Elizabeth And Joseph Massoud Family Foundation

The Elizabeth and Joseph Massoud Family Foundation is a small, closely-held private family foundation ($10.29M in assets, EIN 46-2495320) run directly by Elizabeth Allman Massoud and Ihab Joseph Massoud (Westport, CT residents) with zero officer compensation and no program staff — filings are administered through Foundation Source (the Wilmington, DE address is Foundation Source's registered agent, not a program office). This is not a foundation with an open RFP: multiple third-party profiles describe it as relationship-based, invitation-only giving, and the foundation's own website lists no application form, portal, or deadline. First-time applicants should not submit unsolicited full proposals; the realistic path in is a warm introduction, ideally through an organization or event the Massouds already support. The grantee list makes the family's actual network visible: Fairfield County, CT nonprofits (Bridgeport Rescue Mission, Homes With Hope, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southwestern CT, Habitat for Humanity of Coastal Fairfield County, the Westport Library, Staples High School's tuition-grants committee) receive the largest number of recurring, smaller checks, frequently tied to galas and charitable events the family appears to personally attend or sponsor. Layered on top of that local base are a small number of large, named, multi-year commitments — most notably $1,428,572 across four grants to Claremont McKenna College for the 'Massoud Family Fund' and the 'Vivienne Y. Massoud Memorial Scholarship Fund,' and $230,000 to Boston Children's Hospital for its cardiac neurodevelopment program — that read as personal legacy commitments rather than open funding opportunities. A third thread reflects the family's Coptic Christian and Middle Eastern heritage (Ihab Joseph Massoud), visible in $40,000 to Christ the Good Shepherd American Coptic Orthodox Church in Long Beach, CA, and smaller gifts to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. Organizations that are not already in this network should treat first contact as relationship-building — attending a sponsored event, securing a board-level introduction, or being recommended by an existing grantee — rather than a cold proposal, and should expect any resulting grant to start small ($1,000-$10,000) before scaling into recurring 'General & Unrestricted' support.

Across the 100 grants captured in available filings, total giving is $2,723,076 at an average of $27,231 per grant, but the median grant size the foundation itself reports is just $5,000 — the average is skewed hard upward by one outlier commitment. The reported range runs from $300 to $642,857 (a single tranche of the Claremont McKenna gift), and the foundation's own typical-grant-size data (average $36,781, median $5,000, n=30) confirms that most checks are modest while a handful of large, named gifts dominate total dollars. By recipient count, Connecticut dominates with 72 of 100 grants, followed by California (11), New York (6), Massachusetts (4), Washington DC (3), Ohio (3), and Alabama (1) — but by dollar volume, California's single Claremont McKenna commitment ($1.43M) likely exceeds all of Connecticut's 72 grants combined, and Massachusetts' one grantee (Boston Children's Hospital, $230,000 across 4 grants) outweighs most CT recipients individually. The largest CT-based relationships are Bridgeport Rescue Mission ($270,000/4 grants, including a named 'Massoud Family Life Change Center'), the Christian Herald Association/Bowery Mission ($141,666/5 grants, NY-based), and Staples High School Tuition Grants ($82,000/4 grants, the family's local Westport high school). On the foundation's IRS filings, total giving grew from $416,469 in FY2013 to $1,317,122 in FY2023 — roughly 3.2x over a decade — while total assets grew from $2.6M to $11.24M over the same period, driven by three lump-sum contribution years (2013: $2.99M, 2014: $1.55M, 2015: $1.4M, then a gap until 2023: $2.08M) rather than steady annual funding. Grants paid rose every year from FY2019 ($379,213) through FY2023 ($1,233,989), a 3.3x increase in five years, signaling an actively scaling — not static — grantmaker. By program category, third-party aggregators bucket the giving as Education, Philanthropy/Voluntarism/Grantmaking, and Human Services, aligning with the foundation's own T99 (Philanthropy, general) NTEE classification and its stated Community Development focus area.

The foundation sits in a tight cluster of similarly-sized private family foundations, several sharing near-identical asset totals in public 990 data:

All five peers are classified under the same 'Philanthropy & Grantmaking' NTEE category and sit within roughly $7,000 of the Massoud foundation's asset base — this is a common asset tier for family foundations administered through outsourced platforms like Foundation Source, which cap complexity by keeping corpus size modest. None of the peers publish annual giving totals or grantmaking guidelines in available data, reinforcing that this entire cohort operates as closed, relationship-driven grantmakers rather than publicly-facing funders; the Massoud foundation is comparatively more transparent only because its own website names specific partner organizations.

No foundation-issued press releases or news coverage for 2025 or 2026 were found — consistent with a foundation that has no communications staff and does not issue announcements. The most recent verifiable activity comes from IRS filing data and third-party 990 aggregators: the foundation's FY2023 filing (the newest on record via ProPublica) shows $1,233,989 in grants paid, up from $1,103,419 in FY2022, and a fresh $2,083,794 contribution from the family that year, the first new capital injection since 2015. Third-party aggregators (Instrumentl, Grantable) reference a subsequent filing showing approximately $1.5 million distributed to 43-74 grantees in 2024, suggesting the upward trend in annual giving continued past FY2023. No leadership changes are indicated — Elizabeth Allman Massoud (Director/VP) and Ihab Joseph Massoud (President/Director/Secretary/Treasurer) have held the same roles across all filings reviewed, and both continue to draw zero compensation. The foundation's website (last checked in this research) does not list any new initiatives, RFPs, or program changes; it continues to describe itself simply as a vehicle for the family's giving to local, national, and global causes, with a static list of ~19 partner organizations spanning civil liberties, youth mentorship, healthcare, humanitarian aid, immigration/refugee services, housing, and education. Absent new public information, the safest planning assumption is that FY2024-2025 giving continued the same relationship-based pattern and scale (roughly $1.2-1.5M/year) rather than any strategic pivot.

There is no application form, portal, LOI process, or deadline published anywhere for this foundation — do not submit an unsolicited full proposal, as multiple independent sources confirm the foundation does not accept them. The single documented contact point is info@anholtusa.com, with 'Massoud Family Foundation' explicitly required in the subject line; treat this as an introduction channel to get on the family's radar, not a submission portal, and keep the initial message to a short paragraph on mission fit rather than a full case for support. The strongest documented path to funding is proximity to the family's existing network: Fairfield County, CT nonprofits (especially in Westport, Bridgeport, and the broader southwestern CT region), organizations serving refugees/immigrants, youth mentorship programs, and disaster-response/human-services groups already make up the bulk of recurring grantees. A second viable path is through charitable events — a large share of the grant history is tagged 'Charitable Event,' implying the Massouds personally attend and sponsor galas, golf tournaments, and comedy-night fundraisers for organizations like Homes With Hope and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southwestern CT; event sponsorship or a table purchase appears to be a genuine on-ramp to a first check, which can then grow into recurring 'General & Unrestricted' support (the typical progression: an event-tied gift of $1,000-$10,000 in year one, followed by repeat, larger unrestricted gifts in subsequent years — Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southwestern CT, for example, received 7 grants totaling $69,405). A third and more specific alignment is with the family's Coptic Christian and Middle Eastern community ties (Ihab Joseph Massoud) and Claremont McKenna College, where the family has made major named commitments; organizations with a genuine, documentable connection to these communities should lead with that connection explicitly. The most common mistake to avoid is treating this like a foundation with published guidelines — there are none, so proposals framed around a formal RFP or generic 'priority areas' language will not land; instead, lead with a specific, personal point of connection and be prepared for a long relationship-building runway rather than a single-cycle ask.