Karpel Foundation

Karpel Foundation is a small, founder-operated criminal-justice funder based in St. Louis, run by Jeff L. Karpel (President/CEO), who also founded Karpel Solutions, a prosecutor case-management software company. Its board is stacked with sitting and former elected prosecutors — John J. Choi (Ramsey County, MN), Jeff Reisig (Yolo County, CA), Jennifer M. Joyce (former St. Louis Circuit Attorney), Spencer Merriweather, Jean Peters Baker, Kendra Culpepper, and others — meaning grant decisions flow heavily through the prosecutor professional network rather than a formal open pipeline. Public sources disagree on access: some directories describe the Foundation as largely selecting its own grantees rather than accepting unsolicited proposals, while the Foundation's own website publishes a downloadable "Karpel Foundation Short Grant" (Version 2) form and an application email (karpel@karpel.com). Treat both as true simultaneously — a formal channel exists, but grantee concentration data shows it is used sparingly for genuinely new applicants. Of the 17 tracked grants totaling $263,380, one organization ("For The People," a sentence-review nonprofit) received four separate grants totaling $120,000 — 45.6% of all tracked giving — and "Prosecutors Center for Excellence" received a further $83,380 across two funding relationships. Together, two anchor partners account for over three-quarters of documented giving, with the remainder split among smaller organizational grants and individual Larry D. Morse II Commitment to Justice awards. First-time applicants should understand this is a re-funding relationship model, not a broad annual RFP: the Foundation identifies a small number of trusted partners (often introduced through board-member prosecutors) and sustains them year over year, supplementing with occasional cohort pilots such as the seven-office Media & Community Engagement Tool Kit beta. Given a total annual grants budget in the $55,000-$164,000 range, realistic asks for new organizational applicants are $5,000-$35,000, scoped narrowly to one of the Foundation's three stated pillars: reducing prosecution TIME, reducing prosecution COSTS, or increasing judicial ACCOUNTABILITY. Despite its "Human Services" NTEE classification, this is functionally a specialty criminal-justice-systems funder, and proposals framed as general social services are off-mission regardless of merit.

Karpel Foundation's asset base grew from $94,500 in FY2014 to $2,144,872 in FY2024 — a more than 22x increase over a decade, funded primarily by ongoing contributions received ($449,558 in FY2024) rather than investment returns (net investment income of just $64,705 that year), indicating Jeff Karpel and affiliated donors continue actively replenishing the corpus rather than drawing down an endowment. Total giving has been volatile: $89,146 (FY2019), $48,362 (FY2020), $90,764 (FY2021), $108,106 (FY2022), a peak of $164,264 (FY2023), then a sharp pullback to $55,000 (FY2024) even as assets and contributions both grew that year — a transition or pause year rather than a capacity shortfall. Across the 17 tracked grants ($263,380 total, average $15,493), individual grant sizes range from $5,000 (e.g., single Larry D. Morse II Commitment to Justice disbursements to Amanda Sweeny and Makesha Smith Creat) up to $35,000 (a single grant to Prosecutors Center for Excellence), with a separate $50,000 flagship prize tier for the named Morse Award. Recipient concentration is extreme: "For The People" alone absorbed $120,000 across four grants (45.6% of tracked giving), and Prosecutors Center for Excellence absorbed roughly $83,380 across two grant relationships (31.7%) — together over 77% of all documented giving, leaving a thin remainder split among five individual Morse Award recipients at $5,000-$10,000 each. The Foundation's most recent 990 program-expense breakdown shows three active buckets: $30,000 to AH DataLytics LLC for prosecution-data research and analysis, $35,000 to Prosecutors Center for Excellence for system-improvement work, and $10,000 for a Victim Services Training Program (a CVENT event-management platform for a crime-victim-advocate training network) — confirming data analytics, prosecutor capacity-building, and victim-services training as the three live program areas. Geographically, tracked grantees cluster in California (6 grants), New York (4), Oklahoma (2), and South Carolina (2), with single grants in Alabama, Louisiana, and Virginia — a national footprint tracking where board-member prosecutors are based rather than favoring Missouri, the Foundation's home state.

