· Community foundation
Erie Community Foundation
The ERIE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION works to improve the quality of life for all in our region by evaluating and addressing community issues, building permanent charitable endowments, and by promoting philanthropic and community leadership.
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 373 grants below total $24,376,560 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $25,784,126 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $1,407,566 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 $10k71 grants · $492k
- $10k–50k191 grants · $4.4M
- $50k–250k95 grants · $9.5M
- $250k+16 grants · $10M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ERIE CITY MISSION | $2,298,713 |
| HAMOT HEALTH FOUNDATION | $1,285,678 |
| UNITED WAY OF ERIE COUNTY | $1,222,047 |
| THE NONPROFIT PARTNERSHIP | $609,966 |
| ERIE PHILHARMONIC | $574,921 |
| ERIE DOWNTOWN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION | $550,859 |
| MINORITY COMMUNITY INVESTMENT COALITION | $500,000 |
| EAST SIDE RENAISSANCE | $451,356 |
| ERIE ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY | $382,336 |
| FOUNDATION FOR FREE ENTERPRISE EDUCATION | $354,554 |
| ERIE INDEPENDENCE HOUSE INC | $340,303 |
| MERCYHURST PREPARATORY SCHOOL | $337,123 |
| SECOND HARVEST FOOD BANK | $301,366 |
| NEW HOPE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF ERIE | $290,276 |
| JULIA HOSPICE AND PALLIATIVE CARE | $276,695 |
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, $6.7M) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, 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
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 +25% since the first grant, against +5% for the ones you funded once.
386 repeat relationships — 297 still active in FY2024, 89 since wound down; 53 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, 96% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1.1M 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
- UWUnited Way of Erie County8× · 2017–2024 · $12M · revenue +39% · 57% of their budget
- HHHAMOT HEALTH FOUNDATION8× · 2017–2024 · $7.0M · revenue +52% · 28% of their budget
- CMCITY MISSION OF THE EVANGELICAL CHURCHES OF ERIE8× · 2017–2024 · $4.1M · revenue +59% · 49% of their budget
Funded once
- ECErie County Gaming Revenue Authorityone grant, 2017 · $4.2M
- CMCarnegie Mellon Universitygraduatedone grant, 2021 · $1.2M · revenue +27%
- BFBEN FRANKLIN TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS CORPORATIONgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $150k · revenue +151% · 72% of their budget
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 facilitate both the creation and retention of jobs within erie county and increase economic opportunities for individuals and businesses through comprehensive economic development programs.
To provide emergency medical services with advanced and basic life support capabilities, ambulance transportation services, and providing trained personnel to assist local fire departments.
The mission of the Erie Chamber of Commerce is to unite community and commerce
To increase the organized capacity for people to care for one another.
Erie canalway heritage fund, inc. works to preserve the extraordinary canal corridor heritage, to promote the corridor as a world class tourism destination, and to foster vibrant communities connected by the waterway.
The Erie Community College Foundation raises funds for scholarships, capital projects, faculty enrichment programs and innovative educational and workforce development initiatives. The Foundation supports alumni and former students through…
To preserve life and promote health and safety in our community.
To focus all available local, state, private and federal resources upon the goal of enabling low income families and low income individual of all ages to obtain the skills knowledge and motivations, and secure the opportunities needed for…
The organization provides support and services for people withdisabilities and their families.
Promote and advance medical research & medical product development, predominately for the medical and academic communities in pennsylvania
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Erie Homes for Children & Adults Inc and the most unlike its peers is Caring Foundation. 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 30 years old; the field is 21. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 16% 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 8% 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.
389 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2026.
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 2017–2026, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 389 of the 561 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 United Way of Erie County ↗
- Who funds HAMOT HEALTH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CITY MISSION OF THE EVANGELICAL CHURCHES OF ERIE ↗
- Who funds ExpERIEnce Children's Museum ↗
- Who funds MERCYHURST UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Erie Philharmonic Inc ↗
- Who funds MERCY CENTER FOR WOMEN INC ↗
- Who funds Erie Zoological Society ↗
- Who funds FOUNDATION FOR FREE ENTERPRISE EDUCATION ↗
- Who funds Erie County Historical Society ↗
- Who funds SECOND HARVEST FOOD BANK OF NW PA INC ↗
- Who funds ERIE CANCER AND WELLNESS FOUNDATION dba - ERIE CANCER WELLNESS CENTER ↗
- Who funds ERIE ART MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds THE NONPROFIT PARTNERSHIP ↗
- Who funds ERIE REGIONAL CHAMBER AND GROWTH PARTNERSHIP ↗
- Who funds SHRINERS HOSPITALS FOR CHILDREN ↗
- Who funds Flagship Niagara League ↗
- Who funds THE ARTS COUNCIL OF ERIE ↗
- Who funds ERIE DOWNTOWN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds ERIE CIVIC THEATRE ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds Carnegie Mellon University ↗
- Who funds THE REGIONAL CANCER CENTER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds St Pauls Clinic Foundation Inc ↗
- Who funds Erie United Methodist Alliance ↗
- Who funds THE GOODELL PROJECT INC ↗
- Who funds Erie Independence House Inc ↗
- Who funds MINORITY COMMUNITY INVESTMENT COALITION ↗
- Who funds ASBURY WOODS PARTNERSHIP INC ↗
- Who funds LAKE ERIE COLLEGE OF OSTEOPATHIC MEDICINE ↗
- Who funds ASBURY ATLANTIC 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: Wabtec Foundation · United Way of Erie County · M J Surgala Tr · Hamot Health Foundation · Northwest Charitable Foundation · The Britton Family Foundation · Second Harvest Food Bank of Nw Pa Inc · Kern Family Foundation Inc · Merwin Foundation · Charles a Dailey Foundation · Greater Erie Economic Development Corporation · The Arts Council of Erie
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 Erie Community Foundation 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.
- Asbury Atlantic Inc — 0% of income from government
- Shriners Hospitals for Children — 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.