City Hill Foundation

City Hill Foundation is a small, founder-directed private foundation run entirely by physician-entrepreneur couple Dr. Jonathan Lim and Dr. Conyee Lim, who co-founded it in 2011 and serve, unpaid, as its only officers (Co-Presidents/Directors). There is no program staff, no board beyond the two founders, and no formal RFP process — grantmaking flows almost entirely from personal relationships and causes the Lims are already close to, filtered through their Christian faith (the Foundation's own language describes support for 'primarily Christian non-profit organizations that seek to make our shared world better for all,' echoing Matthew 5:14). For an unfamiliar applicant, this means the single highest-leverage move is finding a genuine point of connection — geography (San Diego / Southern California, plus a smaller cluster of Cincinnati, OH grants), sector (health care, conservation, education, religion, social justice, arts), or faith community — rather than submitting a cold, generic proposal into a portal that doesn't functionally exist. Third-party aggregators (GrantBay) list the Foundation as technically 'open to unsolicited applications,' and the DB record confirms `accepting_applications: true`, but the Foundation's own website and IRS filings show no grants page, no LOI form, and no published deadline — so 'open' should be read as 'not legally closed' rather than 'actively soliciting.' The grantee list is short and concentrated: of 8 tracked outbound grants totaling roughly $8.16M, the two largest relationships (The Cambridge School, a classical Christian K-12 school in San Diego, and the Lims' own donor-advised fund at Fidelity Charitable) account for the overwhelming majority of dollars. A first-time applicant should expect a multi-touch relationship-building arc rather than a single-cycle proposal-to-award process: initial outreach and mission alignment, an informal conversation or introduction (ideally through a mutual contact in the Lims' San Diego/biotech/faith network), then a request for a simple written proposal, and — for larger asks — an implicit expectation of a personal or site visit before a capital-scale commitment like the Cambridge School endowment gift. Smaller, mission-aligned nonprofits with a direct line to the founders (as Hope for San Diego and UrbanLife Farms both had) are realistic near-term targets; unsolicited proposals from organizations with no California or faith-community touchpoint face long odds given the pattern observed.

Total documented outbound grantmaking in the sampled data is $8,159,250 across 8 grants (average $1,019,906 per grant), but this average is skewed heavily by two outlier gifts to The Cambridge School totaling $5,958,750 (a $2,979,375 grant and a $2,000,000-plus follow-on tied to the 'City on a Hill Endowment,' publicly described as a $1M lead gift plus a $1-for-$3 matching challenge toward a $5M total corpus). Strip out Cambridge School and the remaining six grants — five to Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund ($2,200,000, ranging roughly $30,000-$950,000 each per GrantBay's fuller 19-grant history) and one $500 gift to BibleProject — tell a very different story: outside of the flagship education commitment, most 'giving' is really the Lims funding their own donor-advised fund rather than funding operating nonprofits directly. By recipient state, the tracked data shows Ohio (5 grants, concentrated in Cincinnati per GrantBay) and California (2 grants) as the geographic anchors, with one grant to Oregon. GrantBay's longer 19-grant history (2016-2024, $7,659,875 total) shows a median grant of $110,000 and a full range of $500 to $2,979,375, with the most recent tracked tax year (2024) showing just 2 grants at a median of $160,000 — consistent with a foundation making a small number of large, considered gifts per year rather than a broad annual grants program. Annual total giving on the 990s is extremely volatile: $0 in 2019 and 2023, $91,293 in FY2023 (unrestricted-basis giving, distinct from the grants-paid figure), $298,180 in 2020, $533,472 in 2021, and a spike to $4,096,905 in 2022 (the Cambridge School year) — before FY2025 filings (per ProPublica) show charitable disbursements of $778,906 against total assets of $8,064,473. Total assets have declined from a 2016-2018 peak near $11.7-13.9M to about $8.0-8.1M today, and net investment income ($264,280-$689,459 in recent years) is the Foundation's dominant revenue source, not new contributions — it is essentially a self-funded, spend-down vehicle rather than one raising new capital.

City Hill Foundation sits at the small end of the private-foundation spectrum, comparable in asset size to other single-family, founder-run Christian giving vehicles rather than to large institutional funders. Unlike bigger Christian-affiliated foundations (e.g., Watkins Christian Foundation in Atlanta, at roughly $102M in assets), City Hill operates with no staff and no public application infrastructure.

