Kramer Fam Foundation

Kramer Fam Foundation (EIN 38-7107022, Detroit, MI) is a bank-administered private family trust, not an active operating foundation. IRS filings show zero staff and a single corporate trustee — Wilmington Trust through FY2020, Comerica Bank from FY2021 onward — compensated roughly $30,000-$36,000 per year for minimal recorded governance hours. There is no mission statement on file, no program officer, and the domain listed for the foundation, kramerfam.org, currently returns no DNS record at all, meaning there is no public-facing presence to research or apply through. The foundation's own enrichment data flags grants as 'preselected only' with no application process, no deadline, and no LOI form, even though it is technically marked as 'accepting applications' — read that as closed-by-default rather than actively soliciting proposals. The clearest signal of preference is renewal behavior: of the twelve largest recipients (Samaritan's Purse, Orange County Rescue Mission, Operation Smile, Second Harvest Food Bank, Mercy Ships, Make-A-Wish of Orange County, Midnight Mission, High Hopes Neurological Recovery Group, Blind Children's Learning Center, Family Assistance Ministries, Saddleback Memorial Foundation, and San Clemente Military Family Outreach), most received grants in 4 or 5 of the years captured in the dataset. This is a fund that re-commits to an established roster of roughly 20-30 organizations annually rather than running a competitive cycle open to the broader nonprofit sector. For an organization not already on that list, the realistic path in is a warm referral — through a board member, donor, or peer nonprofit already funded — rather than a cold submission to the trustee's charitable-trust desk. First-time applicants should also note the grant type on offer: purposes are coded overwhelmingly as 'UNRESTRICTED GRANT' or 'SUPPORT FOR DAILY [OPERATIONS],' meaning the trust prefers writing general operating checks to organizations it already trusts over funding narrowly scoped new programs from unfamiliar groups.

Grantmaking has been remarkably stable in dollar terms even as the asset base grew. Grants paid ran $514,000 (2014), $506,000 (2015), $520,000 (2019), $525,000 (2020), $505,000 (2021), $445,000 (2022), and $568,000 (2023) — a tight band of roughly $445K-$568K per year for a decade, while total assets rose from $2,214,608 (2014) to $5,626,831 (2023). That implies a falling effective payout rate (from roughly 23% of assets in 2014 to about 10% in 2023) as the corpus grew, consistent with a foundation distributing near the IRS 5% minimum rather than scaling giving proportionally. FY2024 brought a discontinuity: a $1,000,000 outside contribution landed in FY2023, and FY2024 total revenue jumped to $4,649,480, pushing assets to $9,624,349 — nearly double the prior year. The foundation's own FY2024 grant total was not available in the primary data reviewed, but a third-party 990 tracker (grantable.co) estimates roughly $700,000 distributed across about 23 grants in FY2024, averaging around $30,000 each — a modest step up from, not a dramatic break from, the historical range. Across the 101 grants captured in this dataset, the average grant is $24,634 and total giving is $2,488,000, with a typical individual grant between $10,000 and roughly $68,750 and a median near $25,000. By purpose, funded organizations code overwhelmingly as general operating support ('UNRESTRICTED GRANT' and 'SUPPORT FOR DAILY OPERATIONS'), with a handful of scholarship awards and church/charitable designations. By program focus, the recurring recipient roster clusters into five areas: disaster relief and international humanitarian aid (Samaritan's Purse, Mercy Ships, Water Missions International, Lutheran World Relief), health and disability services (Operation Smile, Make-A-Wish of Orange County, High Hopes Neurological Recovery Group, Blind Children's Learning Center, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital), food security (Second Harvest Food Bank, Project Angel Food), Lutheran and other Christian faith institutions (Christ Lutheran Church, Abiding Savior Lutheran Church, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod), and military/veteran family and rescue-mission services (San Clemente Military Family Outreach, Orange County Rescue Mission, Midnight Mission). Geographically, California receives 66 of the 101 grants (about 65% of grant count), heavily concentrated in Orange County, with the remainder scattered across Texas (6), South Carolina (5), Virginia (5), North Carolina (5), Arizona (4), Tennessee (4), Maryland (3), Utah (2), and New York (1).

