Joia Foundation Inc.

Joia Foundation Inc. is a small, closely held private non-operating foundation (EIN 45-4784099) based at 160 Federal St, Boston, MA, administered through the accounting firm Edelstein & Company LLP and governed by three uncompensated directors: Cecilia Vieira Stone (President/Clerk), Max Stone (Treasurer), and Deanna West (VP). Its IRS filings check the box indicating it 'only makes contributions to preselected charitable organizations' and does not accept unsolicited applications for funds — this is a closed, relationship-driven family giving vehicle, not a program-based public foundation with an open pipeline. Its grantee list bears this out: across 41 tracked grants totaling $7,135,000 (average $174,024 per grantee relationship), giving concentrates overwhelmingly on Partners In Health, which alone received 3 grants totaling $5,500,000 — 77% of all tracked dollars. The remainder went to a small, stable roster funded three years running at identical amounts: Brown University, Boston Children's Hospital, Sky's The Limit Fund, and Saving Teens In Crisis Collaborative each received $300,000 across 3 grants; World Central Kitchen, Family Promise MetroWest, GLAD, and Natick Service Council each received $60,000 across 3 grants; NAACP Legal Defense Fund, OUT MetroWest, Lambda Legal, and The Bail Project each received smaller multi-year amounts. This repeat, fixed-amount pattern signals pre-committed multi-year pledges to organizations with an existing personal relationship to the Stone family, not a competitive review process. Most critically, third-party 990 filing aggregators (Grantmakers.io, Instrumentl) show Joia Foundation filed a FINAL RETURN for tax year 2025, distributed roughly $32.5 million (nearly its full remaining corpus) that year, and reported $0 in total assets in its 2026 filing — consistent with a planned dissolution. For any organization without a pre-existing relationship with the Stone family, there is no viable approach strategy: this foundation is winding down and was never open to unsolicited outreach in the first place. Grant seekers should redirect research effort toward Partners In Health's other institutional funders or toward Boston-area family foundations with comparable profiles (legal advocacy, LGBTQ rights, and human-services giving) rather than pursuing Joia directly.

Tracked grantee data shows $7,135,000 distributed across 41 grants to roughly 15 distinct organizations, for an average of $174,024 per grantee relationship; the foundation's own reported typical-grant-size figures (drawn from a 13-grant sample) show a median of $20,000, a mean of $117,308, and a range from $10,000 to $1,000,000 — the gap between the $174K grantee average and the $20K median confirms a barbell distribution: a handful of very large, repeat commitments (led by Partners In Health at $5.5M across 3 grants) alongside a long tail of $10,000-$60,000 grants to community and advocacy nonprofits. Annual grantmaking has been highly irregular rather than a steady payout: FY2013 saw $0 in grants against $39.8M in assets; FY2014 and FY2015 saw enormous one-time distributions of $22.46M and $19.55M respectively (likely tied to an earlier funding event or planned spend-down); FY2019-FY2020 returned to near-zero giving ($0 and $12,636) despite $19-25M in assets; FY2021-FY2023 show a recovery to conventional annual grantmaking of $1.5M, $1.53M, and $4.09M respectively, funding the stable ~14-organization roster described above. Web-sourced 990 data extends this picture past the database's FY2023 cutoff: FY2024 saw only $24,935 disbursed (another near-pause), before FY2025 delivered a terminal distribution of roughly $32.5 million that liquidated the foundation's assets from $32.56M down to $18,900, followed by a final residual grant of roughly $13,000-$16,000 in the FY2026 closing filing. Geographically, the 41 tracked grants concentrate in Massachusetts (19 instances), with secondary clusters in California (6), New York (6), Arizona (3), Washington DC (3), and Rhode Island (3), plus one in Alabama — reflecting the board's Boston base and Partners In Health's Ivy/hospital-adjacent institutional network (Brown University, Boston Children's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) rather than a stated geographic mandate (none is listed; the database's 'geographic_focus' field lists MA, NY, CA, consistent with this pattern).

The five peer foundations returned by the database are asset-matched to Joia's *current, post-dissolution* balance of $18,900 rather than its historical scale — at its FY2021 peak Joia held $35.2M in assets, roughly 1,800x larger than any of these peers currently hold. This is a data artifact worth flagging to any grant seeker: Joia was a mid-sized operating grantmaker for most of its history and only recently collapsed to peer-foundation scale because it dissolved, not because it was always this small.

