· Private foundation
The Leslie S and Philip L Bernstein Family Fund
Its FY2025 filing reports that it funds preselected organizations and did not take unsolicited requests; check the foundation's own site before ruling it out.
What you funded, over time
Every grant clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k31 grants · $38k
- $10k–50k5 grants · $71k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $100k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MUSIC ACADEMY OF THE WEST | $50,000 |
| SANTA BARBARA COTTAGE HOSPITAL | $50,000 |
| SANSUM CLINIC | $30,000 |
| Germantown Academy | $11,000 |
| CANCER FOUNDATION OF SANTA BARBARA | $10,000 |
| OPHTHALMICEDGE INC | $10,000 |
| WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION | $10,000 |
| California Pacific Medical Center Foundation | $5,000 |
| Ganna Walska Lotusland | $2,500 |
| WORLD CLASS ACCESSIBILITY FOUNDATION | $2,500 |
| THE METROPOLITAN OPERA GUILD INC | $2,000 |
| Santa Barbara BOTANIC GARDEN | $1,500 |
| CHILDREN'S MUSEUM OF SANTA BARBARA | $1,000 |
| YOSEMITE CONSERVANCY | $1,000 |
| THE LAND TRUST FOR SANTA BARBARA COUNTY | $1,000 |
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 (FY17–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 94% 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
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 +40% since the first grant, against +10% for the ones you funded once.
43 repeat relationships — 35 still active in FY2025, 8 since wound down; 1 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (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 FY2025, 100% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1k 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
- MAMUSIC ACADEMY OF THE WEST9× · 2017–2025 · $555k · revenue +18%
- SBSanta Barbara Cottage Hospital9× · 2017–2025 · $450k · revenue +31%
- SCSANSUM CLINIC9× · 2017–2025 · $275k · revenue +33%
Funded once
- SBSANTA BARBARA ART MUSEUMone grant, 2017 · $100k
- JSJACOB STERN EMPLOYEE HURRICANE RELIEF FUNDone grant, 2018 · $50k
- WCWEILL CORNELL MEDICAL COLLEGEone grant, 2018 · $15k
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 integrate art into the lives of people, fostering imagination, stimulating thought, and creating personally rewarding experiences.
See schedule 0founded in 1994, opera santa barbara is the signature provider of professional opera on the california central coast. we aspire to be a cultural leader in the santa barbara region, voicing and advancing our community's spirit…
The monterey museum of art cultivates curiosity in the visual arts and engages community with the diversity of california art - past, present, and future.
Creating excellent exhibits and educational experiences that celebrate the santa barbara channel and illuminate our rich connections with the sea.
The catalina island conservancy protects and stewards 88% of catalina island. more than 42,000 acres of wildlands, coves and coastal habitats. founded to preserve the island's natural resources, the conservancy advances a mission rooted in…
To protect and steward in perpetuity the unique natural, cultural, and asthetic resources of the preserve and serve as a model of ecologically sustainable development to committees outside the preserve.
The museum of sonoma county engages and inspires our diverse community with art and history exhibitions, collections, and public programs that are inclusive, educational, and relevant.
To further the scientific, literary, educational and charitable purposes of california state university, monterey bay, including fundraising, development, endowment management, financial assistance, public relations and other support.
California college of the arts educates students to shape culture and society through the practice and critical study of art, architecture, design, and writing. benefitting from its san francisco bay area location, the college prepares…
The ucla foundation is the giving, receiving, and investing arm of the ucla campus. the foundation enables private donors to help build, sustain and advance one of the world's finest academic and research institutions. private philanthropy…
The San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory is dedicated to the conservation of birds and their habitats through science and outreach.
The santa barbara public library foundation supports the long-term health and sustainability of the santa barbara public library through public-private partnerships.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Santa Barbara Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Merrag. 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 64 years old; the field is 14. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 24% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
49 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. 49 of the 68 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 MUSIC ACADEMY OF THE WEST ↗
- Who funds Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital ↗
- Who funds SANSUM CLINIC ↗
- Who funds CANCER FOUNDATION OF SANTA BARBARA ↗
- Who funds DIRECT RELIEF ↗
- Who funds LOBERO THEATRE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds OPHTHALMICEDGE INC ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA PACIFIC MEDICAL CENTER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE LAND TRUST FOR SANTA BARBARA COUNTY ↗
- Who funds SANTA BARBARA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE PUBLIC SCHOOL OF GERMANTOWN ↗
- Who funds PIERRE CLAEYSSENS VETERANS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds World Class Accessibility Foundation ↗
- Who funds GANNA WALSKA LOTUSLAND ↗
- Who funds YELLOWSTONE FOREVER ↗
- Who funds WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds The Metropolitan Opera Guild Inc ↗
- Who funds YOSEMITE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds HEAL THE OCEAN INC ↗
- Who funds SANTA BARBARA BOWL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds UC SANTA BARBARA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds JOHN & ANNA NEWTON PORTER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SANTA BARBARA BOTANIC GARDEN ↗
- Who funds Montecito Community Foundation ↗
- Who funds SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds MAYO CLINIC ↗
- Who funds SANTA BARBARA ZOOLOGICAL FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MOXI THE WOLF MUSEUM OF EXPLORATION INNOVATION ↗
- Who funds SANTA BARBARA HISTORICAL MUSEUM ↗
- Who funds CASA DEL HERRERO ↗
- Who funds PUBLIC MEDIA GROUP OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds UNITED SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS 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: Santa Barbara Foundation · Ann Jackson Family Foundation · Elizabeth and John Moller Foundation · Www Foundation · Hutton Foundation Dba Hutton Parker Foundation · Brittingham Family Foundation · Alice Tweed Tuohy Foundation · The Kirby-Jones Foundation · Mosher Foundation · Schlinger Family Foundation · The Wood-Claeyssens Foundation · The Susanne and Gary Tobey Family Fnd
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 The Leslie S and Philip L Bernstein Family 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.
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — 63% of income from government
- Wesleyan University — 1% 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.