Christy Foundation

The Christy Foundation is not a conventional grantmaking foundation that solicits or reviews outside proposals — it is a small, trustee-administered scholarship trust with a fixed, narrow beneficiary pattern. IRS filings spanning 2010 through the most recent FY2025 return show the same structure every year: US Bank's Washington Trust Department serves as sole trustee (compensated $28,000-$31,700 annually across the record), no contributions are ever received from outside donors, and all giving is funded from investment income on a stable ~$1.6-1.7M asset base. The DB's matched grantee data shows exactly two recurring beneficiaries — Montana State University (4 grants totaling $273,025) and Washington State University (4 grants totaling $91,009) — both coded as SCHOLARSHIPS. There is no evidence anywhere (990 narrative, website, aggregator profiles) of an open application process, an LOI stage, or a review committee that considers unsolicited requests. The website of record, christy.org, does not resolve to foundation content and is marked parked/inactive in our own enrichment data, and no independent grants portal, RFP page, or contact form could be located during this research. For grant seekers, the realistic read is that this is a restricted, likely donor-designated trust benefiting students at two specific land-grant universities (MSU and WSU) rather than a discretionary foundation open to new applicants. Organizations outside that scholarship channel should not expect a response to cold outreach. The only plausible path in is through the financial aid or scholarship office at Montana State University or Washington State University directly, since the trust appears to disburse through those institutions' own scholarship administration rather than accepting applications from individuals or third-party nonprofits.

Total giving has ranged narrowly from $79,114 (FY2010) to $134,811 (FY2021) over the fifteen-year record in our database, with FY2022 (the most recent DB-recorded year) at $134,264 and grants paid of $89,920. Independent aggregator data for FY2025 shows charitable disbursements of $93,683 against $168,636 in revenue — squarely inside the historical band. Grant count is remarkably constant: 2 grants per year, every year on record, with Instrumentl reporting a typical individual award size of $21,850-$67,440 in the most recent cycle. The DB's matched grantee data corroborates this at the institutional level: Montana State University has received 4 grants averaging $68,256 each (total $273,025), while Washington State University has received 4 grants averaging $22,752 each (total $91,009) — a rough 3:1 split in MSU's favor across the two-state, two-university program. Average grant size across all 8 recorded grants is $45,504. Assets have been essentially flat for a decade, moving between $1.45M (2020) and $1.70M (2021/2014), meaning the foundation's annual payout is a function of investment returns (net investment income ranged from $29,768 in 2019 to $347,402 in 2021, a swing driven by market conditions and asset sales rather than any change in program design) rather than a deliberate expansion or contraction of giving. There is no geographic diversification beyond Montana and Washington, no program-area diversification beyond scholarships/education (NTEE code B82Z), and no indication in ten-plus years of filings that a third beneficiary has ever been added.

Christy Foundation sits in a tight asset cluster with all five peers (each between $1.63M and $1.65M in total assets, suggesting these were pulled as size-matched comparables rather than mission-matched ones). What distinguishes Christy from typical small education foundations is its extreme concentration: rather than spreading scholarship dollars across a state or region, it channels 100% of giving through exactly two named universities year after year, a pattern more consistent with a bank-administered, donor-restricted trust than a foundation built to solicit and evaluate outside applications. Grant seekers should not expect Christy to behave like a discretionary peer foundation of similar size — its US Bank trusteeship and lack of any public grants page point to a fundamentally different (closed) operating model.

The most current verifiable data point is the FY2025 Form 990-PF (fiscal year ended August 2025), which shows total revenue of $168,636 (driven by $52,283 in dividend income and $64,937 in net gains from asset sales), total expenses of $129,298, charitable disbursements of $93,683, and net assets of $1,643,661 — figures reported by Grantmakers.io's aggregation of the IRS filing. This is consistent with, and only modestly above, the FY2022 figures in our own database ($134,264 total giving, $89,920 grants paid, $1,634,201 in assets), indicating no material change in scale or direction between 2022 and 2025. US Bank's Washington Trust Department remains the sole trustee, with compensation that has crept up gradually from roughly $23,600 (2010) to $31,666 (FY2025) — a normal inflation-linked trend rather than a governance change. No leadership transitions, new program announcements, name changes, or press coverage of any kind were found for this specific foundation; web search results for 'Christy Foundation' news are dominated by unrelated organizations (the Christy Award literary prize held its 2025 finalist webcast September 19, 2025, with the Winners Gala set for November 7, 2026 in Nashville — a completely separate entity). Grant seekers should treat this foundation as dormant from a public-relations standpoint: it generates an annual IRS filing and nothing else. Given the total absence of news, applicants have no signal of an upcoming shift in priorities, and should plan around the historical pattern rather than any announced change.

Given the total absence of a public application process, published deadline, or grants portal, the standard grant-writing playbook does not apply to the Christy Foundation as a discretionary funder. The single most important 'tip' is diagnostic: confirm you are not one of the several unrelated 'Christy Foundation' organizations (Christy-Houston Foundation in Rutherford County, TN; Christy's Foundation food-relief nonprofit in Los Angeles/Northridge, CA; The Christ Foundation's matching-grants program; or the separate North Carolina 'Christy Foundation' academic scholarship nonprofit that does run a January-March contact-form application window) before investing time. For EIN 91-1236204 specifically, the ten-plus-year filing history shows zero variation in beneficiaries, which strongly suggests the trust is either donor-restricted by its founding instrument to Montana State University and Washington State University, or channels funds through those institutions' own scholarship offices rather than fielding direct applications. The most productive path for an individual student is to contact the financial aid or scholarship administration office at MSU or WSU directly and ask whether a 'Christy' or similarly-named endowed scholarship fund is listed in their internal scholarship database (many university scholarship offices maintain donor-restricted funds like this that are only visible through the university's own scholarship search tool, not through the foundation itself). Do not attempt cold outreach to US Bank's Washington Trust Department expecting a proposal review — as trustee, its role is fiduciary administration of an existing instruction, not discretionary grantmaking judgment. Organizations that are not MSU, WSU, or students at those two schools should not budget staff time pursuing this funder; the realistic probability of breaking into a pattern that has not changed in over a decade of filings is effectively zero. If a direct relationship is somehow established, emphasize alignment with each university's own scholarship criteria (merit, financial need, or field of study, depending on which listed fund applies) rather than foundation-level mission language, since the foundation itself appears to have no independent programmatic criteria beyond the university disbursement channel.