· Private foundation
The Sam Mazza Foundation
Its FY2024 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
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.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k14 grants · $58k
- $10k–50k17 grants · $321k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Dance Brigade | $35,000 |
| Golden Thread Productions | $30,000 |
| Look What SHE Did | $25,000 |
| Living Jazz | $20,000 |
| Ars Minerva | $20,000 |
| Pacifica Education Foundation | $20,000 |
| Music at Kohl Mansion | $20,000 |
| ABD Productions | $20,000 |
| West Edge Opera | $18,000 |
| Central Stage | $18,000 |
| Golden Thread Productions | $15,000 |
| Opera Parallle | $15,000 |
| Near Arnold's School of Performing | $15,000 |
| 3Girls Theatre Company | $15,000 |
| Youth Musical Theater Company | $12,500 |
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, $249k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 53% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants spread fairly evenly across need levels.
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 +17% since the first grant, against +14% for the ones you funded once.
100 repeat relationships — 25 still active in FY2024, 75 since wound down; 5 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, 92% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $31k 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
- DBDance Brigade6× · 2017–2024 · $175k · revenue +57%
- PRPacifica Resource Center6× · 2017–2024 · $116k · revenue +90%
- BSBRIGHT STARS OF BETHLEHEM NFP6× · 2019–2024 · $99k · revenue +138%
Funded once
- DMDOOR-DOG MUSIC PRODUCTIONS INCone grant, 2018 · $30k
- PFPlaygrounds for Palestineone grant, 2023 · $21k
- PPPRESIDIO PERFORMING ARTS FOUNDATIONone grant, 2017 · $20k · revenue -20%
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.
Oakland Ballet Company's mission is to inspire the community by keeping the tradition of ballet exciting, vibrant and accessible.
Operating out of an old can factory in the Mission District of San Francisco, Z Space now activates two performance spaces, an 85-seat black box and a 244-seat main stage, with a warehouse aesthetic and an adventurous edge.
To champion the performing arts in Santa Rosa for all. To connect people with one another and with art that can enrich their lives. To embrace people from all backgrounds. To provide exceptional service to our resident companies and to…
Choral Music Performances: California Bach Society is a 30-voice chamber choir known for finely wrought interpretations of Renaissance and Baroque music, often accompanied by leading period instrumentalists. Each season, the choir performs…
Promote the expressive arts of the historic silk road region of Eurasia
ARTRONIKA is a collective of Los Angeles based artists that produce immersive arts programming showcasing an array of South Asian talent and culture. Through innovative and inclusive events, we reimagine traditional music, art, and…
Community Music / Arts Organization
The Marsh develops new performance. It encourages and supports all stages of this development by providing artists of all ages with a performance venue, education and a supportive environment.
To preserve, promote, and present the art of ballet and dance through performances, education, and community outreach, making high-quality cultural experiences accessible to diverse audiences.
Occidental Center for the Arts exists to provide a welcoming and accessible venue for the performing and visual arts in Sonoma County California for local regional national and international artists. our mission is to enrich our community…
On the Boards' mission is to invest in leading contemporary performing artists near and far and connect them to a diverse range of communities interested in forward-thinking art and ideas.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is San Francisco Performances Inc and the most unlike its peers is Faith Hope and Love 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 28 years old; the field is 15. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 23% startups (under 5 years old) — 2% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.8% lost their exemption, against 12% 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.
118 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. 118 of the 169 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 Dance Brigade ↗
- Who funds World Arts West ↗
- Who funds Golden Thread Productions ↗
- Who funds Pacifica Resource Center ↗
- Who funds BRIGHT STARS OF BETHLEHEM NFP ↗
- Who funds ARS MINERVA ↗
- Who funds Destiny Arts Center ↗
- Who funds Opera Parallle ↗
- Who funds San Francisco Girls Chorus Inc ↗
- Who funds THE UNIVERSITY CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds Living Jazz ↗
- Who funds MUSIC AT KOHL MANSION INC ↗
- Who funds PACIFICA HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds KITKA INC ↗
- Who funds WEST EDGE OPERA ↗
- Who funds Intersection for the Arts ↗
- Who funds Cutting Ball Theater ↗
- Who funds Episcopal Community Services ↗
- Who funds Crowded Fire Theater Company ↗
- Who funds DIMENSIONS DANCE THEATER INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds Theatre Bay Area ↗
- Who funds KORSA MUSICAL THEATER ↗
- Who funds The Aurora Theatre Company ↗
- Who funds PACIFICA EDUCATION FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Comedy Celebration Day Inc ↗
- Who funds ALONZO KING LINES BALLET ↗
- Who funds Shotgun Players ↗
- Who funds PLAYWRIGHTS FOUNDATION 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: The Zellerbach Family Foundation · Phyllis C Wattis Foundation · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · Kenneth Rainin Foundation · Fleishhacker Foundation · The Bernard Osher Foundation · East Bay Community Foundation · The San Francisco Foundation · Walter and Elise Haas Fund · The Morris Stulsaft Foundation · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · Center for Cultural Innovation
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 Sam Mazza 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.
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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to The Sam Mazza Foundation?
Find your warmest path to The Sam Mazza 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.