All six entries (Joia included, at current balance) sit in the same generic "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE bucket (T20) with near-identical five-figure asset bases — a size class typically populated by small family pass-through vehicles, single-purpose conduits, or foundations in the process of closing out, none of which publish open application processes. None of the peer records include disclosed annual giving totals in this dataset, so a direct dollar-for-dollar comparison isn't possible; the more meaningful comparison is Joia's own historical scale (FY2021 peak of $35.2M in assets and $1.5-4M in typical annual giving) against genuinely comparable mid-sized Massachusetts health/human-services funders, which this bundle does not include.

The most consequential recent development is not a new program announcement but the apparent closure of the foundation itself. Per Grantmakers.io's filing summary, Joia Foundation Inc. checked the 'FINAL RETURN' box on its tax year 2025 Form 990-PF, filed February 20, 2026. That filing shows total assets falling from $32,556,742 (FY2024) to $18,900 (FY2025), on charitable disbursements of approximately $32.5 million — by far the largest single-year distribution in the foundation's available filing history apart from its 2014-2015 spend-down years. A follow-on FY2026 filing reported $0 in total assets and a final residual grant of roughly $13,000-$16,000, consistent with the foundation formally dissolving. This wind-down follows two unusually quiet years: FY2024 saw only $24,935 disbursed and FY2023 (the last year in our internal database) saw a return to normal-scale giving at $4,085,000 across the same core roster of ~14 organizations it had funded in FY2021 and FY2022. No press releases, philanthropy-trade coverage, or local Boston news items referencing Joia Foundation, Cecilia Vieira Stone, Max Stone, or Deanna West were found in general web search — the foundation has operated with essentially no public profile throughout its history, consistent with its 'preselected organizations only' posture. Leadership has been stable and unchanged across all available filing years, with all three directors (Stone, Stone, West) serving without compensation the entire time. There is no evidence of a successor vehicle, merger, or public statement explaining the dissolution; grant seekers or researchers wanting confirmation should pull the primary FY2025 and FY2026 Form 990-PF filings directly from ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer or the IRS, since this report relies on third-party aggregator summaries of those filings rather than the raw source documents.

The single most important tip is: do not apply. Joia Foundation's own tax filings check the box stating it contributes only to preselected organizations and does not accept unsolicited applications, and independent grant databases (GrantExec, Grantable, Instrumentl) corroborate this — there is no LOI process, no application form, and no listed program officer to contact. Compounding this, third-party 990 aggregators show the foundation filed a final return for tax year 2025 and closed out to $0 in assets by its 2026 filing, meaning even a warm introduction is unlikely to lead anywhere now that the entity is dissolving. A common mistake grant seekers make with foundations like this is treating a stale 'website' field in a grants database as a live lead — the URL on file, joia.org, actually belongs to an unrelated private individual's personal hobby site and has no connection to the foundation; do not attempt outreach through it. Similarly, the listed contact address (c/o Edelstein & Company LLP, 160 Federal St, 9th Floor, Boston, MA, 617-227-6161) is the foundation's accounting/filing agent, not a grants office, and is not an appropriate channel for cold inquiries. For researchers rather than applicants, the more productive use of this foundation's data is pattern-matching: its historical giving (Partners In Health at $5.5M across 3 grants; recurring $300K commitments to Brown University, Boston Children's Hospital, Sky's The Limit Fund, and Saving Teens In Crisis Collaborative; recurring $60K commitments to World Central Kitchen, Family Promise MetroWest, GLAD, and Natick Service Council; smaller recurring gifts to NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Lambda Legal, OUT MetroWest, and The Bail Project) sketches a donor profile — Boston-connected, health/human-services and LGBTQ-legal-advocacy oriented, favoring multi-year fixed commitments over one-time or project-restricted grants. Organizations already in that roster, or working in adjacent spaces (health equity, teen crisis services, LGBTQ legal advocacy in Massachusetts), are the closest analogues to what this funder valued, and could reasonably use that framing when approaching *other* Boston-based family foundations with a similar profile, even though Joia itself is no longer a live prospect.