Arminius Foundation

The Arminius Foundation is a small, trustee-directed family foundation (EIN 20-2070678) formed in 2004 in Shaker Heights, Ohio, with just $904,308 in total assets (FY2023) and $75,800 paid out in grants that year. It is not a solicitation-driven funder: its website (arminiusfoundation.org) has no grant portal, no LOI form, no published guidelines, and its own 'Giving' page discusses only how to *donate to* the foundation, not how to *apply* for a grant. The foundation's internal data flags it as preselected-only, and its own site's activity log stops in 2014 — all signals of a closed, relationship-based grantmaker rather than an open competitive one.

Control sits with a tiny trustee/director group — John Lewis, Fred Widen, and Craig L. Stout — with Frederick N. Widen, Esq. of Ulmer & Berne LLP serving as the foundation's registered correspondence address. Nearly every dollar tracked in its grant history goes to organizations already inside this circle's orbit: Shaker Heights Schools Foundation ($108,907 across 4 grants, the largest single relationship on record), the American Jewish Committee ($70,400/4 grants), and Williams College ($25,000/4 grants) — Williams being Fred Widen's undergraduate alma mater, a classic marker of trustee-directed giving. The remaining grantees (Breakthrough Schools, Cleveland Marshall Law School, Shaker Heights Development Corp, Shaker Historical Society, Family Connections, Cleveland Neighborhood Progress) are all hyper-local Northeast Ohio institutions.

For a first-time applicant, the realistic path is not a mailed proposal but a warm introduction: through Shaker Heights Schools, Breakthrough Schools/Village Preparatory, or another current grantee; through the Ulmer & Berne / Cleveland legal and civic network; or through an institutional tie to Williams College. Organizations working in Shaker Heights K-12 education, Cleveland-area economic/technology development for underserved communities, or entrepreneurship support (its historical LEAP accelerator investment) fit the pattern best. National or out-of-region nonprofits without a Northeast Ohio or Williams College connection should expect a very low probability of success regardless of proposal quality — this is a fit problem, not a writing problem.

Arminius Foundation's giving is modest and remarkably stable: over the ten fiscal years with available data (2011-2023), grants paid ranged from a low of $50,000 (FY2012, FY2015) to a high of $110,000 (FY2013), with FY2023's $75,800 sitting comfortably mid-range. Total assets have hovered near $1 million for a decade (from $644,732 in FY2011 to $1,013,133 in FY2014 to $904,308 in FY2023), funded mostly by net investment income ($22,000-$44,000/year) and occasional outside contributions ($100,000-$101,000 received in FY2013, FY2014, and FY2023 — likely a periodic top-up from the founding family rather than fundraising).

At the grant level, the foundation's tracked history (21 grants, $260,207 total, $12,391 average) shows a wide spread: median award size is $15,000, with the smallest documented gift at $750 (Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, visioning support) and the largest single relationship, Shaker Schools Foundation, totaling $108,907 across 4 separate grants. The most recent Form 990-PF grant schedule shows 4 grants ranging $5,000-$25,000 (median and average both $15,000) — a useful proxy for what a newly-approved grant looks like today.

Geographically, of the 21 tracked grants, 13 (62%) went to Ohio recipients, with New York and Massachusetts splitting the remaining 8 (19% each) — the NY/MA share is almost entirely the American Jewish Committee (NY) and Williams College (MA), i.e., two fixed institutional relationships rather than open geographic diversification. By purpose, essentially all tracked grants (except one $750 'visioning support' gift) are coded EDUCATION or EDUCATION/GENERAL PURPOSE, confirming education as the dominant, near-exclusive program area despite the foundation's stated mission also naming technology and entrepreneurship. Grant counts per recipient (4, 4, 4, 2, 1, 1...) suggest the foundation favors renewing a small, stable set of relationships over funding a wide, rotating pool of grantees.

