Hilltop Church

Hilltop Church (EIN 88-0377908) is a Pahrump, Nevada-based private foundation filing Form 990-PF, with $3.7M in assets and roughly $1.25M in reported annual income. It is not a competitive, application-driven grantmaker — its own IRS filing lists application_instructions as none, and the grantee history shows a tightly curated, relationship-based giving pattern rather than an open RFP process. Two compensated officers, Julie Cooper (Director) and Mindy Miller (Trustee), each draw $50,000/year ($100,000 combined officer compensation, unchanged 2018-2023), alongside uncompensated trustees Mike Weaver, James Miller, and John R. Cress — a small, stable governing team that almost certainly makes giving decisions directly rather than through staff-run program review. First-time applicants should not expect an LOI-to-full-proposal pipeline or site visits; the realistic path in is a warm introduction to one of the five named individuals, ideally through a shared Nevada faith, health, or human-services network. The FY2023 grantee list (28 grants totaling $200,000) skews heavily toward organizations serving Pahrump and the broader Nevada corridor (17 of 28 grants, 61%) plus a secondary cluster in Fresno, California (8 of 28, 29% — Poverello House, Fresno Idea Works, Marjaree Mason Center), suggesting a trustee or family connection to that region specifically, not a stated program area. Grant sizes are modest and split fairly evenly between a handful of larger, headline gifts ($10,000-$40,000 to organizations like VMC Foundation, Faith Communications Corporation, and St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital) and a long tail of $1,000-$6,000 community-service checks. Organizations outside Nevada and the Fresno cluster, or without any faith, health, domestic-violence, or senior/veteran services angle, have essentially no evidence of fit in the historical data and should not treat this as a general open funder.

In the most recent fully reported grant year (FY2023, aligning with the $200,109 grants_paid figure on the 990), Hilltop Church made 28 grants totaling $200,000. Average grant size was $7,143; median grant size was $5,000 (nine of the 28 grants, or 32%, were exactly $5,000). The range ran from $1,000 (Child Assault Prevention) to $40,000 (VMC Foundation), with a second tier at $20,000 (Faith Communications Corporation) and $15,000 (St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital) — meaning the top three grants alone ($75,000) accounted for 37.5% of total giving, while the bottom 19 grants ($5,000 or less) accounted for just under $70,000 combined. Geographically, Nevada dominates with 17 of 28 grants (61%), California follows with 8 (29% — concentrated in the Fresno area), and Illinois, New Hampshire, and Virginia each received a single grant. There is no formal program-area breakdown in the filing (ntee_category on the funder itself is simply "Religion"), but grantee names cluster into recognizable buckets: human/social services and domestic-violence response (Northern Nevada Hopes, Domestic Violence Resource Center, No To Abuse, Tu Casa Latina, Marjaree Mason Center — roughly $37,500, 19% of total), health and hospice (St. Jude's, Community Health Alliance, Nathan Adelson Hospice — $27,500, 14%), faith and church-affiliated organizations (Faith Communications Corporation, First Southern Baptist Church, First Choice Pregnancy Center, Pahrump Valley United Methodist, St. Francis of Assisi Food Pantry — $34,500, 17%), and a smaller mix of veterans, senior, and animal-welfare causes. On the asset side, total assets have fallen every year on record: $6.07M (2018) → $5.94M (2019) → $5.74M (2020) → $5.36M (2021) → $5.01M (2022) → $4.90M (2023) → $3.70M (2024), a 39% six-year decline despite consistently positive net investment income ($117K-$411K/year), meaning distributions and expenses have outpaced returns. Total giving (a broader figure than grants_paid, likely including officer compensation and administrative costs) has ranged from $509,627 (2018) to $767,395 (2021), but the grants_paid line item is $0 for 2018-2021 and only appears at $200,000 (2022) and $200,109 (2023) — a gap worth noting rather than explaining away, since it may reflect either a real shift to direct cash grants starting in 2022 or an artifact of how the filings categorized distributions in earlier years.

