Hand Foundation

Hand Foundation (Wilmington, DE-registered EIN 56-2403164; operating publicly as "The HAND Foundation") is a Menlo Park, California family foundation founded in 2003 by Noosheen Hashemi (President/Director) and Farzad Nazem (Secretary/Director), with Nasrin Hashemi as Treasurer — all three serve as unpaid directors with zero reported officer compensation across every filed year. This is a hands-on, relationship-driven family vehicle, not a staffed institutional funder with a program-officer bureaucracy. The foundation's own public materials state plainly that "the majority of grants are made to organizations with which they have a deep relationship and extensive engagement," and that it prefers to "start small, and grow their investment over time." That preference shows up directly in the grantee data: Moms Against Poverty received 8 separate grants totaling $168,400, and Menlo School received 4 grants totaling $26,000 — both patterns of an initial modest gift followed by repeat, escalating support rather than one-off large checks. First-time applicants should expect a cold, unsolicited full proposal to underperform badly; a short letter of inquiry, ideally introduced through a shared network (Stanford, Menlo School, the Iranian-American/Persian diaspora community, or Silicon Valley tech-philanthropy circles the founders travel in), is the realistic entry point. The foundation favors organizations aligned with founder identity and lived experience: Iranian-American cultural and civic institutions (Farhang Foundation, National Iranian American Council), elite higher-education ties (Tufts, Stanford, Menlo School, Georgetown), and child-protection/child-sexual-abuse-prevention training providers delivered at the grassroots level (a recurring $5,000 grant to individual Children's Advocacy Centers nationwide). Grants skew general operating or fund-specific ("General & Unrestricted," named funds/galas) rather than tightly restricted project grants, suggesting the foundation trusts grantees it already knows rather than dictating deliverables. The IRS ntee classification on file (T22 — Philanthropy & Grantmaking) and the platform's own "accepting applications: true" flag indicate the foundation has not formally closed itself off to outside inquiries, but its self-description as relationship-first means an applicant should treat that flag as "technically open, practically invitation-weighted" rather than as an open competitive RFP. Geographic focus fields list California and DC specifically, reinforcing that organizations physically rooted in the Bay Area or operating national-policy programs out of Washington are the most natural fits; an out-of-network applicant located elsewhere, with no education, child-protection, or Iranian-American-community angle, should expect this to be a longer-odds, lower-priority target than a funder that runs an open, staffed RFP process.

Across the 98 grants captured in the platform's grantee history, total disbursed giving is $2,277,372 with an average grant of $23,238 — but that average is skewed upward by a handful of large, multi-year institutional relationships. The single largest grantee is Trustees of Tufts College at $505,000 across 3 grants (Dean's Discretionary Fund and a White House Conference on Nutrition Planning Fund), followed by The Nueva School at $215,000/4 grants, Farhang Foundation and National Iranian American Council tied at $200,000 each, and Moms Against Poverty at $168,400 across 8 grants. Below that top tier, the modal grant size drops sharply to $5,000-$10,000 — visible in a cluster of 8 identical $5,000 grants funding "prevention of child sex abuse training" at individual Children's Advocacy Centers scattered across Missouri, Massachusetts, California, and elsewhere. By recipient geography, California dominates with 61 of the tracked grants (the founders' home base), followed by DC (13, largely national advocacy/policy organizations), with single-digit counts spread across IL, NY, MA, OR, SC, VA, MI, and MO. On an annual basis, IRS filings show total giving swinging widely: $1,918,457 in FY2011 (an outlier, likely a large one-time commitment), then a steadier $512,788-$634,490 band from FY2012-2015, jumping to $715,367-$924,680 in FY2019-2021, before falling to $330,444 in FY2022 against $10.18M in year-end assets. Current listed assets are $9,125,111 with $342,957 in reported income — a small perpetual foundation, not a spend-down vehicle, so annual giving in the $300K-$900K range should be treated as the realistic total pool competing across all these priorities each year. The platform's own typical-grant-size estimate (based on a 27-grant recent sample) puts the median at $10,000 with a $1,000-$250,000 range and a $30,650 average, reinforcing that most individual awards are modest even though headline relationships can run into six figures over time.

