Bratton Family Foundation

The Bratton Family Foundation is a closely-held, family-operated funder in Fort Worth, TX (EIN 75-2513615), run by President/Treasurer Douglas K. Bratton, Vice President/Secretary Anne Marie Bratton, and Director Phil Null — the same three names across every filing year, indicating a stable, tight-knit board with no outside staff. The IRS record marks it 'preselected organizations only,' and this checks out: its website, bratton.org, is a bare domain with no visible content, and both /about and /contact return 404 errors. There is no published mission statement, no grants portal, and no application form anywhere in the data or on the live site. This is not a funder that reviews cold LOIs — it is a vehicle for the Bratton family's personal giving relationships.

Those relationships cluster around two geographies and a handful of recurring causes. Fort Worth/Tarrant County anchors the giving (33 of 54 tracked grants, 61%): the Kimbell Art Museum, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth Symphony, Fort Worth Zoo, Cook Children's Medical Center, and Cornerstone Assistance Network all appear as repeat or notable recipients. A second cluster sits on Nantucket, MA (10 of 54 grants, 19%) — the Nantucket Historical Association, Nantucket Cottage Hospital Foundation, Nantucket Conservation Foundation, and Artists Association of Nantucket all recur, strongly suggesting a family residence there. The single largest relationship by dollars is Duke University ($640,000 across four gifts for a business-school scholarship/professorship), pointing to an alma mater or trustee tie.

For an organization with no prior relationship to the Brattons, the only realistic paths in are: (1) board-level introduction through Fort Worth or Nantucket civic/arts/faith circles where the foundation already gives; (2) affiliation with Duke University's development office if the ask is education-related; or (3) routing through 'Evangelical Giving' or similar donor-advised intermediary funds ($316,904 and $170,406 respectively across the two largest such vehicles), which function as pass-throughs for faith-aligned giving. Cold outreach via a written proposal is unlikely to be reviewed — there is no evidence a formal review process exists.

Across the 54 grants captured in the dataset (spanning roughly 2012-2023), the foundation distributed $1,554,119 total, averaging $28,780 per grant — but that average is skewed by a handful of large anchor gifts sitting alongside a long tail of very small ones. The IRS-reported 'typical grant size' metric shows a median of $61,850 and a range of $630 to $588,580 across seven sampled award amounts, while the grant-level data shows most individual checks are far smaller: half of the 43 distinct recipients received $5,000 or less, and the smallest recorded gift was $30 (Design Inspirations, Fort Worth).

By category, higher education is the largest single bucket: Duke University alone accounts for $640,000 (41% of total tracked giving) via four gifts for a business-school scholarship/professorship fund. A close second is giving routed through donor-advised/umbrella 'various charitable programs' vehicles — Evangelical Giving ($316,904), Nantucket Charities ($170,406), Fort Worth Dallas Charities ($168,221), and an unlabeled 'Nationalunknown Charities' fund ($33,850) — together $689,381, or 44% of total giving, that in turn regrants to end organizations the foundation doesn't itemize. The remaining ~15% splits across direct human-services/faith gifts (Cornerstone Assistance Network $50,000, Search Ministries $10,000), arts & culture (Texas Ballet Theater $25,000, Kimbell Art Museum $5,000, Modern Art Museum FW $4,923, Nantucket Historical Association $17,750), youth/family (Pathfinders $25,000, Boy Scouts of America $5,000), health (Nantucket Cottage Hospital $14,000, American Red Cross $10,300), and small environment/animal-welfare gifts under $16,000 each.

Annual giving has been volatile: $368,047 (2019), $412,217 (2020), a spike to $1,047,971 (2021, likely the bulk of the Duke commitment), then a step down to $468,598 (2022) and $303,284 (2023). Total assets fell from $9.2M (2019) to $7.65M (2024), a foundation in steady decline/spend-down rather than growth. Geographically, 61% of grants go to Texas, 19% to Massachusetts (Nantucket), 9% to New York, 7% to North Carolina (Duke), and single grants to Florida and Virginia.

