Bonnie Family Foundation

The Bonnie Family Foundation is a small, closely-held family foundation ($1,105,220 in assets as of FY2025) run entirely by three uncompensated directors — Cornelia W. Bonnie (President), Shelby W. Bonnie (VP), and James Cloonan (Secretary/Treasurer, the foundation's listed contact) — with no staff, no website, and no public grants portal. IRS filing data marks the foundation as technically "accepting applications," but its own application_instructions field is blank and its grant pattern is that of a preselected-recipient funder: of 70 recorded grants totaling $380,250, every single one flows to organizations the directors already know, predominantly in Kentucky (42 of 70 grants, roughly 60% of grant count) with smaller clusters in South Carolina (6), Montana (5), Georgia (4), New Mexico (4) and Virginia (4). The Montana grants (Bitterroot Land Trust, Bitterroot Water Forum, Stock Farm Greater Ravalli Foundation) and Kentucky cluster centered on Louisville and Oldham County strongly suggest the Bonnie family has personal ties to both regions. For an unsolicited applicant, this is a low-probability, relationship-first funder, not a competitive-RFP funder. Cold LOIs are unlikely to be read absent a warm introduction. The realistic path in is: (1) identify a board or program connection to Louisville-area civic/arts/conservation organizations already funded (Community Foundation of Louisville, Lincoln Foundation, Louisville Fund for the Arts), since a shared board member or executive introduction is the most common way small family foundations expand their circle; (2) target land/water conservation and human-services nonprofits operating in Kentucky, South Carolina coastal areas, or the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, since those are the only geographies the foundation has funded; (3) keep any outreach modest — median historical grant size is $4,000-5,000 (DB-reported typical range $250-$25,000, median $4,000), so this is not a funder to approach for six-figure asks. First-time applicants should treat any contact as relationship-building for a future cycle, not a transactional proposal.

Across the 70 grants captured in the foundation's giving history, total disbursed is $380,250 at an average of $5,432 per grant. The IRS-derived typical_grant_size field narrows this further: median $4,000, average $5,161, range $250 (smallest, to groups like Danny and Ron's Rescue) to $25,000 (Bluegrass Land Conservancy), based on a 14-grant sample. The single largest cumulative relationship is with Fons Vitae / Fons Vitae of Kentucky, a Louisville-based interfaith publisher, at $59,500 combined across two name variants and multiple gifts — evidence the foundation makes repeat, multi-year gifts to a small core group rather than one-off awards. Other repeat relationships include Center for Women and Families ($20,000/4 grants), Lincoln Foundation ($25,000 combined/5 grants), Bitterroot Water Forum ($15,000/3 grants), Duke University ($15,000/3 grants), and Salvation Army ($20,500 combined/6 grants). By purpose, land and water conservation is the largest identifiable bucket (Bitterroot Land Trust $30,000, Bluegrass Land Conservancy $25,000, Kentucky Natural Lands Trust, Nature Conservancy of Kentucky, Environmental Defense Fund, Bitterroot Water Forum), followed by human services (Center for Women and Families, Salvation Army, Volunteers of America, Southern Center for Human Rights) and arts/education/community institutions (Louisville Fund for the Arts, Actors Theatre, community foundations, Duke, Deerfield Academy, University of Louisville Libraries). Annual grants-paid has been volatile: $78,450 (FY2012), down to $28,650-$34,750 (FY2013, FY2023), a mid-range $45,250-$72,250 band (FY2014-FY2022, with gaps in filings available), and a sharp step-up to $152,250 in FY2025 — the highest year on record and roughly double the prior peak. Total assets have stayed remarkably flat, $914,668 (2012) to $1,105,220 (2025), meaning the corpus is essentially being maintained by net investment income (e.g., $30,179 in FY2025) rather than growing through new contributions — the foundation reported $0 in contributions received in every year sampled except a modest $40,000-$50,000 in 2012-2013.

All five peers cluster within $700 of Bonnie's asset base ($1.105M) and share the same IRS "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE classification, meaning they are conduit/pass-through family foundations rather than program-driven grantmakers — none has a public website in this dataset. Bonnie stands out within this peer set for having an unusually well-documented, geographically concentrated grant history (70 recorded grants to identifiable nonprofits) rather than opaque pass-through giving, which makes it comparatively easier to research and target despite having no formal application process.

No foundation-issued press releases, leadership announcements, or program updates were found — consistent with an all-volunteer, three-director family foundation with no communications function. The only verifiable recent activity is procedural: the FY2025 Form 990-PF was filed and indexed by third-party trackers (Instrumentl, ProPublica, Grantmakers.io) around April 2026, reporting $152,250 in grants paid, the foundation's largest annual payout across the ten fiscal years in the data (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025 — note FY2016-2018 and FY2024 filings were not present in the reviewed data). That figure is more than double the prior decade high of $78,450 (FY2012) and roughly 4.4x the FY2023 level of $34,750, which fell during a period when total revenue was also compressed ($43,921 in FY2023 vs. $124,011 in FY2025). Leadership has been stable across the available record: Cornelia W. Bonnie (President), Shelby W. Bonnie (VP), and James Cloonan (Secretary/Treasurer) are the only officers listed, all uncompensated, with no evidence of turnover. Grant seekers should read the FY2025 payout increase as the most concrete recent signal available, but should not assume it establishes a new sustained giving level without a subsequent filing to confirm the trend.

There is no formal application process to optimize for: application_instructions is blank in IRS data, there is no grants portal or LOI form, and the foundation's own website field is "NA." Practically, that means: (1) Do not send a cold, generic proposal — it will not be reviewed by a program officer because there isn't one; all three directors are unpaid family/trustee members handling this alongside other responsibilities. (2) The only realistic entry point is a warm introduction through an organization already in the portfolio — Fons Vitae, Center for Women and Families, the Lincoln Foundation, Bitterroot Land Trust, and the Community Foundation of Louisville are the foundation's deepest, most repeated relationships and are the most likely places to find a board member or staffer who can make an introduction. (3) Geography is a hard filter — target only Kentucky (especially Louisville/Oldham County), South Carolina coastal communities, or Montana's Bitterroot Valley; grants to New Mexico, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts in the historical data are isolated one-offs, not evidence of an open geographic mandate. (4) Size the ask to typical behavior: $250-$25,000, median around $4,000 — a $100,000 unsolicited ask to a $1.1M-asset, three-trustee foundation is a mismatch and signals the applicant hasn't done basic research. (5) Favor general operating support framing over project-restricted asks — virtually every recorded grant purpose in the data is coded simply "General," indicating the foundation prefers to fund organizations it trusts broadly rather than specific programs. (6) Because the foundation is small and its directors handle correspondence personally (contact is listed as "% James B Cloonan"), any outreach should be personal, brief, and reference a specific shared connection or the funder's known conservation/human-services/arts interests — not a mass-distributed proposal packet.