Engelsma Family Foundation

The Engelsma Family Foundation is a closed-door, preselected-grantee funder — the single most important fact for any grant seeker to internalize before investing time here. Multiple independent grant-research directories (Inside Philanthropy, Grantmakers.io) confirm it does not accept or review unsolicited applications, and its own IRS record leaves application_process and application_form_url blank while still marking accepting_applications as true — a common quirk for family foundations that technically remain open on paper but function entirely by invitation in practice. This is a classic small family foundation organized around the personal and professional networks of its directors: Susan Wilcox (President), Daniel Engelsma (Treasurer), Sharon Korsh (VP), Barbara Diessner (Secretary), and six additional family directors (Bruce, Bradley, and Jessica Engelsma; Jeremy and Brandon Diessner; Nicole Slattery; Paige Wilcox), none of whom draw compensation — a strong signal this is an all-volunteer, checkbook-style family vehicle rather than a staffed institution. The website on file, engelsma.com, actually belongs to Engelsma Construction, Inc., a third-generation Minneapolis commercial contractor — confirming the family's Twin Cities business roots and explaining why 103 of the foundation's 160 tracked grants (64%) go to Minnesota organizations despite the foundation's own legal address in Sioux Falls, SD. With no LOI process, no portal, and no published guidelines, realistic access runs almost entirely through relationship-building: board service, shared alumni ties, or introduction through an already-funded grantee. Recurring, multi-year recipients like Dunwoody College of Technology, Gustavus Adolphus College, and University of Minnesota Foundation suggest the family favors Minnesota higher-education institutions with which a director has a personal history. First-time applicants without a warm connection should treat this as a long-shot, low-priority target and instead study the grantee list below for peer organizations doing comparable work — that list, not a website or guidelines page, is the only reliable signal of fit here.

In FY2023 (the latest filed year), the foundation reported $446,656 in total giving against $368,217 in grants actually paid out, on a base of $5,122,798 in assets (current record shows assets have since grown to $5,788,989). Across the tracked grant history of 160 grants to roughly 50 distinct organizations, total disbursed is $1,185,554 at an average of $7,410 per grant line item; the foundation's own typical_grant_size field shows a tighter distribution — median $1,000, average $6,325, ranging from as little as $50 up to $50,100 (a one-time MN Disaster Recovery Fund gift routed through The Saint Paul Foundation). The largest recurring, multi-year commitments are Fraser ($97,000 across 3 grants), Summit Academy OIC ($91,300/3), Urban Ventures Leadership Foundation ($75,100/3), Children's Health Care Foundation ($68,363/3), Regions Hospital Foundation ($68,000/3), N.C. Little Memorial Hospice ($67,500/3), Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery ($60,000/3), Dunwoody College of Technology ($52,000/3), and Pinky Swear Foundation ($51,500/3) — almost all general operating support rather than restricted project funding. By rough dollar share of the top grantees, health and human-services organizations (hospitals, hospice, crisis nursery, disaster relief) take roughly half of total giving, education (colleges, workforce-training nonprofits like Summit Academy OIC and Dunwoody) about a fifth, community-development/basic-needs organizations (Urban Ventures, food shelves, housing) another fifth, and animal welfare a small remainder. Geographically, Minnesota dominates (103 of 160 grants), with secondary clusters in California (15, likely tied to a director's residence), DC (6), Virginia (5), and Maryland/New York (4 each) — a pattern consistent with a handful of directors each championing causes in their own home states. Total giving has ranged from $284,582 (2011) to a peak of $517,811 (2022), generally tracking net investment income rather than following a defined payout formula, and dipped to $446,656 in the most recent 2023 filing as investment returns cooled.

The Engelsma Family Foundation sits in a tight cluster of similarly-sized Philanthropy & Grantmaking-classified family foundations, all holding roughly $5.78-5.79M in assets — likely a coincidence of the peer-matching methodology rather than genuine strategic similarity, since none publish comparable program guidelines.

Of this peer set, only Life Enrichment Foundation surfaces a public website (lifeenrichmentfoundation.org), making it a marginally more approachable target for cold outreach than Engelsma or the other four peers, none of which have any discoverable web presence. None of these peers publish annual giving figures in available data, but at Engelsma's asset size a payout in the $350K-$500K/year range (as Engelsma itself demonstrates) is a reasonable benchmark for the group. Grant seekers priced out of Engelsma's invitation-only process should treat these peers with equal skepticism absent direct evidence of an open process.

No news coverage, leadership changes, or new program announcements were found for 2025 or 2026 — this foundation generates essentially no public activity outside its annual IRS Form 990-PF filing. The most recent verified financial data is the FY2023 filing (grants_paid $368,217, total_giving $446,656, assets $5,122,798), filed in 2024; the platform's own record shows a slightly higher current asset figure of $5,788,989 with income of $1,719,954, suggesting a filing for FY2024 or FY2025 has since been processed but detailed grant-level data from it was not available in this research pass. The foundation's board composition appears stable and multi-generational, with a 20-person director list that includes some names appearing twice in source data (Sharon Korsh, Susan Wilcox, Daniel Engelsma, Bruce Engelsma, Bradley Engelsma, Jessica Engelsma, Barbara Diessner, Nicole Slattery, Paige Wilcox) — consistent with a family board that has added a second generation (Diessner, Slattery) alongside the founding Engelsma and Wilcox members without any reported turnover in officer roles. No director compensation is reported in any year, reinforcing that this is a purely volunteer-run family vehicle rather than a foundation with paid program staff who might be reachable for guidance. In the absence of any 2025-2026 news, grant seekers should treat the FY2023 grantee list (Fraser, Summit Academy OIC, Urban Ventures, Children's Health Care Foundation, Regions Hospital Foundation) as the best available proxy for current-year giving intent.

This foundation does not run a competitive application process, so conventional grant-writing advice (compelling narratives, budget justifications, outcome metrics) is largely moot — access depends on relationship, not proposal quality. First, do not submit an unsolicited LOI or proposal; there is no published intake mechanism (application_form_url and application_process are both blank in IRS/990 data), and Inside Philanthropy explicitly confirms unsolicited requests go unreviewed. Second, if your organization already receives support from a peer Minnesota institution in the foundation's orbit — Dunwoody College of Technology, Gustavus Adolphus College, University of Minnesota Foundation, Summit Academy OIC, or Urban Ventures Leadership Foundation — a warm introduction through that organization's development staff is a far higher-percentage move than any direct outreach. Third, given the Engelsma Construction, Inc. connection (a Minneapolis-based commercial contractor run by the same family), organizations with ties to the Twin Cities construction, real estate, or business community may have an underexplored angle for a warm introduction through a shared business or civic relationship. Fourth, if you do make contact, call the Sioux Falls office at (605) 336-6832 (c/o Rose Manthe) rather than emailing — no public email address is on file — and ask directly whether the foundation is accepting any new relationships this cycle rather than pitching a specific project. Fifth, keep any conversation focused on general operating support: the grant history shows the foundation strongly prefers unrestricted funding over capital campaigns or restricted program grants, so a project-specific ask is a mismatch with observed behavior. Sixth, expect modest gift sizes for a first-time relationship — the median tracked grant is just $1,000, with the largest recurring commitments ($50,000-$97,000 across three years) reserved for organizations with the longest-standing family ties. Finally, monitor ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer (projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/710924087) annually for the newest Form 990-PF, since it is the only reliable way to track whether the foundation has added any new organizations to its preselected roster.