· Private foundation
Vartkess & Rita Balian Family Foundation Inc
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
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 52% of VARTKESS & RITA BALIAN FAMILY FOUNDATION INC’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k28 grants · $26k
- $10k–50k1 grant · $11k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ARMENIAN AMERICAN CULTURAL ASSOCIATION | $11,000 |
| EASTERN DIOCESE OF THE ARMENIAN CHURCH | $2,500 |
| ST MARY ARMENIAN APOSTOLIC CHURCH | $2,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $1,500 |
| KNIGHTS OF VARTAN | $1,000 |
| WASHINGTON NATIONAL CATHEDRAL | $1,000 |
| FUND FOR ARMENIAN RELIEF | $1,000 |
| ARMENIAN MISSIONARY ASSOC OF AMERICA | $1,000 |
| NAASR | $1,000 |
| WETA | $1,000 |
| AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT | $1,000 |
| WESTERN DIOCESE OF THE ARMENIAN CHURCH | $1,000 |
| ST NERSESS ARMENIAN SEMINARY | $1,000 |
| AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF ARMENIA | $1,000 |
| ZORYAN INSTITUTE FOR COMTEMPORARY ARMENIAN RESEARCH AND DOCUMENTATION | $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 11%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 49% of your 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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 16% of Vartkess & Rita Balian Family Foundation Inc’s grant dollars are earmarked, by their stated purpose, for a different county than the recipient’s own address — money that lands at a nonprofit in one place but is meant to do its work in another. Read by recipient address, 40% of the giving stays in VA; read by stated purpose it is 23% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
Recipient view: each grant at its grantee’s ZIP, mapped to a county. Directed view: each grant at the county its stated purpose names, falling back to the recipient’s county when the purpose names no place; US grants only. A county shows only if it carries the top 95% of that view’s dollars. Purposes are read from the foundation’s own 990 grant descriptions.
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 +30% since the first grant, against +9% for the ones you funded once.
38 repeat relationships — 24 still active in FY2025, 14 since wound down; 2 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, 95% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $2k 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
- AAARMENIAN ASSEMBLY OF AMERICA INC8× · 2017–2025 · $9k · revenue +293%
- SNST NERSESS ARMENIAN SEMINARY INC8× · 2017–2025 · $9k · revenue +60%
- GWGREATER WASHINGTON EDUCATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION INC6× · 2020–2025 · $7k · revenue +30%
Funded once
- AAACAone grant, 2023 · $10k
- TFTCA Friends of the Armenian Mirror Spectatorone grant, 2023 · $3k
- PParosone grant, 2023 · $3k
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 promote armenian contemporary experimental art
Education about armenia & caucasu region
Armenian film society celebrates armenian culture through year-round programming of film screenings, discussions, workshop, and lectures. it shines a spotlight on armenian films and filmmakers, as week as films that deal with armenian…
Ensuring the prosperity and well-being of all armenians.
To provide an educational resource and research base for students, teachers, and policymakers on a comprehensive agenda of foreign and domestic issues mainly on achieving peace, stability and cooperation in the region and building…
The American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC) encourages and supports scholarly study of the South Caucasus states (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia) across all disciplines of the Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences.…
To Promote education and cultural awareness of historical events
The anca-wr works in coordination with a network of offices, chapters, and supporters throughout the western united states to actively advance the concerns of the armenian american community on a range of issues. these issues include…
Research, study and document ancient Armenian architecture.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Armenian Assembly of America Inc and the most unlike its peers is The Paros 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 37 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% 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 13% 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.
27 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. 27 of the 70 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 ARMENIAN AMERICAN CULTURAL ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds ARMENIAN ASSEMBLY OF AMERICA INC ↗
- Who funds ST NERSESS ARMENIAN SEMINARY INC ↗
- Who funds THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS ↗
- Who funds GREATER WASHINGTON EDUCATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF ARMENIA CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds YOUNG CONCERT ARTISTS INC ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT ↗
- Who funds FUND FOR ARMENIAN RELIEF INC ↗
- Who funds The Virginia Hospital Center Foundation ↗
- Who funds ANCA ENDOWMENT FUND INC ↗
- Who funds THE PAROS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds TEKEYAN CULTURAL ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds THE CARTER CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds AURORA HUMANITARIAN INITIATIVE FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds JOHN F KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS ↗
- Who funds Knights of Vartan Inc ↗
- Who funds POST CLASSICAL ENSEMBLE INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds Armenian Church Endowment Fund 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 Parsekian Foundation Inc · Sami & Annie Totah Family Foundation · Nazarian Family Foundation · The Stephen Philibosian Foundation · United Armenian Charities Inc · Leon and Marion Semonian Charitable Trust · John Mirak Foundation · Afeyan Family Foundation · TF Educational Foundation · Cherchian Family Foundation Inc · Charles Mosesian Family Foundation · Sjs Charitable Trust
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 Vartkess & Rita Balian Family Foundation 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.
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 Vartkess & Rita Balian Family Foundation Inc?
Find your warmest path to Vartkess & Rita Balian Family Foundation Inc 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.