Bratton sits in the middle of Fort Worth's family-foundation ecosystem by asset size — an order of magnitude larger than the smallest local family funds (Jackson, Winn Dunaway) but three orders of magnitude smaller than the city's marquee funder, Sid W. Richardson Foundation, which has a professional program staff even though it too favors known relationships. Unlike Richardson, Bratton has no public program officer, no grants portal, and no disclosed giving guidelines, making it structurally closer to a private family checkbook than an institutional grantmaker — a pattern common among the smaller Fort Worth family foundations in this table, none of which publish application guidance either.

No news coverage, press releases, or public announcements about the Bratton Family Foundation were found for 2025 or 2026 in general web search — the only sources indexing this funder are nonprofit-data aggregators (Instrumentl, Cause IQ, Candid, Grantable, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Grantivo) republishing IRS Form 990-PF filings, not original reporting. The most recent financial data available (FY2024) shows total_revenue of -$26,394, an investment-loss year, with grants_paid and total_giving not yet populated in the filing captured here — meaning current-year grantmaking activity is not yet publicly visible.

The last fully reported giving year, FY2023, shows $303,284 distributed via $282,181 in grants paid, continuing a decline from the FY2021 high of over $1M (driven substantially by the Duke University commitment). Total assets slipped further to $7.65M as of the 2024 filing, down from $9.2M in 2019. Board composition has been unchanged across all filings reviewed — Douglas K. Bratton (President/Treasurer), Anne Marie Bratton (Vice President/Secretary), and Phil Null (Director) — with zero reported officer compensation in every year on record, consistent with an unstaffed, volunteer-run family foundation. Absent any independent news signal, the most reliable read on 'recent activity' is this financial trajectory: steady, modest, relationship-based giving in the $300-450K/year range, not an actively growing or publicity-seeking grantmaking program.

There is no formal, publicly documented application process for this foundation — treat any aggregator page suggesting otherwise as generic boilerplate. The IRS record itself flags 'preselected organizations only,' and the foundation's own website (bratton.org) has no About, Grants, or Contact page live (all return 404 or blank content as of this research). Practically, that means:

1. Do not lead with a cold written proposal. With three unpaid family board members and no program staff, there is no one positioned to receive or review unsolicited LOIs. Time spent on a polished cold application to this funder is largely time spent unread.

2. Build the relationship through the causes they already fund. The foundation repeats gifts to the same Fort Worth institutions year over year (Kimbell Art Museum, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth Zoo, Fort Worth Symphony, Cook Children's) and the same Nantucket, MA institutions (Nantucket Historical Association, Nantucket Cottage Hospital, Nantucket Conservation Foundation). If your organization sits in either ecosystem, board-to-board introduction through a shared civic or arts affiliation is the highest-odds path.

3. If your ask is education-related, go through Duke University's own advancement/major-gifts office, not the foundation directly — the $640,000 committed there over four gifts for a business-school scholarship/professorship suggests an existing, managed relationship on Duke's side.

4. If your organization is faith-aligned, look at whether you're already a grantee of a donor-advised intermediary such as 'Evangelical Giving' — a large share of Bratton's giving (over $300K to that single conduit) flows through such a vehicle rather than direct grants, so the actual decision point may sit with the DAF sponsor, not the family.

5. Use the contact of record sparingly and formally. The public 990 contact is '% Freida Goodsell, 201 Main St Ste 2100, Fort Worth, TX 76102' with phone (817) 390-8858 — this is almost certainly an administrative/accounting contact (a Fort Worth office-suite address shared by many small family foundations and trust administrators), not a program officer. A brief, professional letter of introduction is more appropriate than a full proposal package on first contact.

6. Keep any ask modest and specific. Half of all tracked gifts are $5,000 or under; a small, well-scoped request tied to a named program (not general operating support) fits the observed pattern better than a large capital ask, Duke's professorship gift being the clear exception rather than the norm.