Hand Foundation sits in a cluster of similarly small, single-family Philanthropy & Grantmaking foundations with near-identical asset bases (~$9.1M) but very different public postures — most of its closest asset-band peers have no public web presence at all, underscoring how atypical it is for a foundation this size to maintain any grantee-facing information.

All five peers cluster within roughly $9.12M-$9.13M in assets — a tight band that suggests they were matched by the platform on asset size rather than mission overlap, and only two of the five (Elpis, Shokooh) even maintain a website. Notably, Shokooh Foundation shares Hand Foundation's apparent Persian/Iranian-American donor identity, making it the most plausible candidate for genuine strategic overlap and worth a closer independent look; the other three peers give grant-seekers essentially no public signal to work from, reinforcing that Hand Foundation, despite its own opacity around a formal RFP process, is comparatively more transparent than the median foundation in its own peer set.

Public, date-stamped news specific to Hand Foundation's grantmaking in 2025-2026 is limited — this is expected for a three-person, unstaffed family foundation that does not issue press releases about individual grants. The most concrete recent signal is an April 2026 item describing President/co-founder Noosheen Hashemi "expanding global philanthropic initiatives through new programs focused on education and economic empowerment," which aligns with the foundation's long-running "building a global middle class" pillar and suggests continued or renewed emphasis on education/economic-opportunity giving going into 2026. Separately, Menlo School's Global Learning program continues to list an active, named "SEIA & HAND" study/travel grant funding juniors' MTerm and summer independent research or social-impact projects abroad — evidence that the foundation's multi-year relationship with Menlo School (four tracked grants totaling $26,000 for the Global Issues Class Fund, Menlo Summer Fellowship, and Youth Philanthropy Project) remains live and ongoing rather than historical. No leadership changes were found: Noosheen Hashemi (President), Farzad Nazem (Secretary), and Nasrin Hashemi (Treasurer) continue to appear as the foundation's sole directors in the most recent filings, unchanged from prior years, all still uncompensated. No new named program launches, RFPs, or public grant announcements from the foundation itself were identified in the 2025-2026 window; grant-seekers should treat the absence of public announcements as normal for this funder rather than as a signal of reduced activity, and should not expect an open call for proposals to appear.

There is no public online application portal or open RFP for Hand Foundation — do not spend time searching for a submission form. The documented entry point is a letter of inquiry (LOI): a concise, 1-2 page statement of who you are, the specific need or opportunity, and the dollar amount requested, sent rather than a full unsolicited grant proposal. Because the foundation explicitly favors organizations "with which they have a deep relationship and extensive engagement," the single highest-leverage move before submitting anything is finding a warm connection — through Stanford (GSB, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and Stanford HAI all appear in Hashemi's affiliations and in the grantee list), Menlo School, the Iranian-American/Persian diaspora nonprofit community (Farhang Foundation, National Iranian American Council, Iranian-American Bar Association Foundation are all funded grantees), or child-protection/Children's Advocacy Center networks. Applicants without any of those ties should not expect a first ask to succeed at a large dollar amount; the foundation's own stated pattern is to fund small first ($5,000-$10,000 is typical for a new relationship, based on the CAC training grants and Menlo School's initial award) and scale up only after the relationship proves out — Moms Against Poverty's growth to $168,400 across 8 separate grants is the model to point to when framing a multi-year ask. Align language explicitly to one or more of the foundation's seven stated pillars (philanthropy-sector advancement, education/training, social entrepreneurship, debate/advocacy, prevention of child sexual abuse, advancement of women and girls, crisis management/rebuilding) rather than generic mission language — proposals that map cleanly to a named pillar are easier for a three-person, unstaffed board to evaluate quickly. A common mistake to avoid: treating this as a large institutional funder with a formal review calendar. With no paid staff and directors who are also active operating entrepreneurs (Hashemi currently runs January.ai), response times and decision cycles are informal and likely slower than a staffed foundation — build in patience and follow-up.