All five peers were matched primarily on asset size (each reports total assets within about $15,000 of Kramer's $9.62M) rather than confirmed programmatic overlap, and four of the five have no public website on file — the same closed, trustee-administered profile Kramer Fam Foundation fits. This peer set illustrates a broader pattern at this asset tier ($9-10M): small, single-family trusts filed under the generic 'Philanthropy & Grantmaking' NTEE code frequently have no public application infrastructure at all, in contrast to larger community and family foundations of the same size class that do publish LOI portals. Grant seekers should expect to treat this entire peer tier as referral-dependent rather than portal-dependent.

No dedicated news coverage, press releases, or public statements were found for this specific foundation (EIN 38-7107022, Detroit, MI) — expected for a zero-staff trust with no public website. Web searches surfaced several other, unrelated organizations sharing similar names (The Kramer Family Foundation Inc. of Reno, NV, EIN 73-1715524; Steven M & Betsy S Kramer Family Foundation; Terry & Suzan Kramer Family Foundation of Wilmington, DE) — none of those are this foundation, and this report excludes their data. The verifiable recent activity for this specific trust comes from its Form 990-PF filing history: the trustee of record changed from Wilmington Trust to Comerica Bank between the FY2020 and FY2021 filings, with no accompanying change in grantee roster or giving pattern. The most significant recent development is financial: a $1,000,000 contribution to the trust's principal was recorded in FY2023, and FY2024 total revenue reached $4,649,480 (versus $1,469,321 in FY2023), pushing total assets from $5,626,831 to $9,624,349 in a single year — by far the largest year-over-year balance-sheet change in the eleven-year filing history reviewed (2014-2024). Grants paid have not shown a matching jump: they stayed within $445,000-$568,000 annually from 2019 through 2023, and a third-party 990 tracker estimates roughly $700,000 distributed across about 23 grants in FY2024, a modest rather than dramatic increase. No leadership, staffing, or program-priority changes were identified in the record reviewed.

There is no formal application channel for this foundation — no website, no LOI form, no listed deadline, and the foundation's own data marks grants as preselected. Treat any outreach as relationship-building, not form-filling. First, confirm fit before investing time: the strongest alignment is with Orange County, CA-based (or CA-serving) nonprofits in disaster relief/humanitarian aid, health and disability services, food security, Lutheran/Christian faith institutions, or military and veteran family services — categories that account for the large majority of the 101 grants reviewed. Second, look for a warm path in rather than a cold one: scan the recurring recipient roster (Samaritan's Purse, Second Harvest Food Bank, Operation Smile, Make-A-Wish of Orange County, Family Assistance Ministries, Saddleback Memorial Foundation, and others) for board, staff, or donor overlap with your own organization, since a referral from a currently-funded grantee is far more likely to reach the family decision-maker behind the trust than a direct approach to the corporate trustee. Third, if a direct approach is the only option, address it to the trustee of record — Comerica Bank as trustee for Kramer Fam Foundation, PO Box 75000, Detroit, MI 48275-7874 — with a concise one-to-two-page letter of inquiry rather than a full proposal, and frame the request as general operating support rather than a restricted program grant, since 'UNRESTRICTED GRANT' and 'SUPPORT FOR DAILY OPERATIONS' are by far the dominant purpose codes in the historical grant data. A common mistake would be submitting a detailed, multi-year restricted-program proposal to a funder whose entire observed pattern is small, repeat, unrestricted checks to organizations it already knows. Fourth, do not expect a portal, tracker, or acknowledgment email — trust-department charitable giving is typically handled manually and infrequently, so a single well-placed, warm-introduced letter will outperform repeated cold follow-up calls. Finally, because filings run on a calendar fiscal year, plan outreach for early-to-mid calendar year so any interest has time to reach the next 990-PF distribution cycle, and monitor the foundation's Form 990-PF (via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, EIN 38-7107022) annually — a genuinely new, non-repeat recipient appearing in a future filing is the best public evidence that this fund does occasionally add relationships beyond its recurring roster.