Carol Wolfe Foundation

The Carol Wolfe Foundation is a small, young, founder-directed West Texas family foundation, formed around 2021 (its 2021 filing shows essentially $1 in total assets) and grown to $11.18M in assets by FY2024. Governance is a tight family/board circle — President Mark Strickland, Vice President Bill Lane, Secretary Jennifer Calley, and Director Angela "Angie" Strickland, who is also the foundation's paid staff contact ($75,000 annual compensation, the only paid role identified in filings reviewed) and the actual point of contact for applicants. With no program officers, no visible RFP calendar, and a Grant Request Form currently down on the website, relationships and direct outreach matter far more here than a formal competitive cycle. Since inception, the foundation has disbursed just $505,600 across 21 grants to 12 unique recipients — an average of $24,076 per grant — meaning this is still a foundation building its grantmaking cadence, not yet operating at the scale its asset base might suggest. First-time applicants should expect three things: no competitive portal (requests are reviewed directly by Angie Strickland); a strong preference for concrete, direct-service asks (spay/neuter costs, prosthetics, scholarship funds, camp fees, a hospital's counseling program) over general operating support; and an overwhelmingly local footprint — nearly all recipients sit in or near Snyder/Scurry County, with Lubbock as a secondary hub via the foundation's own counseling clinic. The grantee list also shows the foundation favors sustained relationships over one-off gifts: Second Chance Dog Rescue, Opportunity Tribe, Texas Lion's Camp, Snyder Lion's Club, and Calvary Baptist Church each received 2-3 separate grants rather than a single lump sum. The single largest award ($113,000, to Dm Cogdell Memorial Hospital Foundation for its behavioral health department) was justified in filings by a specific, countable outcome — over 378 clients served and a new therapeutic staff room — a useful template for how to frame an ask. Organizations outside Scurry County or Lubbock, or without a mental-health, community-development, or social-welfare angle, face long odds; the two apparent exceptions (grants tied to Illinois, likely the Oak Brook-headquartered Lions Clubs International Foundation) look like national-affiliate pass-throughs supporting a local Lions chapter rather than open competitive asks.

Since formation, the Carol Wolfe Foundation has disbursed $505,600 across 21 recorded grants to 12 unique recipients, averaging $24,076 per grant. Individual grants range from $1,000-2,000 gifts (Snyder Lion's Club and Calvary Baptist Church each received two grants totaling $2,000) up to a single $113,000 award to Dm Cogdell Memorial Hospital Foundation for its behavioral health department. The largest cumulative relationship is Southcrest Baptist Church at $160,600 across two grants for financial counseling services. By recipient total, the top three relationships — Southcrest Baptist Church ($160,600), Cogdell Memorial Hospital Foundation ($113,000), and Sparrow's Nest maternity home ($110,000) — account for $383,600, or 76% of all recorded giving, while the remaining nine recipients split the other 24% ($122,000) in grants of $20,000 or less. Grant purposes cluster into three buckets: mental health/counseling ($273,000, or 54% — Southcrest Baptist's counseling program plus Cogdell's behavioral health department), family/social welfare ($110,000, or 22% — Sparrow's Nest), and community/youth programs ($122,600, or 24% — camps for Opportunity Tribe and Lion's-affiliated groups, animal welfare via Second Chance Dog Rescue, scholarships, and Snyder's downtown holiday festival). Geographically, 16 of 21 grants (76%) went to Texas-based recipients, with 5 grants (24%) flowing to Illinois-registered entities — almost certainly the Oak Brook, IL-headquartered Lions Clubs International Foundation, which alone accounts for 3 of those. Total giving has grown sharply alongside the foundation's maturing balance sheet: from $0 in FY2021 (formation year) to $258,071 in FY2022 to $562,324 in FY2023 — more than doubling year-over-year — while grants paid rose from $121,300 to $263,000 over the same period. Contributions received have also scaled fast ($6.66M in FY2022, $4.85M in FY2023), building total assets to $11.18M by FY2024 (FY2024 grants-paid and total-giving figures were not available in the filings reviewed). Net investment income reached $252,346 in FY2023, up from $144,034 in FY2022. Notably, FY2022-23 grants paid ($121,300 and $263,000) sit well below the ~5% of assets ($550K-$650K) private foundations are typically required to distribute annually, suggesting grantmaking capacity will likely need to expand as the corpus stabilizes — a signal that this foundation may have room to grow its giving budget in coming cycles.

