Ingram Family Charitable Trust

Ingram Family Charitable Trust (EIN 20-1178042) is a small, closed-model trust administered by a corporate trustee — IRS filings list UMB Bank ($10,834 fee, FY2024) and, in prior years, Illinois Bank Trust ($9,833-$10,192) as trustee. With total assets of just $1.05 million and annual grant distributions in the $45,000-$57,000 range, this is one of the smallest grantmaking vehicles a nonprofit is likely to encounter, and its behavior confirms it: the trust's own Form 990-PF marks itself 'preselected only,' meaning it restricts giving to organizations it has already identified rather than soliciting or reviewing open applications. Independent funder-profile aggregators (Grantable, Cause IQ) corroborate this reading, describing a trust that does not field unsolicited proposals.

The grantee record makes the pattern unmistakable: across the years captured in our data, essentially all tracked giving — $164,061 across three recorded grants, averaging $54,687 each — has gone to a single recipient, Trinity Lutheran Church (recorded once with a spelling variant as 'Trinity Luthern Church'), based in Illinois. Two of the three grants were unrestricted operating support. There is no competitive program, no published mission statement, no listed program areas, and no dedicated grants page — the trust's on-file 'website' is simply a GuideStar placeholder our system has flagged as dead.

For grant seekers, the realistic read is that this is a family- or estate-administered giving vehicle built around one long-standing relationship — very likely a family church — not a discoverable funding source for the broader nonprofit sector. Organizations without a pre-existing relationship to the Ingram family or their corporate trustee should not expect a first-time, unsolicited approach to succeed. The trust's structure, size, and decade-plus filing history all point toward a closed, relationship-only distribution pattern rather than an open charitable program. Time and proposal-writing effort are better spent on similarly-sized peer trusts with broader, more competitive distribution patterns, or on regional community foundations and denominational funders serving the same northern Illinois region where Trinity Lutheran Church is based.

Total assets have declined modestly from $1.12 million (FY2021) to $1.05 million (FY2024), consistent with a fund that distributes more than it earns in some years and receives zero new contributions — every year of financial history on record (2011-2024) shows $0 in contributions received. The trust is purely a spend-down vehicle funded by its own investment portfolio: in FY2024, net investment income of $60,723 made up 87.5% of the $69,351 in total revenue, and grants paid ($54,253) consumed the majority of that income.

Grants paid have moved within a narrow band for over a decade: $31,124 (2011), $41,482 (2012), $53,676 (2013), $42,940 (2014), $42,985 (2015), $45,000 (2019), $52,648 (2021), $57,160 (2022), $52,316 (2023), and $54,253 (2024) — a low of $31K and a high of $57K, a remarkably tight range for a trust with no new capital inflows. This suggests payouts track a fixed distribution target or the standard 5% private-foundation minimum-distribution requirement recalculated off a fairly stable asset base.

On the grantee side, our data captures only $164,061 in total tracked giving across 3 grants (avg. $54,687 per grant), 100% of it to organizations in Illinois. All of it went to Trinity Lutheran Church / 'Trinity Luthern Church' (almost certainly the same recipient recorded twice), split into a $111,413 two-grant total and a separate $52,648 unrestricted gift. There is no evidence in either the DB or web research of a health, education, or human-services program — the trust's NTEE classification (T22, Philanthropy & Grantmaking) combined with a Religion-focus notation from third-party aggregators aligns with a single-recipient church-support pattern rather than a diversified giving portfolio. With no typical_grant_size, funding_cycle, or application_deadline on file, and zero matched public grant listings, there is no evidence this trust runs any kind of open or recurring funding cycle.

The striking pattern here is asset uniformity: all five peers hold between $1,023,656 and $1,023,894 in assets — a spread of under $250 across five entities in four different states. Combined with Ingram's own near-identical size ($1,049,932) and NTEE classification, this points to a common structural template: small, bank- or trust-company-administered charitable trusts, likely set up through similar estate-planning vehicles and run on similarly formulaic minimum-distribution schedules rather than active grant programs. None of the five peers have disclosed giving data, application processes, or grantee lists in this dataset, which is itself consistent with Ingram's own profile — vehicles this size rarely publish grant guidelines because they aren't built to receive outside applications. Grant seekers should treat this entire peer cluster with the same caution as Ingram: assume closed, relationship-based giving unless direct evidence says otherwise.

No dedicated news coverage, press releases, or announcements about Ingram Family Charitable Trust were found in web research — a finding worth stating plainly rather than papering over, since it's consistent with a trust this size and this closed in structure. The most concrete recent development is administrative: FY2024 Form 990-PF data (last updated in filings as of 2026-05-25) shows UMB Bank collecting a $10,834 trustee fee, whereas FY2022 and FY2023 filings list Illinois Bank Trust in that role ($10,192 and $9,833 respectively) — indicating the trust's corporate trustee changed sometime between the FY2023 and FY2024 filing years. This kind of trustee handoff is common for small trusts as banks consolidate trust-services divisions and does not, on its own, signal any change in giving priorities.

One important caution for researchers: web searches for 'Ingram Family Charitable Trust' surface a cluster of unrelated organizations that share the Ingram name but are not this entity — including Ingram Charities (the Nashville-based Ingram Industries family philanthropy), Ingram Family Foundation entities in Texas and Arizona, the Ingram-White Castle Foundation (Columbus, OH), and a separate UK-based 'Ingram Trust.' Philanthropist Martha Rivers Ingram, associated with the unrelated Nashville Ingram family, died August 6, 2026, at age 90 — this news has no connection to the Kansas City/Illinois trust profiled here (EIN 20-1178042) and should not be cited in outreach to this funder.

There is no formal application process to describe: the foundation's own record lists application_instructions as blank ('__none__'), with no form URL, deadline, or funding cycle on file, and its Form 990-PF explicitly states it contributes only to preselected organizations. Treat this as a hard signal, not a data gap — corroborating third-party funder profiles reach the same conclusion independently.

Practical guidance for organizations still considering outreach: - Do not submit a cold LOI or proposal; there is no review process on record to receive it into. - If your organization has any existing tie to Trinity Lutheran Church in Illinois — the sole documented beneficiary across all years of data, totaling $164,061 in tracked gifts — that relationship (or a warm introduction through it) is by far the most credible path to this trust's attention. - Identify the acting corporate trustee before reaching out. As of the FY2024 filing, that is UMB Bank; prior filings list Illinois Bank Trust. Trusts like this are typically administered at trustee discretion, often guided by a private letter of wishes from the settlor rather than public guidelines, so the trustee's trust-services officer — not a program officer — is the actual decision-maker. - The trust lists a phone contact, (815) 668-4519 (an Illinois area code, consistent with its Rockford-area grantee base despite the Kansas City, MO mailing address on file) — useful only for confirming trustee contact details, not as an invitation to pitch a proposal. - Do not invest meaningful proposal-writing time here. With $54,253 distributed in FY2024 against one recurring recipient, the realistic addressable opportunity for a new, unconnected applicant is close to zero. Redirect effort toward open, competitive funders — including the five peer trusts in this profile only if you can independently verify one of them accepts applications, since none show a documented open process either.