All three same-scale peers (Acierno, the Richmond Christian Family Foundation) are, like City Hill, small enough to run without dedicated program staff, and none publish a formal open grant cycle — this is typical of foundations in this asset band nationally, where deployment is driven by trustee relationships rather than competitive review. City Hill's giving is more volatile year-to-year than its peers because a handful of capital-scale commitments (the Cambridge School endowment) dominate its multi-year totals, whereas Acierno and the Richmond foundation show steadier, more evenly distributed annual disbursements in the $400K-$530K range.

The most concrete recent activity is the Foundation's FY2025 IRS filing (primary return filed 2025-09-11, per ProPublica), which shows $583,197 in revenue, $1,882,980 in total expenses, $778,906 of that in charitable disbursements, and total assets of $8,064,473 — down from $9,285,468 at the end of FY2023 and well below the 2016-2018 peak near $11.7-13.9M. That decline, combined with a net investment loss context in 2022 and 2025, points to the Foundation being in an active drawdown phase rather than growth. On the program side, the single largest recent commitment on record remains the multi-year gift to The Cambridge School in San Diego to establish 'The City on a Hill Endowment' — a $1M lead gift plus a matching challenge (City Hill matching $1 for every $3 raised from others) aimed at building a total endowment corpus of up to $5M, which lines up with the $2.98M and $2.0M grants recorded in the Foundation's 990 data around 2022. Beyond that, no 2025-2026 press releases, new program announcements, or leadership changes were found in web search — co-founders Conyee Lim and Jonathan Lim remain the sole officers, unpaid, as they have been since 2011. Jonathan Lim's parallel public activity (City Hill Arts, a faith-inspired film/media venture launched in 2022 with projects alongside Stampede Ventures, plus his ongoing biotech leadership roles and advisory seat at Every Cure) suggests the family's philanthropic and mission-driven capital is increasingly deployed across a blended 'City Hill' platform (Ventures, Arts, Foundation) rather than through the Foundation as a standalone grantmaking program — worth noting for applicants who may find more traction engaging the broader City Hill ecosystem than the Foundation's 990 filings alone would suggest.

There is no published grants portal, LOI form, deadline, or staff contact for City Hill Foundation — the practical application process runs through direct relationship-building with co-founders Conyee and Jonathan Lim rather than a formal pipeline. Concretely: (1) Lead with faith and mission alignment explicitly — the Foundation's own self-description ('primarily Christian non-profit organizations... the light of the world') signals that proposals should speak directly to Christian mission and community impact rather than generic nonprofit language; secular organizations without an explicit faith or values throughline are a weaker fit based on the observed grantee pattern. (2) Emphasize San Diego/Southern California ties or a Cincinnati, OH connection if you have one — geography is the clearest observable pattern in the actual grants paid (Hope for San Diego, UrbanLife Farms, and The Cambridge School are all San Diego-based; 5 of 8 tracked grants by count went to Ohio recipients), so an organization with no footprint in either region should expect a harder path in and may want to seek a warm introduction through the Lims' known networks (biotech/life-sciences philanthropy, classical Christian education, or faith-based media). (3) Think in capital-gift terms, not annual-operating-grant terms, for a large ask — the Foundation's biggest documented commitments are matching-challenge endowment gifts (the Cambridge School model: a lead gift plus a multiplier to catalyze other donors), so a compelling 'if you fund $X, we can unlock $3X more' structure mirrors what has already worked. (4) Do not expect a fast or transactional review — with two unpaid co-president/directors and no program staff, response times and decision cycles are informal and likely slow; patience and a long-term relationship orientation (site visits, personal meetings) will serve better than a single unsolicited proposal. (5) A common mistake would be treating this like a large institutional foundation with a competitive RFP cycle — GrantBay's 'open to unsolicited applications' tag reflects legal openness, not an active program; cold submissions with no faith, geographic, or personal connection to the Lims are unlikely to be prioritized against a giving history this concentrated and relationship-driven. (6) Because a meaningful share of the Foundation's reported giving actually routes to the Lims' own Fidelity Charitable donor-advised fund, applicants should recognize that dollars flowing there are effectively a second, invisible layer of decision-making beyond what the 990 or any grants database can show — a direct ask to the Foundation itself, rather than trying to reverse-engineer DAF activity, is the only real point of leverage.