· Private foundation
Useful Choices Charitable Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2020–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k6 grants · $26k
- $10k–50k2 grants · $30k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Alice Lloyd College | $20,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $10,000 |
| A Hand UP Erie | $5,000 |
| Performing Arts Collective Alliance | $5,000 |
| Slippery Rock University Foundation | $5,000 |
| A Hand UP Erie | $4,000 |
| Blue Heart Santuary Inc | $4,000 |
| McCord Memorial Library | $3,200 |
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 (FY22–25, $55k) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 11%. 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.
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 +38% since the first grant, against +6% for the ones you funded once.
7 repeat relationships — 6 still active in FY2025, 1 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, 82% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $10k 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
- ALALICE LLOYD COLLEGE4× · 2022–2025 · $46k · revenue +44%
- TPTHE PEOPLE CONCERN2× · 2022–2024 · $26k · revenue +38%
- MMMcCord Memorial Library Association4× · 2020–2025 · $16k · revenue +50%
Funded once
- CMCITY MISSION OF THE EVANGELICAL CHURCHES OF ERIEgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $15k · revenue +46%
- CMChristian Ministries of Apostolic Fone grant, 2024 · $15k
- AAALL ABOUT CHARACTER INCone grant, 2023 · $13k · revenue -61%
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.
Homeless Day Shelter
To educate the residents of erie county on proper care, housing and support of animals; to prevent animal cruelty in erie county, and to provide temporary shelter for homeless pets.
EUMA ends homelessness by making it rare, brief and one-time, as Jesus would.
Erie Independence House, Inc. (EIH) exists to enhance and promote independence in people with disabilities through the provision of accessible, affordable, adaptive housing necessary for them to lead productive, independent lives. We offer…
Eecm changes the lives of people facing the impacts of poverty. opportunity, transformation, hope.
The mission of the sarah a. reed's children's center is to enhance the well-being of children, adults ,and families, helping them to realize their potential and experience success.
Creative Community Connectors is created and formed to address eliminate community violence in the City of Erie by building rapport in the community and bridging community relational efforts. The intention and vested effort is focused…
See schedule o.power's mission is to help women reclaim their lives from addiction and related emotional health issues and improve the well-being of future generations. we provide a range of gender-responsive, trauma-informed drug and…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is City Mission of the Evangelical Churches of Erie and the most unlike its peers is Blue Heart Sanctuary Inc. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
15 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. 15 of the 21 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 ALICE LLOYD COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds A HAND UP ERIE INC ↗
- Who funds PERFORMING ARTS COLLECTIVE ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds THE PEOPLE CONCERN ↗
- Who funds BLUE HEART SANCTUARY INC ↗
- Who funds McCord Memorial Library Association ↗
- Who funds CITY MISSION OF THE EVANGELICAL CHURCHES OF ERIE ↗
- Who funds ALL ABOUT CHARACTER INC ↗
- Who funds SLIPPERY ROCK UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds ASBURY WOODS PARTNERSHIP INC ↗
- Who funds EAST ERIE COUNTY EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds CLIMATE CHANGERS INC ↗
- Who funds HAVEN HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds OLIVER HAZARD PERRY SHIPYARD ↗
- Who funds HOPE ON HORSEBACK ↗
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: Erie Community Foundation · Wabtec Foundation · Ge Aerospace Foundation · Charities Aid Foundation America · American Online Giving Foundation 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 Useful Choices Charitable 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 Useful Choices Charitable Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Useful Choices Charitable 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.