Skip to content
Plinth

· Private foundation

The Ovation Foundation

Its FY2019 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.

$137k
Granted FY2017
9
Grants FY2017
7
States reached
$25k
Largest
01What you fund
01FY2017 · 9 grants

Where the money goes

Your grants by size, and where they go.

By grant size · FY2017

  • Under $10k4 grants · $12k
  • $10k–50k5 grants · $125k
$25,000
Median grant
7
States reached
$5k
Total assets
Largest grants
RecipientAmount
Global Center for Cultural Entrepreneurship$25,000
Riverviews Artspace$25,000
Streetlights Production Assistant Program Inc$25,000
Center for Creative Economy$25,000
3Arts Inc$25,000
The Storefront for Community Design$3,000
Project H Design$3,000
Juxtapostion Inc$3,000
New Orleans Video Access Center Inc$3,000
02The need
02

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.

show:

Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–17) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 96% of your dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Most of your grants land in higher-need ZIPs.

area typical 11%Juxtapostion Inc: $3k → 11%Project H Design: $3k → 10%Streetlights Production Assistant Program Inc: $25k → 14%Global Center for Cultural Entrepreneurship: $25k → 12%Center for Creative Economy: $25k → 15%3Arts Inc: $25k → 14%Riverviews Artspace: $25k → 13%The Storefront for Community Design: $3k → 22%New Orleans Video Access Center Inc: $3k → 23%0%20%40%50%more need →
grant to an above-average-need area below average· circle size = grant amount

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.

03Your field

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.

1
Oakwood Arts Inc

We make art and careers in creative industries accessible to all through community engagement, inspiring programming, and experiential education. Our programs focus on the digital and technical skills students need to succeed in the…

Employment
2
Center for Cultural Innovation

Education/Support/Services for Artists The Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) was launched in 2001 to promote knowledge sharing, networking and financial independence for individual artists and creative entrepreneurs by providing…

Arts & Culture
3
Equity Arts

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…

4
Art Opportunities Inc

To create community driven public art and launch careers for youth and artists.

Arts & Culture
5
Artopolis Development

ArtBuilt is a solutions-focused nonprofit that builds new systems of support for artists based on access to affordable real estate, asset building and deeply reciprocal relationships with local communities.

Arts & Culture
6
California Institute of Contemporary Art
7
Verge Center for the Arts

Verge Center for the Arts provides contemporary art and art resources to the Sacramento region through a combination of exhibitions, low or no cost artist workspace, and educational programming.Located in Sacramento's Southside Park…

Arts & Culture
8
New City Arts Initiative

We envision the charlottesville area as a place where a thriving group of local artists unsettles and transforms our community to work toward a more just, beautiful future.

Arts & Culture
9
Oakland Digital Arts and Literacy Center Inc

BRIDGEGOOD increases opportunity and digital literacy for under-resourced students with a focus on Black Indigenous and Women People of Color. We prepare first-generation college students for careers in UX UI and Visual Design while…

Education
10
District of Columbia Arts Center

The District of Columbia Arts Center serves the Washington DC area by presenting high caliber and challenging works. It encourages professionalism among artists by providing a forum for educational and cultural exchange. DCAC was founded…

Arts & Culture
11
ArtSeed

Arts education and vocational guidance.

Arts & Culture
12
Coven

COVEN is a creative placemaker that advances socioeconomic mobility for underrepresented artists through storytelling, funding, and activations in Third Places. COVEN is supported by ThirdPlace Partners (TPP), a fractional real estate…

Arts & Culture

For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Global Center for Cultural Entrepre dba Creative Startups and the most unlike its peers is Storefront for Community Design. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.

03the grantee network

8 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 20172025, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 8 of the 9 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.

