Albany Foundation

The Albany Foundation is a small, closely held Austin, TX private independent foundation (EIN 77-0594694, ruling date May 2003) with roughly $10.1M in assets and no paid staff — all four officers (President Julie A. Jarvis, Treasurer Evan Hood, and Directors Madeline Kasch and Natalie Jones) serve uncompensated. Independent grant-database research (GrantExec, Cause IQ) directly confirms what the IRS filing structure implies: this foundation does not accept unsolicited applications and gives only to a preselected slate of organizations, despite a DB flag showing 'accepting applications' as technically true. There is no public grants portal, no published funding priorities document, no LOI process, and no deadline — the foundation's own filings list no grants page URL and no contact email. This is not a foundation to court through cold outreach or a polished proposal; it is a relationship-driven, trustee-directed giving vehicle. The strongest signal in the grantee data is geographic and personal: 14 of 34 distinct grantees (41%) are Texas nonprofits, and the two largest single awards — $1,332,000 to Texas Christian University for a scholarship endowment and $166,091 to Texas Tech University for operating support — point to trustee ties to Texas higher education. A secondary cluster of gifts to Syracuse University (the Alexia Endowed Chair and La Casita Cultural Center, two separate $5,000-$20,000 awards) suggests an officer or family connection to Syracuse as well. Realistically, first-time applicants without an existing personal, board, or alumni connection to Jarvis, Hood, Kasch, or Jones have a low probability of breaking in cold. The more productive path is indirect: identify shared board memberships, university development-office relationships, or Texas nonprofit networks (Tarrant County, Austin) that connect to this foundation's known officers, and pursue a warm introduction rather than a direct application. Organizations already receiving support — youth services, child welfare (CASA affiliates, Safe Haven of Tarrant County), higher education, and diverse smaller nonprofits spanning animal welfare to homelessness — suggest the foundation's interests are broad rather than narrowly programmatic, reinforcing that relationships, not thematic fit, drive selection.

Across the 34 distinct grantees on record (36 total grants, reflecting two repeat gifts), total disbursed giving is $2,213,091 at an average grant of $61,475 — but that average is skewed hard by one outlier. The median grant is $5,000: 24 of the 34 listed awards are exactly $5,000 one-time operating-support gifts spread across a wide range of causes and states. Above that floor, the distribution steps up sharply: $20,000 (Syracuse University), $40,000 (Native Hope), $50,000 (two grants: UT Austin Dell Medical School neurosciences and The Settlement Home for Children), $80,000 (two grants: Texas Coalition of Homes-Ben Richey Boys Ranch and a two-payment $80,000 total to Youth Art Collective), $85,000 (Casa For Kids), $90,000 (Safe Haven of Tarrant County), $166,091 (Texas Tech University operating), and a single dominant outlier of $1,332,000 (Texas Christian University scholarship endowment) — which alone represents 60% of all recorded giving. Excluding that one endowment gift, the remaining ~$881,000 spread across 33 grants averages closer to $26,700, and the true typical award for a first-time or smaller grantee is the $5,000 floor. Geographically, Texas dominates with 14 of 34 grantees (41%), followed by California (5), New York (4), Montana (3), Colorado (2), and single grantees in Arizona, Connecticut, Maryland, South Dakota, and Washington — a national footprint with a clear Texas center of gravity. By purpose, virtually all grants (33 of 34) are coded 'OPERATING EXPENSES,' with the single exception being the TCU scholarship endowment — this foundation funds general operating support, not restricted programs or capital campaigns. Annual payout has been volatile: $1,387,000 paid in FY2020, cratering to $55,000 in FY2021 and $221,091 in FY2022, then recovering to $550,000 in FY2023. Total assets have held essentially flat near $10M for over a decade (from $11.1M in 2012 to $10.1M in 2024), meaning the foundation is not growing its corpus or scaling giving — it distributes based on annual investment performance and discretionary trustee decisions rather than a fixed percentage payout schedule.

