts Fund’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, 98% of the giving stays in OH; read by stated purpose it is 89% — 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 +70% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
12 repeat relationships — 5 still active in FY2023, 7 since wound down; 5 grantees were first funded in FY2023 (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 FY2023, 50% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $106k 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
- AFASSEMBLY FOR THE ARTS3× · 2020–2023 · $115k · revenue +487%
- JDJULIA DE BURGOS CULTURAL ARTS CENTER2× · 2020–2022 · $50k · revenue +43%
- DLDUFFY LITURGICAL DANCE ENSEMBLE3× · 2020–2023 · $50k · revenue +70%
Funded once
- ACATNSC CENTER FOR HEALING & CREATIVE LEADERSHIPone grant, 2020 · $30k
- AOART OF ME PRODUCTIONSone grant, 2022 · $20k
- LLoiterone grant, 2022 · $20k
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.
To establish a forum for community engagement and educational outreach through collaboration with emerging and established artists and the creation, production and presentation of a diverse array of theatre, music, dance, and exhibitions…
The mission of the cleveland museum of art (cma) is to fulfill its dual roles as one of the world's most distinguished comprehensive art museums and as one of northeastern ohio's principal civic and cultural institutions. the museum,…
To be a national model for how a presenting organization serves its community, leveraging the worlds best modern and contemporary dance to inspire and educate audiences, local dancers, and community members.
Dobama theatre, inc. is dedicated to premiering important new plays by established & emerging playwrights in professional productions of the highest quality. through theatrical production, community engagement, and education programming,…
The sculpture center is one of the only cultural instituitons providing critical resources to sculptors along their journey through creation, exhibition, mentorship, conversation and engagement, and development and support opportunities.
Ocb ignites audience passion and participation in contemporary dance through performance, outreach programs and community engagement.
Moca's mission- art now, in progress - embodies our nature as a living, adaptive platform for artistic experimentation, public exchange, and civic connection. our vision - artists & art lead us to the unfamiliar, where we open and connect…
EQUITY ARTS is a center for the creative economy that advances racial equity and wealth-building for artists and entrepreneurs. This reparative ownership model preserves space for synergistic exchanges between value-aligned partners. The…
Exclusively for charitable, religious, educational
Borderlight's mission is to present visionary international theatre and build cross-cultural understanding.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Assembly for the Arts and the most unlike its peers is Latinus Theater Experience Company. 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 14 years old; the field is 22. You back the younger end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 3% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 3% 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.
36 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. 36 of the 39 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 ASSEMBLY FOR THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds JULIA DE BURGOS CULTURAL ARTS CENTER ↗
- Who funds DUFFY LITURGICAL DANCE ENSEMBLE ↗
- Who funds LATINUS THEATER EXPERIENCE COMPANY ↗
- Who funds CLEVELAND PUBLIC THEATRE INC ↗
- Who funds EAST 66TH STREET SERVICES INC ↗
- Who funds DJAPO CULTURAL ARTS INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds CLEVELAND PRINT ROOM INC ↗
- Who funds CUYAHOGA COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BROADWAY SCHOOL OF MUSIC & THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds FOLUKE CULTURAL ARTS CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds BALANCE POINT STUDIOS ↗
- Who funds ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH WATCH ↗
- Who funds GREATER CLEVELAND URBAN FILM FDN ↗
- Who funds MVMT Dance Co ↗
- Who funds ART OF ME PRODUCTIONS ↗
- Who funds Loiter ↗
- Who funds THE FAB FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Life Exchange Center ↗
- Who funds NEAR WEST THEATRE INC ↗
- Who funds COMITE MEXICANO INC ↗
- Who funds ESPERANZA INC ↗
- Who funds CLEVELAND PUBLIC LIBRARY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds PEEL DEM LAYERS BACK ↗
- Who funds BIRTHING BEAUTIFUL COMMUNITIES ↗
- Who funds ELIZA BRYANT VILLAGE ↗
- Who funds AFRICAHOUSE INTERNATIONAL ↗
- Who funds Negro League Baseball Legends Hall of Fame Baseball Heritage Museum ↗
- Who funds LITTLE LUMPYS CENTER FOR EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVES ↗
- Who funds CAMPUS DISTRICT INC ↗
- Who funds Twelve Literary Arts ↗
- Who funds COLLECTIVEXPRESS INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds KARAMU HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds MOJUBA DANCE COLLECTIVE ↗
- Who funds THE CLEVELAND PLAY HOUSE ↗
- Who funds PALS FOR HEALING ↗
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 Cleveland Foundation · The George Gund Foundation · The Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation · Saint Lukes Foundation of Cleveland Ohio · Turrell Fund · In Our Backyards Inc · Treu Mart Fund · The Abington Foundation · Jack Joseph & Morton Mandel Foundation · Murphy Family Foundation · Third Federal Foundation · The Reinberger 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 Equity in the Arts 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.