Big Wood Foundation

Big Wood Foundation is a small, unstaffed Stern family foundation run out of a New York accounting office (c/o Phillips Gold & Co LLP, 445 Park Avenue) rather than a program-staffed grantmaker. Its own data flags it as 'preselected_only' — meaning the board (Michael Stern, President/Treasurer; Marjorie Stern, Secretary; Ricki Stern and Mark Stern, Directors) chooses grantees directly rather than running a competitive open process. Only one officer, Michael Stern, draws compensation ($10,000/year, unchanged since at least 2012), underscoring that there are no program officers to pitch and no formal review committee to lobby.

The grantee list is the clearest guide to what gets funded: it skews heavily toward organizations with a direct personal or professional tie to the family. Ricki Stern is an Emmy- and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker (Dartmouth '87; "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," "The Trials of Darryl Hunt," "Surviving Jeffrey Epstein"), and the grant list mirrors that world — Public Theater, Roundabout, Ars Nova, MCC Theater, Lincoln Center Theater, St. Ann's Warehouse, The Civilians, KCRW, and the Metropolitan Opera all appear as repeat grantees. Family alma maters (Dartmouth College and its Center for Social Impact, Taft School, Colorado College, Trinity School, The Mountain School) and NY/LA-area hospitals (NY Presbyterian, Hospital for Special Surgery) also recur, alongside an Idaho grantee (Lee Pesky Learning Center, Boise) that likely explains the foundation's name — the Big Wood River runs through Idaho's Sun Valley/Ketchum area, suggesting a family second-home or vacation tie to the Wood River Valley.

First-time, cold applicants should treat this funder as effectively closed to unsolicited inquiries. There is no functioning foundation website (bigwood.org is now a parked domain-sale page), no listed contact email, no LOI portal, and no published deadline. The realistic path in is a warm introduction through one of the affinity clusters above — NYC performing arts/documentary circles, the listed schools, or the hospitals — rather than a standard proposal-to-site-visit progression common at staffed foundations.

The foundation's own typical-grant-size data (most recent full year, n=56) shows a median grant of $2,750, an average of $8,214, and a range of $52 to $100,000 — a very long tail of small gifts under a handful of larger ones. A broader multi-year grantee sample (125 grants, $1,740,727 total, average $13,926) confirms the same shape and shows New York recipients dominate at 78 of 125 grants (62%), followed by California (18, 14%), Connecticut (9), New Hampshire (6), and single- or double-digit counts in Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Vermont.

One line item towers over everything else: 'Various Organized Charities (See List Attached)' totals $896,318 across 2 grants — a bundled Schedule of attached grantees, larger than the rest of the top-50 list combined, and a reminder that the true grantee count and per-organization amounts are understated by any single grant line. Among individually named grantees, Friends Without A Border ($175,000 over 2 grants) is the largest, followed by Metropolitan Opera ($100,000), Team Rubicon ($75,000), and Brown University ($30,000). Most named grants cluster in the $2,500–$15,000 band — museums (MoMA, the Met, Whitney, Guggenheim, Jewish Museum) and theaters typically receive $3,500–$15,000 apiece.

Total giving has held in a relatively narrow band for over a decade: $588,898 (2019), $740,363 (2020), $833,605 (2021), $894,299 (2022), $830,422 (2023), with $946,191 the high-water mark in 2015. FY2024 grants (per Instrumentl) were $542,350, below the recent average — worth noting but not yet a confirmed trend on one data point. Meanwhile assets nearly tripled from $3.5M (2012) to $9.24M (2024), driven mainly by investment gains and lumpy contributions ($3,974,474 received in 2021; $1,480,821 in 2023) rather than by the foundation restraining its payout. Officer compensation has stayed flat at $10,000/year for over a decade, reinforcing that this is a lean, single-family operation with no program staff overhead.

Big Wood Foundation has no DB-provided peer set, so this comparison uses two real, size-adjacent New York performing-arts/human-services funders identified through this research, plus a general small-family-foundation benchmark for scale context.

Big Wood sits at the small end of this set by both assets and giving — roughly 6-16x smaller than Fan Fox/Samuels and Tiger Baron — and shares their NYC performing-arts orientation without their scale or formal infrastructure. Unlike Tiger Baron, which explicitly welcomes unsolicited mail applications, Big Wood offers no such channel, making it closer to Fan Fox & Samuels' relationship-driven, largely-by-invitation posture but with no website or guidelines to even define the ask.

No news coverage, press releases, or public announcements about Big Wood Foundation were found for 2025 or 2026 — the foundation maintains essentially no public profile. Most notably, the domain on file as its website, bigwood.org, no longer hosts foundation content; it currently displays a third-party domain-broker's for-sale listing, meaning the foundation has effectively no working website today even though one may have existed in the past.

The most recent verifiable financial signal is the FY2024 Form 990-PF: total assets of $9,241,445, total revenue of $411,222, and (per third-party 990 aggregation) grant disbursements of $542,350 — down from FY2023's $830,422 in total giving and $500,100 in direct grants paid. This dip is within the range of normal year-to-year variation for a foundation this size funding a semi-fixed roster of grantees, but there is no public explanation (no annual report, no statement) for the decline.

Leadership shows no evidence of change: Michael Stern continues as President/Treasurer, Marjorie Stern as Secretary, and Ricki Stern and Mark Stern as Directors, matching the roles listed across all Form 990-PF filings reviewed. Ricki Stern's documentary filmmaking career has remained active in this period (including prior work such as "Surviving Jeffrey Epstein" and "Surviving Death"), which plausibly continues to shape the foundation's visible tilt toward theater, documentary-adjacent arts organizations, and journalism-related grantees, though no direct statement links her project slate to specific new grants in this window. In the absence of a functioning website or press activity, the Form 990-PF filings remain the only reliable source of current information on this funder.

Treat Big Wood Foundation as a closed, relationship-based funder rather than one with a competitive open cycle — its own data marks it 'preselected_only,' there is no live website, no listed contact email, and no published deadline or LOI form. Cold, unsolicited proposals mailed or emailed with no prior connection are unlikely to be reviewed, since there is no program staff to route them.

The single highest-leverage move is finding a genuine link to one of the foundation's demonstrated affinity clusters: New York performing arts and documentary film (Public Theater, Roundabout, Ars Nova, MCC Theater, Lincoln Center Theater, St. Ann's Warehouse, The Civilians, Metropolitan Opera, KCRW), the family's schools (Dartmouth College, Taft School, Colorado College, Trinity School, The Mountain School), NYC hospitals (NY Presbyterian, Hospital for Special Surgery), or the Los Angeles arm of the family's giving (Friends of the LA Phil, Willows Community School, LA Regional Food Bank, Art Center College of Design). A board introduction from a trustee, alum, or artistic staff member at one of these organizations is far more likely to get traction than a direct approach.

Size the ask to what this funder actually gives: the median grant is $2,750 and the average is $8,214, with the large majority of named grants falling between $2,500 and $15,000. Requests above roughly $30,000–$50,000 are rare outside a handful of larger, multi-year relationships (e.g., Friends Without A Border at $175,000 over two grants, Metropolitan Opera at $100,000). A modest, specific, program-level request framed around one of the affinity areas above is more realistic than a general operating or capital campaign ask.

Since there is no public portal, the only listed contact point is the phone number (212) 935-8630, care of the foundation's accountant, Phillips Gold & Co LLP, at 445 Park Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY 10022. A short, specific letter of interest sent by mail — rather than an attempt to email or find a portal that does not exist — is the most professional route absent a personal introduction. Do not expect a formal decline; family foundations without staff frequently simply do not respond to unsolicited outreach.