· Public charity
Firelight Media Inc
Firelight media's mission is to provide filmmakers mentorship, funding, and creative development to support the creation, distribution, and impact of documentary media by and about communities of color in all our vibrance and complexity.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2023–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 20 grants below total $442,500 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $697,500 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $255,000 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.
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE INSTRUMENT PROJECT LLC | $27,500 |
| CENTER FOR INDEPENDENT DOC | $25,000 |
| TALKING STONES LLC | $25,000 |
| BIMSHIRE PROJECT LLC | $25,000 |
| MIGHTY SQUAWK PRODUCTIONS | $25,000 |
| YOU DON'T KNOW MY NAME | $25,000 |
| SEABREEZE MEDIA INC | $25,000 |
| FIRE FROG MEDIA LLC | $25,000 |
| AMULETOS PROJECTS LLC | $25,000 |
| QUEENS DISCO PRODUCTION LLC | $25,000 |
| TROJAN HORSE MEDIA INC | $25,000 |
| MATININO LLC | $25,000 |
| WE LOVE MOROCCO LLC | $25,000 |
| COMMUTED FILM LLC | $20,000 |
| JJIGAE PRODUCTIONS LLC | $20,000 |
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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY23–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 15%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 73% of your 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 — $145k on the FY2025 return
Schedule F, as filed: 2 regions, $25k to organizations and $120k to individuals. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: IMPACT/RESEARCH 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.
4 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. 4 of the 50 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.
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: Sundance Institute · The Ford Foundation · International Documentary Foundation Inc
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 Firelight Media 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.
- The Center for Independent Documentary Inc — 6% 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.