Carol J Adragna Family Foundation

The Carol J. Adragna Family Foundation is a small, Depew, NY-based family trust (EIN 27-6968082) with two structurally distinct giving channels, and grant seekers need to understand both before deciding whether to approach it. Channel one is the founding purpose: an annual college music scholarship honoring Carol J. Adragna, a music educator who taught in Western New York public and Catholic schools for 34 years. This channel is genuinely open — high school seniors from the region can apply with an essay and an audition. Channel two is a much larger stream of unrestricted general-support gifts (332 grants totaling $1,236,910 in the Schedule of grants reviewed, averaging $3,726 each) that flow repeatedly to roughly 50-90 well-known national and regional nonprofits — American Red Cross, Buffalo City Mission, SPCA Serving Erie County, St. Jude, National Wildlife Federation, World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club, Alzheimer's Association, and similar organizations. Many of these recipients show 3-4 recurring gifts, which reads as a standing rotation of trustee-favored causes rather than a solicited grants program. There is no visible LOI, RFP, or online application for this general channel, no `grants_page_url`, and no listed `application_deadline` in the foundation's own filings data. For an unfamiliar nonprofit, cold outreach to this channel is unlikely to succeed — with only three trustees (Jeffrey Adragna, Lori Foster, David Gutowski) and total assets of $8.65M, this reads as a closely-held family vehicle, not an institutional grantmaker soliciting proposals. The realistic entry point for grant seekers is the music scholarship: high school seniors headed into Music Education, Music Performance, or Music Therapy, based in Western New York, should apply directly through the essay-and-audition process rather than through a generic proposal. Nonprofits already serving WNY's social-service, animal-welfare, health, or environmental sectors with an existing personal connection to a trustee have a plausible but unsolicited path in; organizations without any prior relationship should not expect a response to a cold proposal.

Financials show a foundation that grew sharply after 2019. Total assets sat under $2M for most of the 2011-2019 period ($495,749 in 2011 up to $1,959,278 in 2019), then a $4,736,897 contribution in FY2020 — most plausibly tied to Carol Adragna's 2019 death — pushed assets to $7,084,672 that year and to a current $8,649,675. Grants paid tracked that infusion with a lag: $61,790 (2019) → $129,500 (2020) → $328,700 (2021) → $366,700 (2022) → $412,010 (2023), a roughly 5x increase in four years and still climbing, alongside total giving (which includes administrative and program costs beyond grants) of $485,913 in FY2023. Officer/trustee compensation is modest and volatile ($9,800-$20,400 across the years shown, then spiking to individual trustee payments of $9,500-$10,500 more recently), consistent with an all-volunteer or lightly-compensated family board. On the scholarship side specifically, the foundation's own IRS filing data reports 64 awards with a median of $2,000, an average of $2,023, and a range of $1,000-$4,500 — a tight, modest band appropriate for a single-student annual music scholarship rather than institutional grants. The broader Schedule of grants (332 grants, $1,236,910 total, average $3,726) is dominated geographically by New York (161 of 286 state-tagged grants, roughly 56%), with secondary concentrations in DC (34), Virginia (21), Texas (18), and California (16) — a pattern that maps to the Washington-area and national headquarters cities of large charities like the National Wildlife Federation, World Wildlife Fund, and Ocean Conservancy rather than to programmatic outreach in those states. No single recipient in the top 50 exceeds $45,500 in cumulative multi-year giving (American Red Cross), and the great majority of relationships sit in the $8,000-$30,000 cumulative range across several years of small annual gifts — reinforcing that this is a diversified, low-dollar-per-grant giving style rather than a foundation making a small number of large, transformative awards.

The foundation sits in a tight cluster of five peer private foundations with nearly identical asset bases (all classified under Philanthropy & Grantmaking, all roughly $8.6-8.65M in assets), but their actual giving practices are otherwise opaque or, where visible, entirely dissimilar in structure to the Adragna model.

Only the Taylor Foundation has verifiable public information beyond its 990 filing, and it turns out to be fully closed — funding exclusively two named genealogical partner organizations in Georgia, with no open solicitation at all. That pattern is instructive: at this asset size ($8.6-8.7M, implying roughly $400-450K in annual required minimum distributions), single-family trusts with 2-3 trustees very commonly settle into either (a) one flagship program with a genuine open door, as Adragna does with its scholarship, or (b) a closed rotation of pre-selected relationships, as the other four peers appear to be. Grant seekers should not expect any of these five foundations to run a conventional open RFP process.

No 2025 or 2026 press coverage, leadership changes, or new program announcements surfaced in web search — this is expected for a three-trustee family foundation with no communications staff. The most concrete recent signal is a scholarship flyer distributed by the Amherst (NY) Central School District's guidance office, confirming the music scholarship program is still active and being promoted to graduating seniors for the current audition cycle. The foundation's own website (mission, criteria-and-eligibility, and leadership pages) and its Facebook page are the only maintained public channels, and neither shows dated news entries. The last verified data point in the platform's own records is a website check on 2026-07-25 (`last_verified_at`) confirming the site and its accepting-applications status are current. The trustee roster — Jeffrey Adragna, Lori Foster, and David Gutowski — has been stable across the compensation records reviewed (Lori Foster and David Gutowski both appear across multiple years at declining but consistent trustee stipends of roughly $9,400-$10,500, tapering toward $4,900 and $0 in the most recent periods shown, suggesting the foundation has moved toward uncompensated or token-compensated trusteeship). The largest structural event on record remains the FY2020 contribution of $4,736,897, which is still working its way into higher annual payouts three to four years later; grant seekers should read the FY2021-2023 trend line (giving nearly tripling) as the most relevant 'recent activity,' even though it predates 2025.

For the music scholarship — the only channel with a documented, open application path — timing and preparation matter more than polish. Essays should directly address why the student is pursuing a music career and should include specific accolades or accomplishments; because the foundation's stated purpose is to honor a specific music educator's legacy, essays that reference a formative teacher relationship or a public/community-school music program (echoing Carol Adragna's own 34-year teaching career) are likely to resonate more than generic 'passion for music' framing. After the essay stage, auditions are held in June and require a two-octave scale of the student's choice, one slow piece, and one fast piece — students should treat repertoire selection as a strategic decision made with a teacher, not an afterthought, since the foundation explicitly invites teacher involvement in that choice. Only Music Education, Music Performance, and Music Therapy majors are eligible; a student admitted to a dual-degree or adjacent program (e.g., music business, audio engineering) should confirm eligibility directly with the foundation before investing in an essay and audition, since those majors are not listed as acceptable. Applicants must be enrolled in and planning to attend an accredited college — gap-year or undecided-school situations should get pre-cleared with Jeffrey Adragna at (716) 553-2921 or jadragna40@live.com, or with Lori Foster at (480) 414-5542, rather than assumed to be fine. Because there is no formal published deadline (the foundation's own filing lists `application_deadline` as blank and only anchors on 'auditions scheduled sometime in June'), the single biggest execution risk is applying too late in the school year — reach out to the foundation in the fall of senior year to get on the essay-submission timeline rather than waiting for a spring push. For nonprofits hoping to access the much larger general-giving channel: cold proposals are very unlikely to land, since 332 historical grants show a closed, recurring set of relationships with well-known regional (Buffalo/WNY) and national charities and no evidence of a solicitation process; the only credible path in is a genuine personal or community connection to one of the three trustees, not a written LOI.