0
Load-bearing (≥25% of a budget)
5
Early backer (in before they grew)
8/8
Grantees still filing
6/8
Grew since you first funded

Where your money sits — by cause, then by grantee

Riverviews Artspace — $25,000 · OtherRiverviews ArtspaceStorefront for Community Design — $3,000 · OtherStorefront for Community …NEW ORLEANS VIDEO ACCESS CENTER INC — $3,000 · OtherNEW ORLEANS VIDEO ACCESS …Center for Creative Economy — $25,000 · Community ImprovementCenter for Creative …STREETLIGHTS — $25,000 · EmploymentSTREETLIGHTSGlobal Center for Cultural Entrepre dba Creative Startups — $25,000 · EducationGlobal Center for Cu…3ARTS INC — $25,000 · Arts & Culture3ARTS INCJUXTAPOSITION ARTS INC — $3,000 · Youth DevelopmentGIRLS GARAGE — $3,000 · International
Other$31,000Community Improvement$25,000Employment$25,000Education$25,000Arts & Culture$25,000Youth Development$3,000International$3,000

Each org by its size and your share of it — top-left is where you’re load-bearing

25%50%75%100%$1.0Mgrantee revenue →↑ your share of their budgetCenter for Creative Economy — $25,000 over 1y, 11% of budgetSTREETLIGHTS — $25,000 over 1y, 9.1% of budgetGlobal Center for Cultural Entrepre dba Creative Startups — $25,000 over 1y, 3.5% of budget3ARTS INC — $25,000 over 1y, 1.9% of budgetJUXTAPOSITION ARTS INC — $3,000 over 1y, 0.2% of budgetStorefront for Community Design — $3,000 over 1y, 1.1% of budgetNEW ORLEANS VIDEO ACCESS CENTER INC — $3,000 over 1y, 0.4% of budgetGIRLS GARAGE — $3,000 over 1y, 0.7% of budget
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.

The Bank of America Charitable Foundation IncNC9.1× affinity5 shared granteesties to 4 of 4Hover any node to trace its alignments.Compare side by side →

Open a dossier: The Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Donor Advised Charitable Giving Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund · Amazonsmile 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 The Ovation 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.

2024
202122232425
no gov · 00%0%1%3%5%your share of their income ↑0%25%50%75%100%share of the org’s income from government
    no gov moneyreceives it· size = income
    0get no government money at all
    3report government grants on their 990 we could not trace to a source (not plotted)
    0rely on government for over half their income
    typical government reliance, FY2025

    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.

    04Through Plinth

    Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus

    How do I get to The Ovation Foundation?

    Find your warmest path to The Ovation Foundation 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.

    On method. Every financial figure here is read directly from IRS e-file XML — your own 990/990-PF and the multi-year returns of the 9 grantees we resolved across every year we hold, several hundred filings in all (a different count from the grant rows on the cover, which are one fiscal year)— each linked to its source. Grantee achievements and outcomes are each organization’s own program-service reporting (Form 990, Part III); we read these as association with sustained funding — the foundation is one of several forces — suppress low-confidence name matches rather than guess, and say so where a figure rests on a single grant or filing. Not everything on this page is a filed figure, and the difference matters. Filed is what you reported on your return. Official is another government record about an organization, such as a federal award or a charity register, joined by name where no shared identifier exists. Resolved is an identity we worked out where the filing named a recipient without an EIN, kept only above a measured confidence threshold. Computed is arithmetic over those, like themes, portfolio clusters and co-funder strength. Context is a statistic about a place rather than about an organization, which is what the need overlay is: it describes the area a grantee’s address sits in, not where its work lands. Inferred is drawn by a model from text, like the partnerships read out of public news and organization websites. Each is labeled where it appears. How we build these →

    Generated from your IRS Form 990-PF e-file return for fiscal year 2017, released 2017. Filings run roughly 12–24 months behind; figures are dated accordingly.

    Possibly out of date. A more recent filing (FY2019) is on record but names no grant recipient in the published copy, so the figures above are from FY2017, the most recent year this funder’s grantee list reached the public record.

    Source object · view filing

    More from the funding graph