Karpel sits squarely mid-pack on assets ($2.16M) among this peer set of similarly small, single-family or founder-driven Human Services-classified foundations ($1.87M-$2.49M), none of which disclose public grantmaking data in this dataset — typical of small foundations that give informally through personal networks rather than open competitions. Karpel is unusual within this peer group for publishing an actual downloadable application form and running a formally named, publicized award (the Larry D. Morse II Commitment to Justice Award) rather than operating entirely below the radar, giving outside applicants at least one visible entry point that most peers in this asset tier do not offer.

The most visible recent development is organizational, not programmatic: in July 2026, Karpel Solutions (the affiliated software company founded by Jeff Karpel) named Todd Hicks as its new CEO to "lead the next phase of growth" — this is a change at the for-profit company, not the Foundation, where Jeff Karpel remains President and CEO. In September 2025, Karpel Solutions was again named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies (#4371, 76% growth 2021-2024), underscoring continued financial strength behind the Foundation's funding base. On the grants side, the Texas District & County Attorneys Association circulated the Foundation's Larry D. Morse II Commitment to Justice Award to its membership with a posted deadline of September 11, 2026 — that application window has now closed as of this report (September 20, 2026); the next cycle date is not yet published and should be confirmed directly with the Foundation. The Foundation also continues its partnership with Measures for Justice, a national nonprofit focused on prosecutorial data accuracy and transparency, and has piloted a beta cohort of seven district attorney offices (in California, Oregon, Missouri, New Hampshire, Louisiana, and South Carolina) for a Media and Community Engagement Tool Kit built with vendor Vera Causa Group, providing websites, media training, and social-strategy consulting. Internally, FY2024's 990 shows the first-ever officer compensation ($33,336 to Secretary/Executive Director Bradley C. Berry), a signal the Foundation is beginning to professionalize staffing as its asset base has crossed $2 million.

Given a discretionary annual grants budget of roughly $55,000-$164,000 and extreme concentration in two anchor partners (For The People and Prosecutors Center for Excellence, together over 77% of tracked giving), cold, unsolicited proposals face long odds of breaking into the rotation without a relationship. The single highest-leverage move for a new applicant is securing an introduction through a sitting prosecutor on the board — figures like John J. Choi (MN), Jeff Reisig (CA), or Kendra Culpepper carry direct credibility with Jeff Karpel's review process. Use the Foundation's own three-pillar language verbatim in any proposal narrative: explicitly state how the project will reduce the TIME it takes to prosecute criminals, reduce the COSTS necessary to prosecute criminals, or increase the ACCOUNTABILITY of the judicial system — generic criminal-justice-reform or social-services framing will read as off-mission even if worthy. There are two distinct entry points, and applicants should not conflate them: (1) the general "Karpel Foundation Short Grant" (Version 2) organizational application, downloaded from karpelfoundation.com/applications.html and emailed to karpel@karpel.com, best suited to programmatic asks in the $5,000-$35,000 range; and (2) the Larry D. Morse II Commitment to Justice Award, a $50,000 prize-style grant for individual career prosecutors (not organizations), with the most recent posted deadline of September 11, 2026 now closed — confirm the next cycle directly. No formal multi-page RFP, budget template, or review-committee timeline is published, consistent with a lean, single-location operation without dedicated program officers; keep submissions concise and be prepared to follow up by phone (314.892.6300) rather than wait on a portal. If proposing a data or case-management pilot, benchmark explicitly against the Foundation's own published standards — 16 data points tracked across counties, a 1-14 day target for law-enforcement-to-prosecutor file transfer, and a 30-day target for criminal discovery disclosure — since these are the exact metrics the Foundation already uses to evaluate system performance. Because the Foundation has recently run cohort-style beta pilots (the seven-office Media and Community Engagement Tool Kit) rather than pure one-off awards, applicants with a program that scales cleanly to a multi-office cohort model may have an edge over single-site proposals. Finally, given FY2024's giving pulled back sharply from FY2023's peak, timing a first approach for later in the Foundation's fiscal cycle, after its board has settled that year's budget, may improve odds of a considered response rather than a reflexive decline.