A year after ending a charitable program that pumped nearly $200 million into hundreds of arts and social-service organizations, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is reopening the pipeline to his personal fortune through his multibillion-dollar family foundation, reports Erica Orden for the Wall Street Journal.

Beginning Tuesday, Bloomberg’s foundation will send letters to 250 cultural groups around the five boroughs, inviting them to apply for some of the $32 million the charity plans to distribute to arts organizations over the next two years. “At Bloomberg Philanthropies, we see the arts as fundamental to New York City's cultural and economic wellbeing,” the letter says.

For nearly a decade, the Carnegie Corp. of New York funded almost 600 of the city's arts and social-services groups on behalf of an anonymous donor, widely assumed to be the mayor. Bloomberg’s aides have long declined to confirm his involvement.

The end of that program, particularly amid a recession that curtailed both public funding and private donations, left arts groups scrambling to find new sources of financing. Many of those are likely to be elated to learn that the Bloomberg Family Foundation is picking up the mantle.

“This would be a huge shot in the arm for a small organization like ours,” said Tom Finkelpearl, executive director of the Queens Museum of Art, which received Carnegie grants totaling $900,000.

Like the Carnegie gifts, funding from the Bloomberg Family Foundation’s Arts Advancement Initiative will come in the form of unrestricted grants, meaning the groups may spend the money as they wish. And like the Carnegie awards, at least in their final years, the foundation’s support will be accompanied by an arts-management training program led by Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Given the billionaire mayor’s unique position overseeing vast amounts of both public and private dollars—he is the nation's second-largest philanthropist after George Soros, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy—the relationship between the distribution of taxpayer money and that of his own has long been a source of curiosity.

The consultant developing the family foundation’s initiative, Anita Contini, said there has been “no involvement with city staff at all.” But it nevertheless has close ties to Bloomberg’s administration.

The chief executive of the family foundation, Patricia Harris, is also first deputy mayor and oversees the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Harris approved the foundation’s overall package of arts financing, a spokesman said, but wasn't involved in developing the program or selecting the recipients.

The recipients of Bloomberg’s private grants will be required to maintain accounts with the Cultural Data Project, an online management tool designed to assist grant-making groups. Use of that tool is also required as of fiscal year 2011 by the city Department of Cultural Affairs.

With the mayor scheduled Thursday to release a streamlined preliminary budget, the promise of his private support for arts groups could help take the sting out of any proposed cuts to their public funding.

Contini, a full-time consultant for the foundation since October and the former director for memorial, cultural and civic programs at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., said the program is tied to City Hall “only in that we both care about the nonprofit arts-and-culture community.”

The award recipients, small- to midsize organizations at least two years old, also must secure matching funds equal to 20 percent of the grant amount. They are required to set goals related “either to audience diversification or organizational management practices,” with second-year funding conditional on meeting those goals.

Individual grants will range from about $25,000 to $350,000 over two years, and 75 percent of the $32 million pool will be awarded to organizations with annual operating budgets of less than $3 million.