Hilltop Church sits in a cluster of small, family- or church-run private foundations classified under the "Religion" NTEE category with near-identical asset bases in the $3.6M-$3.8M range. None of the five closest peers in this dataset have a public website on file, reinforcing that this asset tier of religious private foundation typically operates without any public-facing grant program.

The data bundle does not include annual-giving or application-process detail for the five peers, and none maintain a discoverable website — which is itself the most useful comparative signal: at this asset size, Religion-category private foundations overwhelmingly operate as closed, trustee-directed vehicles rather than public grantmakers. Applicants should treat Hilltop Church's lack of a formal process as the norm for its peer set, not an anomaly, and should not expect a competitive open call to ever materialize from a foundation this size in this category.

No news coverage, press releases, leadership announcements, or new-program statements for Hilltop Church were found for 2025 or 2026 in any general web search, aggregator (Instrumentl, Cause IQ, Charity Navigator, ProPublica), or local Pahrump news source. The most recent verifiable activity is the FY2023 Form 990-PF (grants_paid $200,109 across 28 grants) and a FY2024 partial filing showing total assets of $3,702,710 and total revenue of $311,073, with grants_paid not yet reported for that year. The governing team on file — Julie Cooper (Director), Mindy Miller (Trustee), Mike Weaver (Trustee), James Miller (Trustee), and John R. Cress (Director) — shows no reported turnover across the filing years available. One caution for anyone using the listed website (hilltopchurch.org) as a research or outreach channel: the live site content describes a PCUSA-affiliated Presbyterian congregation with a nursery school and youth programs, while third-party directories identify the Pahrump, NV Hilltop Church as Southern Baptist — a mismatch that should be resolved by phone or in-person confirmation before relying on the site for programmatic details. Absent verified 2025-2026 activity, the safest planning assumption is continuity: a similarly sized (~$200K), similarly distributed (Nevada-heavy, Fresno-secondary) grant round, made through the same small trustee group, with no indication of an expanded, contracted, or newly formalized process.

Because Hilltop Church's own 990 lists application_instructions as none and there is no discoverable grants page, application form, or published deadline, generic "submit an LOI" advice does not apply here — the realistic strategy is relationship-based, not process-based. Start by directly confirming the organization's identity and current leadership by phone rather than relying on the listed website, since the domain on file (hilltopchurch.org) presents Presbyterian/PCUSA programming that conflicts with third-party records identifying the Pahrump entity as Southern Baptist; resolving that mismatch before any outreach avoids addressing correspondence to the wrong congregation or denomination. Given that 61% of FY2023 grant dollars stayed in Nevada and a further 29% went to a tight Fresno, California cluster, organizations based in or serving those two geographies have a demonstrably better fit than a generic national appeal — lead with local presence and specific Pahrump- or Fresno-area impact data rather than broad mission language. The grantee list shows a strong preference for organizations already serving vulnerable populations the foundation appears to care about personally — domestic violence survivors, seniors, veterans, hospice/health patients, and food-insecure families — so proposals should name a concrete, small-dollar use of funds (most grants were $1,000-$6,000) rather than requesting a large multi-year commitment; only the top three grantees received $15,000 or more, and each of those ($40,000 to VMC Foundation, $20,000 to Faith Communications Corporation, $15,000 to St. Jude's) reads as an established, ongoing relationship rather than a first-time award. The most common mistake an applicant could make here is treating this like a typical competitive foundation: there is no evidence of a formal review committee, published cycle, or scoring rubric, so a generic cold proposal is unlikely to get traction. Instead, identify a warm connection to Julie Cooper (Director) or Mindy Miller (Trustee) — the two compensated officers who most plausibly run day-to-day giving decisions — through shared Nevada faith, health, or social-service networks, and request a brief conversation before submitting anything in writing. Given the steady 39% decline in total assets since 2018, it is also reasonable to ask directly, in any conversation, whether the foundation expects to sustain its recent ~$200K/year grants_paid level going forward.