The Albany Foundation sits within a cluster of similarly-sized private foundations in the $10.0M-$10.1M asset range, all classified under Philanthropy & Grantmaking. None of these peers publish giving totals or application status in this dataset beyond asset size, underscoring how opaque this whole peer tier is — small family foundations at this asset level rarely maintain public grant programs.

Albany Foundation is distinguishable from this peer set mainly by its documented payout history and the outsized TCU endowment gift, which pushed its FY2020 giving ($1.52M) well above what a $10M corpus would typically distribute under a standard 5% payout rule (~$500K). Applicants should note that Cabot-Kjellerup is the only peer with a live public website, making it a comparatively more approachable target for cold outreach if Texas Christian University, Texas Tech, or Syracuse ties don't apply to your organization.

No foundation-specific news, press coverage, leadership changes, or new program announcements for this Albany Foundation (EIN 77-0594694) were identified in 2025-2026 web searches — this is consistent with a foundation that has no website, no communications function, and no paid staff. Search results attributed to "Albany Foundation" news instead surfaced unrelated organizations of the same or similar name (New Albany Community Foundation in Ohio, hosting a December 2024 gala with Peyton Manning and an October 2025 lecture series; Albany State University Foundation in Georgia, which received a $62,549 gift in July 2026) — none connect to this entity. The most recent verifiable activity is financial: the foundation's FY2023 Form 990-PF (filed covering the year ending in 2023) reported $550,000 in grants paid against $649,484 in total giving and $342,344 in total revenue, with net investment income of $246,794. A more recent FY2024 filing shows total revenue jumped to $1,027,450 (driven by investment gains) and total assets rose slightly to $10,103,665, but the corresponding grants-paid figure for FY2024 was not available in the data reviewed, meaning current-year (2025-2026) payout levels cannot be confirmed. Leadership has been stable: Julie A. Jarvis has held the President role across multiple filing years, with Evan Hood as Treasurer; Madeline Kasch and Natalie Jones appear as more recently added Directors, while earlier filings listed Robin M. Picard and Sara Kauffman in Secretary roles — suggesting modest board turnover but no wholesale leadership change to report.

The single most important fact for any prospective applicant: this foundation does not run a public application process. Independent grant-tracking services (GrantExec, Cause IQ) explicitly confirm it gives only to preselected organizations and does not accept unsolicited requests, and the foundation's own IRS filings list no grants page, no application form URL, and no deadline. Do not submit a cold LOI, do not build a proposal packet expecting a portal, and do not expect a response to a general inquiry sent to an unlisted contact address — there is no staff to review it. Instead: (1) Map your board and major donors against the foundation's known officers — Julie A. Jarvis, Evan Hood, Madeline Kasch, and Natalie Jones — for shared institutional ties, especially Texas Christian University, Texas Tech University, Syracuse University, or Tarrant County/Austin nonprofit and philanthropic circles, since those are the only concrete affinity signals in the grant history. (2) If your organization is a Texas 501(c)(3) working in youth services, child welfare, homelessness, education, or health — the categories represented among current grantees (Safe Haven of Tarrant County, Casa For Kids, The Settlement Home for Children, Tarrant Area Food Bank) — you have the best statistical fit; 41% of named grantees are Texas-based. (3) Expect general operating support, not restricted project funding — 33 of 34 recorded grants are coded operating expenses, so lead any eventual conversation with organizational sustainability and impact, not a specific program budget. (4) Calibrate expectations on size: the realistic entry point for a new relationship is around $5,000 (the modal grant size), not the $1.3M outlier gift to TCU, which reflects a long, deep institutional relationship (likely a scholarship endowment tied to a trustee's alma mater) rather than a typical award. (5) Given the volatile year-to-year payout (from $55,000 to $1.39M across recent years), timing a request to a specific fiscal year is not something an outside applicant can control or predict — focus on relationship-building over deadline-chasing, since none exists publicly.