Debartolo Family Foundation

The DeBartolo Family Foundation is a small, family-run Tampa private foundation (EIN 31-1739677) with roughly $7.76M in assets and no paid staff — the president, four vice presidents, secretary, and treasurer are all DeBartolo family members drawing zero compensation. This is a hands-on, relationship-driven funder, not an institutional grantmaker with a program office. The foundation favors small, program-specific, locally rooted organizations over large institutions: of 439 recorded grants totaling $1.92M, the average award is just $4,380 and 385 of 439 grants (88%) went to Florida recipients, overwhelmingly in the Tampa Bay area. The largest single grantees in the dataset — Humane Society of Northwest Montana ($78,551), Gary Sinise Foundation ($65,000), Frankie's Friends ($54,500), Ensworth School ($52,000) — are exceptions that prove the rule: most giving is modest, program-restricted, and tightly clustered around youth, education, animal welfare, veterans, and grassroots human-services groups. First-time applicants should not expect a portal or formal RFP; the entire front door is a short email to Foundation Manager Judy Bragdon (jbragdon@debartoloholdings.com) with a mission statement, a specific dollar ask, and a brief description of intended use. There is no stated cycle or deadline for community grants (deadlines only apply to the April 1 scholarship cycle), so timing is flexible but relationship quality matters — this is a foundation built around the family's own causes (their name is attached to Brooks DeBartolo Collegiate High School, a charter school) and its recurring Spirit of Humanity Award, which functions as an informal 'graduation' tier for grantees who've built visibility with the family. Organizations should calibrate asks to program-level budgets (median $2,500, up to $25K typical ceiling) rather than organization-wide budgets, and should lead with concrete, local, human-scale impact stories rather than data-heavy institutional proposals.

Grantee-level data shows an average grant of $4,380 across 439 grants totaling $1,922,756 cumulative, but the foundation's own stated typical range is far wider: minimum $200, median $2,500, average $14,264, and maximum $1,000,000 across 99 tracked awards — indicating a long tail where a handful of large, multi-year, or capital-type gifts (likely including the Brooks DeBartolo charter school and Spirit of Humanity recipients) pull the average well above the median. By geography, Florida dominates grantee count (385 of 439, ~88%), with small clusters in Tennessee (8), Ohio (7), California and Georgia (6 each), New York (5), Maryland (4), Colorado, Texas and Virginia (2-3 each) — likely reflecting family/business relationships (e.g., Ensworth School in Nashville, $52,000 across two grants) rather than open-eligibility giving outside Florida. By program area, human-services and health/medical nonprofits dominate the top-50 grantee list — Frankie's Friends ($54,500, animal cancer treatment), Corporate Angel Network ($35,000, cancer patient flights), Children's Cancer Center ($30,000), St. Joseph's Children's Hospital and Hospitals Foundation, Alzheimer's Association, Maple Tree Cancer Alliance — alongside youth/education (Friends of the Children Tampa Bay $30,000, Starting Right Now $30,000, Mort Elementary School $30,800, University of Florida scholarships $17,500) and veterans/military (Folds of Honor $10,000, Liberty Manor for Veterans $25,000). On the financial trendline, total giving has been volatile: $1.91M (2019) and $1.62M (2020) at the recent peak, dropping to $736K (2021) and $683K (2022) during a period of declining net investment income, before recovering to $1.18M in 2023 and an estimated $907K in 2025 per third-party tracking. Total assets have held roughly flat near $7.8-8.1M since 2022 after tripling from $2.5-3.1M in 2011-2019, funded by periodic large contributions (e.g., $5.6M received in 2022 alone). Grants paid consistently run 75-90% of total giving each year, with officer compensation at $0 throughout — a fully volunteer family board.

The DeBartolo Family Foundation sits within a cluster of similarly sized Philanthropy & Grantmaking-classified private foundations, most in the $7.7-7.8M asset range but with very different postures toward outside applicants.

DeBartolo stands out among this peer set as the only foundation with a fully public, navigable website, published programs (scholarships, community grants, teacher grants, Spirit of Humanity Award), and a named, reachable staff contact for unsolicited inquiries — most peers of similar asset size in this data set have no public web presence at all, suggesting they rely entirely on trustee-directed or invitation-only giving. For grant seekers, this makes DeBartolo meaningfully more accessible than a typical same-size family foundation, but its hyper-local Tampa Bay eligibility restriction narrows the realistic applicant pool far more than its transparency alone would suggest.

The foundation's most recent visible public action is opening 2026-2027 Adopt A School Program applications on 2026-07-23, continuing its long-running teacher/classroom support track. In January 2026, Children's Network of Hillsborough County was named a Spirit of Humanity Award recipient ($25,000), following Our Children Have Rights Organization in September 2025 and The Skills Center in April 2025 — the foundation has kept its three-times-a-year Spirit of Humanity cadence consistent through the 2025-2026 cycle. A February 2026 blog post ('2025 in Review: Making a Difference Together') recapped the prior year's giving, and the foundation funded a teacher-wellness event ('A Calming Retreat for Pierce Middle School Teachers') in August 2025, reflecting its continued emphasis on direct, small-dollar support for local schools rather than large capital grants. On the scholarship side, the Class of 2026 included 40 scholarship recipients from Hillsborough, Pasco, Pinellas, and Polk counties, with the foundation's affiliated Brooks DeBartolo Collegiate High School producing its own valedictorian recognitions in both 2025 and 2026 — underscoring that the family maintains an operating relationship with at least one local charter school beyond pure grantmaking. No leadership changes, executive transitions, or new strategic priorities were identified in available news; Judy Bragdon continues to serve as the sole named point of contact for funding inquiries, and the all-family, zero-compensation board structure identified in IRS filings appears unchanged through the 2023 fiscal year (the most recent financials in the data bundle).

This foundation has no formal LOI portal, no grants management system, and no published RFP calendar for its community grants — the entire application funnel for non-scholarship requests is a single email to Foundation Manager Judy Bragdon (jbragdon@debartoloholdings.com). Keep that first email to three tight elements: (1) your organization's mission statement, (2) a specific dollar amount requested, not a range, and (3) a concrete, short description of what the money will fund. Do not request general operating support — the foundation explicitly states 'only program-related requests will be accepted,' so frame the ask around a discrete activity (a school program, a piece of equipment, a cohort of scholarships, a specific service line) rather than organizational overhead. Because typical awards run under $25,000 and the recorded median is just $2,500, an ask in the $2,500-$15,000 range is far more likely to land than a six-figure request — save larger asks for organizations that already have a track record with the family (the rare $50K-$1M grants in this foundation's history appear tied to long-standing relationships, such as the family's own charter school). Geography is close to a hard filter: virtually all giving goes to Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, and Polk county organizations, so out-of-area applicants should not expect a response unless they can show direct Tampa Bay impact. Have your 501(c)(3) determination letter, most recent audited financials, and latest Form 990 assembled before you email — these are the exact three documents requested if the foundation invites a full proposal, and having them ready signals organizational readiness. Time community-grant outreach around the school year (requests tied to back-to-school, holiday family assistance, or spring scholarship season track the foundation's own program calendar) even though there's no hard deadline outside the April 1 scholarship cutoff. Finally, watch the Spirit of Humanity Award and Adopt A School Program announcements on the foundation's blog — organizations that get local press or community visibility for grassroots work are the ones that appear to surface on the family's radar for these discretionary, non-application-based awards.