Arminius sits squarely among a cluster of similarly-sized education foundations, all holding almost exactly $1.13 million in assets — a size band typical of single-family or small-trustee-group foundations funded by one original gift rather than ongoing fundraising. None of the five peers listed here maintain a public website, application portal, or disclosed annual giving figure, which is itself informative: at this asset scale ($1.1M, implying roughly $50,000-$110,000 in annual mandatory distributions under the 5% payout rule), foundations overwhelmingly favor closed, founder/trustee-directed giving over open competitive programs. Grant seekers should treat Arminius and its peers as a category — worth identifying via trustee names, geographic ties, and Form 990-PF grant schedules rather than through conventional grant-portal research, since none will publish guidelines or accept unsolicited proposals through a website.

No 2025 or 2026 news, press coverage, leadership changes, or new program announcements could be identified for the Arminius Foundation through web search or its own website. The foundation's 'Major Investments' page — its most detailed public account of grantmaking — lists activity only through 2014 (a Scranton Road Ministries community computer lab upgrade), meaning the site itself has not been updated with new grant narratives in over a decade even as the foundation continued filing annual Form 990-PFs.

The most current verifiable activity is financial rather than programmatic: the FY2023 Form 990-PF (the latest on file) shows $75,800 in grants paid, $904,308 in total assets, and a $100,000 contribution received into the foundation that year — the third time in the record (after FY2013 and FY2014) that an outside contribution near $100,000 has been added, suggesting a periodic replenishment pattern from the founding family or trustees rather than a one-time event. Leadership has remained stable across the filings reviewed: John Lewis and Fred Widen as trustees and Craig L. Stout as director, with no turnover documented.

Given the absence of any 2025/2026 signal, grant seekers should not expect this foundation to be running an active or newly-announced funding cycle; the safest assumption is continuity with its historical pattern — modest, steady support (roughly $60,000-$110,000/year) concentrated on the same handful of Northeast Ohio education and civic institutions, refreshed by year rather than by new initiative.

There is no published RFP, LOI template, deadline, or online application for the Arminius Foundation — 'application_instructions' on file is explicitly blank, and the foundation's own website discusses only how to donate to it, never how to request funding from it. Any strategy here has to substitute for a missing formal process:

• Find the relationship, not the form. Every dollar in the tracked grant history (Shaker Schools Foundation, Breakthrough Schools, Williams College, American Jewish Committee, Cleveland Marshall Law School, Shaker Heights Development Corp) traces to either the Shaker Heights, OH community or a trustee's personal institutional tie (Williams College is trustee Fred Widen's alma mater). Applicants without one of these connections should seek a warm introduction before writing anything.
• Route through the trustee-attorney. Correspondence and contributions are handled through Frederick N. Widen, Esq. at Ulmer & Berne LLP in Cleveland — for an unsolicited inquiry, a short, personal letter or call through this channel is more likely to be read than a generic proposal mailed to the foundation's Winthrop Road address.
• Match the sweet spot, not the ceiling. The most recent Form 990-PF grant schedule shows 4 grants of $5,000-$25,000 (median $15,000). A first ask in that range, tied to a specific, concrete use (a program, a piece of equipment, a named initiative — mirroring past gifts like planetarium upgrades or reading-program licenses) fits the foundation's demonstrated pattern far better than a large multi-year general-operating request.
• Lead with education, in Shaker Heights or Cleveland. Every tracked grant but one is coded EDUCATION; the sole exception (Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, $750) was 'visioning support,' still a civic/community-development framing. Entrepreneurship and technology appear only through legacy investments (the LightHouse Entrepreneurial Accelerator Program, OneCommunity) and have not recurred in the tracked grant data since the early 2010s — treat them as secondary, not primary, framing today.
• Common mistake to avoid: treating this as a national or open-call foundation. At $904,308 in assets and roughly $75,000 in annual giving spread across a stable, small set of recipients, it functions more like a family giving vehicle than an institutional grant program — cold, generic applications are the likeliest cause of no response.