I watch a lot of educational videos on YouTube, and the people that can afford to run their channels full-time without another job to support themselves have a variety of sources of income, such as money directly from YouTube advertising, having sponsored videos, selling merchandise, and what I want to focus on here: Patreon, or other similar direct contributions from viewers.
I really like a lot of these channels and would have no problem supporting them once I get to a financial position where I can afford to be giving money away to content creators, except that as an accountant that works on tax returns mostly, I am keenly tuned into doing things in the most tax-advantageous way. This means giving to a 501c3 in order for it to be tax-deductible. (Or really, allowing them to be given to by a donor-advised fund, which I’ll fund one year with a large enough donation to itemize effectively, since I otherwise have very few itemized deductions.)
I do not recall ever seeing anyone state that their work is supported in part by a grant from such-and-such foundation like I remember seeing on PBS television as a kid. One of the channels even claims to be associated with PBS (Space Time), so OK, maybe I can support the channel through PBS, but there’s no way from what I can tell on the general “make a donation” payment screen to say that you want your gift to go to some specific series of programs associated with them. I did look up what I thought was the best of all the educational channels I’ve seen, Khan Academy, and they are indeed a 501c3, but they appear to have a much greater scale of operations given that Google says they have $60 million in assets. Most of the creators I would like to support are small independent productions that maybe have a few people working on them but are primarily single-person operations, and them forming 501c3s might not be possible because they’re not even connected with the United States (which is I think true in the majority of the cases).
I searched around using various keywords and was unable to find any particular 501c3 educational foundation with a focus on supporting YouTube content creators. I don’t really care if they support different channels than the ones I’m watching per se, as I might get them to consider supporting ones I do watch with a large enough donation to them, but from what I can tell such a thing doesn’t really exist.
Now, I understand that a lot of YouTube creators are only very tangentially educational, and that many of them don’t really have education as the focus of the channel, and are more about “Entertaining things that will make me money that tell people something they probably didn’t already know”, as as such might not qualify as truly charitable educational content creators. But for at least some of them, I think their passion is in teaching people about the topic, and if they get any sponsorship they try to tie it in directly with what they’re trying to teach people about (and if they can’t, they wouldn’t accept the sponsorship). My initial research says that any grants made by a 501c3 to a non-501c3 are subject to more formal scrutiny to ensure that the grant was used for an exempt purpose, such that many foundations do not want to do such scrutiny and thus limit their grants to registered 501c3s, but it’s certainly possible for 501c3s to make grants that are within the boundaries of their exempt function but to an organization or individual that is not a 501c3.
I’m pretty sure that the answer to my question is no, and that if I want there to be such an organization, I may need to create it myself, and certainly that thought is weighing quite heavily on me. I figured before I spend a lot of my time and money chasing such a project I would ask the smartest and most knowledgeable people I know whether they knew of anyone else that was doing such a thing. The answer to the topic question is thus my primary goal, and the reason I put this in GQ. If the mods think IMHO or maybe CS is better, then go ahead and move it.