Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival
Nonprofit profile at a glance
- EIN
- 814612212
- IRS 990-EZ coverage
- 2025–2025
- Forms available
- Form 990-EZ 2025, Form 990-N 2024
- Location
- Blairsville, GA, USA
- Rating
- 75
- Verdict
- SUPPORTED
- Rating confidence
- Moderate
- Sector
- Arts, Culture, and Humanities N.E.C.
Reported finances
- Revenue
- $113,307
- Expenses
- $44,482
- Assets
- $166,152
Source: IRS Form 990-EZ. Selected filing: tax year 2025. Amounts in USD.
Leadership & pay
5 people listed
People named in this filing
- Amanda Lawrence (director)
- Nathan Baerreis (board member)
- Robert Lea (board member)
Selected names, not a complete roster or a statement of current roles. Open leadership details for the complete filed list.
Source: IRS Form 990-EZ. Selected filing: tax year 2025. Names and roles reflect this filing, not necessarily current officeholders.
Overview
Mission
Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival Inc. provides meaningful opportunities for an underserved audience to engage with storytelling through hearing stories and attending workshops that will enable them to develop a cultural intelligence through the arts of listening and speaking. The GMSF celebrates diverse traditions of storytelling including those of Appalachia.
What it reported doing in 2025
Held annually in the spring the two-day Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival shares the art of storytelling with culturally and economically diverse audiences by offering storytelling and musical performances events for children and students an open mic an exhibit on traditional quilting and workshops for visitors to learn about the tradition of oral storytelling and become part of its preservation. The festival also includes an annual workshop on storytelling as a form of healing from trauma. The event brings verbal arts to an area with low literacy rates; offers free for students low-income individuals and individuals with disabilities and low-cost for all others educational arts programming in an economically depressed area to people who would have no way to see artists of this caliber otherwise; addresses the growing problem of excessive screen time by providing activities that demonstrate the value of face-to-face rather than digital interaction; shares the traditional arts of storytelling and quilting with younger generations who may be unaware of or detached from these expressions of culture; and brings together different segments of our community and helps them learn about each others cultures through the diverse artists stories presented. Between in-person attendance and online viewing 3000+ people are served annually. Each year we assess the festivals reach in terms of participant demographics learning outcomes and economic effect in the community.
Operating model
- Revenue model
- Donor-supported. 90% of the money available for current operations came from contributions and gifts.
- Distribution model
- Cannot be determined from the filing. The filing does not provide enough consistent spending detail to tell whether the nonprofit works directly or through others.
The verdict
SUPPORTED - The filed numbers largely add up and a large share of total spending goes to programs. A relatively small share of available resources goes toward mission work and some filed totals do not add up.
Rating breakdown
- Financial Efficiency: 62
- Transparency & Controls: 100
- Sustainability: 79
- Growth: NotEnoughData
Detailed rating inputs
Financial Efficiency
- Mission deployment rate: 40.3%; rating input score 40
- Program expense ratio: 100%; rating input score 100
Transparency & Controls
- Consistency checks: 100%; rating input score 100; 52nd percentile among comparable filings
- Major donor itemization: Yes; rating input score 100
Sustainability
- Operating margin: 60.7%; rating input score 95; 95th percentile among comparable filings
- Total-asset coverage ratio: 3.74; rating input score 92; 92nd percentile among comparable filings
- Liabilities to assets ratio: Limited
- Officer compensation ratio: 0%; rating input score 63; 63rd percentile among comparable filings
Growth
- Program expense growth: Limited
- Revenue growth: Limited
- Asset growth: Limited
Details
- Where the money goes: 40.3% of revenue deployed · 100% of spending went to programs
- Governance: Filed governance answers
- Accomplishments: 1 filed program accomplishment · $46K in reported program spending
- Leadership: top reported pay $0 · 5 people listed
- Consistency: 6 of 7 current checks pass · 1 finding to review
- Schedules: 3 filed schedules
- Filing history: 1 filing year from 2025
- Contacts: How to reach this organization
- Money network: Resolved incoming and outgoing counterparties from filed money flows.
- Grant readiness: Federal tax and exclusion status, award history, and grant-maker relationships.
- People: Everyone the filings name, and which of them the filings identify by more than a name.
Key Signals
Signals prioritize questions for review. They are not findings of misconduct.
- Moderate — Financial Efficiency: Mission deployment rate scored 40/100.
- Moderate — Transparency & Controls: Part III program expenses within total did not reconcile in the filed values.