Center For Social Change Inc.

Important framing before anything else: the underlying IRS record classifies Center For Social Change Inc. (EIN 27-2966443) as a private foundation, but every piece of primary evidence — the organization's own mission statement, its five listed programs, its website, and its 990 filings — describes a direct-service operating nonprofit for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, not a grantmaking body. The mission statement is explicit: "provide services of the highest quality for people with cognitive and developmental disabilities and related disorders including autism." Its five programs (Residential services, Vocational and supported employment, Day habilitation, Medicaid waiver services, and Autism services) are all client-facing care delivery, run out of Maryland despite the Coral Way, Miami filing address (likely a registered-agent or accounting address, since geographic focus is tagged "Maryland" and CARF accreditation covers Maryland residential and day programs). Most tellingly, both years of financials on file show grants_paid: $0 — no record of this organization awarding a grant to another organization or individual exists in the data reviewed.

What this means for a grant seeker: this is not a funding prospect. The "total_giving" figures in its 990 ($1,342,486 in FY2020, $1,343,368 in FY2019) almost certainly represent program service expenditures — the cost of delivering residential care, habilitation, and Medicaid waiver services directly to clients — not third-party grant disbursements. Nonprofits and individuals should not submit a Letter of Inquiry or proposal here expecting philanthropic funding.

The only legitimate points of engagement are: (1) as a referral source if you serve autistic or I/DD individuals in Maryland who need residential, vocational, or day habilitation placement; (2) as a potential subcontractor or vendor if you provide ancillary clinical, therapeutic, or facilities services CSC needs to run its own programs; or (3) as a donor-relations contact if you are an individual or corporate donor, since the organization does solicit contributions ($2,591,772 received in FY2020) to supplement its $2,675,366 in total revenue. First-time contacts should route through the organization's general contact page rather than a grants office, since no grants office, LOI portal, or program officer exists in any source reviewed. Leadership is a small executive team — Lucinda Kerschensteiner (Executive Director, $59,956 compensation in FY2020) and Lourdes Negreira (Co-Executive Director/CFO) — sized like an operating agency, not a philanthropy with program officers.

There is no external grantmaking pattern to analyze: grants_paid is $0 in both filed years on record (FY2019 and FY2020), and the DB's own grantee tracker returns zero top grantees, zero total grants, and a null average grant amount. What the financials do show is an operating budget growing on the strength of contributions and Medicaid-adjacent revenue, not investment income: total revenue rose from $1,356,148 (FY2019) to $2,675,366 (FY2020), essentially doubling, driven almost entirely by a jump in contributions received from $1,259,736 to $2,591,772. Net investment income was $0 in both years, confirming this is not an endowment-driven grantmaker living off asset returns — it is a program-revenue-and-donations operation. Total assets grew from $1,877,209 to $3,125,151 over the same period, and "total_giving" (better read as program service expense) held nearly flat at $1,343,368 and $1,342,486 across the two years, suggesting a stable direct-care cost base even as the top-line budget doubled — consistent with a one-time capital contribution or grant received (rather than paid) driving the FY2020 revenue spike. Officer compensation also shifted: $0 recorded in FY2019 versus $59,956 in FY2020 for the Executive Director, suggesting either a compensation-reporting change or a leadership transition/formalization that year. With zero grants awarded, there is no median grant size, no program-area breakdown of giving, and no geographic distribution of grantees to report — any such figures would be fabricated. Grant seekers evaluating this organization purely as a prospective funder should treat the funding-pattern picture as empty by design, not incomplete reporting.

Center For Social Change Inc. is grouped by NTEE code (Human Services) with several small family foundations of similar asset size, but the comparison mostly underscores how different its actual function is — it is an operating direct-service agency, while the listed peers appear to be small private grantmaking/family foundations with no grants-paid activity of their own on record either.

All five peers cluster within roughly $17,000 of each other in total assets (~$3.10M-$3.13M) and none have a listed website in this dataset, which typically signals small, closely-held family foundations that give quietly and by relationship rather than open call — a pattern grant seekers should expect to need a personal introduction for, if these peers make grants at all. Center For Social Change is the outlier in the group: similarly sized by assets, but functioning as a service provider rather than a funder, so it should be dropped from any funder-prospecting list built from this NTEE/asset-size cluster.

No grant-related recent activity was found for this organization in 2025-2026, and web research strongly suggests this is by design rather than a research gap — the entity does not make grants. The organization's own site publishes an internal newsletter cadence (quarterly "Reflections" magazine, most recently a Winter 2024-25 issue, and a monthly "Employee Connection" staff newsletter running through at least March 2026), which points to an active, functioning direct-care operation, but none of the indexed issues surfaced funding announcements, new grant programs, or leadership changes beyond what's in the 990 data. Search results repeatedly surfaced unrelated organizations that share part of the name — a Miami-Dade nonprofit coworking space at 4socialchange.org and the Miami Workers Center/Power U's "Center for People Power" project (construction expected to start in 2026) — neither of which is affiliated with EIN 27-2966443; these should not be attributed to this foundation in any outreach. The one internally-consistent data point suggesting recent change is financial: officer compensation jumped from $0 (FY2019) to $59,956 (FY2020) for Executive Director Lucinda Kerschensteiner, alongside a near-doubling of total revenue and contributions, which is consistent with either a leadership formalization or a major new funding/contract source (likely an expanded Medicaid waiver contract) around FY2020 — but this predates the 2025-2026 window this report targets, and no more recent filings were available in the data bundle to confirm whether that trajectory continued.

The most important "application tip" for this entity is to recognize it is not a grants funder and redirect effort elsewhere. Nothing in the DB record (grants_paid: $0 across all years on file, zero tracked grantees) or on the organization's own website (no grants page, no LOI portal, no application form URL, no listed grant deadlines) indicates a mechanism for external organizations to apply for funding. The `application_instructions` field in the underlying record is explicitly "__none__", and no program officer, grants manager, or funding-focused contact was identified in leadership (the listed team — Executive Director, Co-Executive Director/CFO, Treasurer, and Directors — mirrors a service-agency governance structure, not a grantmaking one).

If your organization's actual goal is to work with Center For Social Change rather than receive a grant from it, three paths are more realistic than a proposal: (1) Referral partnership — if you serve families or individuals with I/DD or autism in Maryland, connect with CSC's intake/referral process for residential, day habilitation, vocational, or Medicaid waiver placements; (2) Vendor/subcontractor relationship — CSC's CARF-accredited programs likely need clinical, therapeutic, transportation, or facilities vendors, which is a commercial relationship, not a grant; (3) Fundraising/donor engagement — CSC actively solicits contributions ($2.59M received in FY2020), so if you are a donor or a peer nonprofit exploring co-funding or shared-donor cultivation, its development or executive office (not a grants office) is the right contact point.

Common mistake to avoid: several public databases (and AI-generated summaries) mislabel this organization as a "private foundation" purely because of its IRS filing classification, which can lead grant seekers to draft and submit LOIs that will go unanswered because no one on staff is positioned to process them. Verify directly with the organization (via its general contact page) before investing time in an application.