All five peers sit within roughly $7,000 of Carol Wolfe Foundation's $11.18M in assets — this is an asset-tier peer group pulled from the same NTEE "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" category, not a mission-aligned set. Four of the five have no public website at all, meaning Carol Wolfe Foundation — despite its small size and family governance — is unusually accessible for its asset bracket: it publishes a mission statement, staff contact, and (per its own site) an open invitation for community partners to reach out. Zoetis Foundation, the corporate foundation tied to animal-health company Zoetis, is the only peer with a comparably defined public grants program, underscoring that most similarly-sized private foundations in this bracket simply don't solicit applications.

Specific 2025-2026 news coverage of the Carol Wolfe Foundation is sparse. Searches surfaced mostly aggregator and database listings (Grantable, Cause IQ, Charity Navigator, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Grantmakers.io, Instrumentl) that mirror IRS filing data rather than report new activity, plus one social-media mention: a Facebook post from a Nolan County-area grantee publicly thanking the foundation for an awarded grant, though the exact posting date could not be confirmed from the available snippet. The most concrete recent activity on record comes from the foundation's own IRS Form 990 program description: it funded mental-health training seminars for Snyder ISD, Hermleigh ISD, and Ira ISD, delivered by the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center's Mental Health Initiative, training over 460 school staff — administrators, teachers, counselors, custodians, and cafeteria workers — in pre-crisis student mental-health identification, at a program cost of $89,288. The foundation also sponsored one Snyder police officer and one Scurry County sheriff's deputy to attend Suicide Prevention Training in New Braunfels, TX, focused on de-escalating mental-health-related 911 calls. No leadership changes were identified: the same four officers — President Mark Strickland, Vice President Bill Lane, Secretary Jennifer Calley, and Director Angela Strickland — appear across the most recent filings reviewed, indicating stable, unchanged governance since formation. The foundation's website also confirms it now operates a standalone mental-health counseling clinic at 6837 82nd Street, Suite 102, Lubbock, TX, signaling an expansion beyond Snyder/Scurry County into direct service delivery in a larger regional market.

Start with a phone call or email to Angela "Angie" Strickland (325-575-6960, astrickland@carolwolfefoundation.org) rather than waiting on the online Grant Request Form, which is currently down for maintenance. If that channel stalls, third-party grant databases document a paper-based fallback: mail 5 physical copies of your grant application to "The Carol Wolfe Foundation, Attn: Angie Strickland, 2303 36th Street, Snyder, TX 79549" — an old-school submission requirement that's easy to miss if you only check the website. Lead with a specific, quantifiable service outcome tied to a dollar figure: the foundation's largest single grant ($113,000 to Cogdell Memorial Hospital Foundation) was justified by "over 378 clients served" and "a therapeutic room for staff" — concrete, countable outcomes, not broad mission language, appear to drive its largest awards. Frame requests around the foundation's three explicit pillars — mental health services, community development, and social welfare — since proposals outside these categories (pure arts, environment, or general education unconnected to mental health) don't appear anywhere in its 12-recipient grant history. Local ties matter enormously: 76% of recorded grants (16 of 21) went to Texas organizations, centered on Snyder/Scurry County with Lubbock as a secondary hub; non-Texas or non-West-Texas applicants without a direct local connection are a poor fit, aside from the Lions Clubs International Foundation-style national-affiliate exception. Be aware of a documented discrepancy in public sources: some third-party aggregators (echoing generic 990 boilerplate) describe the foundation as funding only "preselected" organizations and not accepting unsolicited requests, while the foundation's own website explicitly states "we are open to any and all inquiries" and invites prospective partners to reach out directly — go to the foundation's own channels and confirm current practice rather than being deterred by aggregator language. Expect a relationship-first process rather than a competitive RFP cycle: the grantee list shows repeat funding to the same handful of organizations (Second Chance Dog Rescue, Opportunity Tribe, Texas Lion's Camp, Snyder Lion's Club, Calvary Baptist Church each received 2-3 separate grants), so a single unsuccessful ask doesn't necessarily close the door — sustained, modest requests over time appear to build toward larger future support. A common mistake to avoid: submitting a generic multi-page proposal deck. With no program staff beyond Angie Strickland's role, a concise, direct request with a clear dollar figure and outcome is far likelier to get read and acted on than an elaborate application packet.