Abelard Foundation Inc.

Abelard Foundation Inc. is a small, disciplined family foundation (EIN 13-6064580, ~$7.85M in assets as of FY2024) that has funded grassroots progressive organizing since 1958, split operationally into an East board (Lincoln, MA, serving groups east of the Mississippi) and a West board (serving the Pacific side), with the IRS filing consolidated under the single Seattle-registered corporate entity. It strongly favors early-stage, budget-constrained organizations — the published cap is $300,000-$350,000 in annual organizational budget — and explicitly avoids funding stand-alone service providers, research shops, legal-aid groups, or organizations reliant solely on media strategy. What it wants instead is community organizing with explicit constituent leadership: groups where the people affected by an issue are also running the campaign and sit on the board. This is visible directly in the grantee data: of the top 50 recipients in the bundle, virtually all are labeled "SUPPORT" (general operating, not project-restricted), and repeat, multi-year funding is the norm — Providence Student Union, La Conexion, and Alianza Agricola each received 3 grants totaling $31,000-$36,000, consistent with the foundation's stated policy of up to two one-year renewals after an initial award. First-time applicants should expect a relationship that starts with a written proposal (not a call or meeting — the foundation is explicit that it does not take unsolicited meeting requests and won't give detailed feedback on declines), followed by a possible site visit tied to a board meeting the foundation deliberately holds in grantee communities. Because the foundation is small (about 15 grants/year, roughly 5 of them new), the funnel is narrow and highly relationship- and fit-driven: proposals should read like a peer's proposal to another social-justice funder, not a polished formal grant application, and should foreground constituent-led leadership development and near-term measurable power-building outcomes over service delivery metrics.

Total giving has ranged from $280,096 (FY2023, an unusually low year) to $649,224 (FY2019) over the last decade, averaging roughly $327,000/year in grants paid across the nine years with data (2012-2023, excluding a null FY2024 figure). The DB's typical_grant_size field puts the median award at $10,000 (range $3,000-$20,500, average $9,694, n=36), while the matched top-50 grantee list confirms this: the largest cumulative recipient totals are $36,000 (three $12,000 grants to Providence Student Union, La Conexion, and Alianza Agricola), and the bulk of listed awards cluster at $10,500-$24,000 in cumulative multi-year totals, implying single awards mostly in the $10,000-$12,000 band — consistent with web-reported East-side awards of $12,000-$15,000 in 2025. Geographically, the 113 grants captured in the bundle (totaling $1,217,000, averaging $10,770 each) skew toward California (17 grantees), New York (12), Michigan and Texas (7 each), Washington (6), and Pennsylvania/Rhode Island (5 each) — a spread that reflects the foundation's dual East/West mandate rather than a single-region focus. All matched purposes are tagged "SUPPORT," underscoring that Abelard funds general operations, not restricted projects. On the balance-sheet side, assets grew from $5.08M (2012) to a peak of $7.85M (2024), roughly 55% growth over 12 years, funded primarily by net investment income ($297K-$1.26M/year) rather than new contributions — contributions received were often $0-$143,000/year and were literally zero in FY2022-2023 in some sub-fields, meaning this is a legacy-endowment funder with no active fundraising, not a growing donor-advised vehicle. FY2023 total giving ($280,096) was the lowest in the dataset, worth flagging to applicants as a tighter year, though FY2024 revenue ($634,465) suggests capacity for grants to rebound.

Abelard sits at the small end of the social-justice funder peer set — its ~$7.85M endowment and sub-$600K annual giving are modest next to Solidago- or General Service-scale peers, but its genuinely open, no-portal, no-LOI application process is unusually accessible compared to funders of similar size that often restrict access to invited or referred organizations. Its niche is narrow and consistent — constituent-led organizing rather than broad community development — which makes it a strong but low-dollar-ceiling fit for very early-stage grassroots groups rather than an established nonprofit's growth-stage funder.

The most concrete recent signal is the foundation's November 12, 2025 IRS Form 990 filing, its latest public disclosure, which indicates continued active grantmaking through the most recent fiscal cycle. Web-search aggregation of 2025 awards lists Wisconsin Conservation Voices ($15,000), Fairness West Virginia ($12,000), and Michigan Faith in Action ($12,000) as confirmed 2025 grantees — all three also appear among the foundation's historical top-50 recipients in the underlying grantee database (Wisconsin Conservation Voices and Fairness West Virginia each show $24,000 in cumulative 2-grant totals, and Michigan Faith in Action likewise $24,000), indicating these are renewal relationships rather than new awards. The East board's website confirms grants-approved PDF lists exist for 2023, 2024, and 2025, meaning the foundation is publishing its awards on a regular annual cadence, though the underlying PDF content (specific 2024/2025 recipient-by-recipient detail) was not extractable via the site's page markup during this research pass. No leadership changes, new program launches, or major strategic announcements surfaced in searches — this is a low-visibility, low-communications-overhead foundation consistent with its small staff footprint (the DB lists 30 people, entirely unpaid board members/officers, with $0 officer compensation across every fiscal year on record, run out of board members' homes in Lincoln, MA and Seattle, WA). The absence of press activity is itself informative: Abelard operates as a quiet, high-trust funder rather than one seeking public visibility for its grants.

Submit a written proposal by mail to Susan Collins, The Abelard Foundation-East, P.O. Box 148, Lincoln, MA 01773 (for East-side/Mississippi-east applicants; West-coast groups should route to the Abelard West address via abelardfoundation.com). Target the twice-yearly deadlines of March 15 (spring board review) and September 15 (fall board review) — applications are accepted year-round, but hitting a deadline is the only way to guarantee review at the next scheduled board meeting. Keep the proposal to 7-10 pages in a single PDF under 4MB (or an equivalent mailed packet), and do not invest in custom formatting: the foundation explicitly accepts "common application" formats or proposals recycled from other funders, and glossy folders/binders are discouraged as a poor cultural fit. The proposal must foreground four things the reviewers screen for: (1) organizational background — founding story, current leadership, and decision-making structure; (2) concrete, current organizing campaigns and their results, not planned activities; (3) an explicit theory of the power/policy change being sought, not just services delivered; and (4) brief staff/board bios demonstrating that constituents (the people directly affected) hold real leadership roles, not just advisory ones. Attach the 501(c)3 determination letter, a budget with staff salaries, board list with demographics, a private-supporter list with amounts, and recent financial statements/audit. The single most common disqualifier based on the foundation's own FAQ is presenting as a service-delivery, legal-aid, research, or media organization without a clear organizing/power-building strategy — Abelard says directly it does not fund groups whose model is service or legal assistance alone. Budget realism matters: the foundation's stated preference is organizations with total annual budgets under $300,000-$350,000, so applicants well above that threshold are unlikely to be competitive even if mission-aligned. Do not request a pre-submission call or meeting — the foundation's FAQ says this explicitly, and unsolicited outreach outside the proposal channel is discouraged. If declined, do not expect detailed feedback; the best path to reapplying is watching for alignment with a subsequent published grants-approved list before resubmitting a revised proposal at the next March 15 or September 15 deadline.