Lacore Family Foundation Inc.

LaCore Family Foundation Inc. is a small, founder-directed family foundation based in Melissa, Texas, established by Terry and Jennifer LaCore. Its IRS-stated mission is narrow and explicit: "sponsorship of youth sports teams in basketball, baseball, football, soccer, and volleyball," and its own website adds a second lane — the Melissa Senior Scholarship for graduating student-athletes. This is not a foundation built to field broad grant applications; the board (Terry LaCore, Jennifer LaCore, Jennifer Grace, and Erin Wasserman, all directors, drawing zero compensation per its 990-PF) manages giving directly, and public aggregator listings confirm the foundation states it funds only preselected organizations rather than reviewing unsolicited proposals.

The grantee list bears this out. Of the top 10 recipients in the data on file, every single one carries the purpose "Student scholarship," led by Bowdoin College ($66,870 across 2 grants — almost certainly a LaCore family legacy or alumni tie given its outsized share versus every other line item), followed by four-figure scholarship grants to Oklahoma State, Southeastern Louisiana University, Texas A&M, Education In Action, Northeastern State, Cisco College, University of Arkansas, Tarleton State, and Midland College. Geographic distribution (Texas 10, Oklahoma 4, Arkansas 2, Louisiana 2, Maine 2) tracks almost exactly to where the honored students chose to enroll, not to an open regional funding footprint.

For a grant seeker, the realistic path in is narrow: (1) if you are a Melissa, TX-area youth sports organization or one of the foundation's six sponsored teams (basketball, baseball, football, soccer, volleyball, MC Elite), a direct relationship with the foundation's local sports ecosystem is the entry point; (2) if you are a graduating Melissa ISD student-athlete, the published Melissa Senior Scholarship application on lacorefamilyfoundation.org is the one open, formal channel; (3) if you are a college or university, funding appears to follow individual scholarship recipients to their chosen school rather than responding to institutional appeals. There is no LOI-to-full-proposal pipeline, no site-visit stage, and no evidence of a portal for unsolicited national or regional nonprofits — this is a family-directed, relationship-based funder operating at a very small scale.

On the data on file (20 tracked grants, $91,328 total, $4,566 average), giving is small-dollar and scholarship-heavy: nine of the ten largest recipients received exactly $2,000-$4,000 across two grants each, with Bowdoin College a clear outlier at $66,870 (73% of the tracked total across just two grants) — consistent with a single large, recurring scholarship commitment rather than a programmatic award. Excluding Bowdoin, the median grant among top recipients is roughly $2,000, and the modal single-grant size across aggregator data (Zeffy) is reported at $1,000, with most gifts falling between $1,000 and $2,000.

The foundation's own IRS filings show total giving scaling up materially in recent years: $480,569 in FY2021, $956,306 in FY2022, and $1,213,078 in FY2023 (note: 990-PF "total giving" includes program-related and operating disbursements, not just grants paid — actual grants paid to outside organizations were far smaller: $0 in FY2021, $45,664 in FY2022, and $73,550 in FY2023). This gap suggests the bulk of the foundation's disbursed funds go toward directly operating and sponsoring its own youth sports programs (uniforms, facilities, coaching, team fees) rather than being granted out to third-party nonprofits — third-party aggregator data independently confirms just 13 organizations received the $73,550 in FY2023 grants.

Assets have fluctuated with contribution timing rather than investment performance: $1.78M (FY2021) to $3.30M (FY2022) to $2.90M (FY2023), tracking closely with contributions received ($2.26M, $2.30M, and $619K respectively) — this is a foundation funded episodically by its founders' personal or business contributions rather than one drawing primarily on endowment income (net investment income is reported as $0 across all three years on file). Geographically, tracked grants split 50% Texas, 20% Oklahoma, 10% each Arkansas, Louisiana, and Maine — almost entirely a function of where scholarship recipients attend school, not a deliberate multi-state program footprint.

No structured peer-foundation list was returned in the data bundle for this profile, so the comparison below uses foundations of similar scale, structure, and cause area (small youth-sports/scholarship family foundations) drawn from general philanthropic-sector knowledge for context; treat the peer rows as illustrative benchmarks rather than verified matched entities.

LaCore sits at the small end of this peer set on both assets and grant dollars actually paid out to third parties — its FY2023 total giving figure of $1.21M looks larger on paper, but the bulk of that funds the foundation's own sports programs rather than external grantmaking. Unlike a typical community scholarship fund, LaCore has not published a general open-application cycle with a public deadline; unlike a larger corporate-founder foundation, it shows no LOI process or program staff. It most closely resembles a hyper-local, founder-run sponsorship vehicle rather than a grantmaking institution built to serve applicants outside its existing Melissa-area network.

No independent news coverage, press releases, or major-gift announcements for LaCore Family Foundation Inc. were found for 2025-2026 in web search. The most current verifiable activity is the foundation's tax year 2025 Form 990-PF, published around May 2026 per aggregator data (Zeffy, Grantmakers.io), showing $1.5M in total assets and approximately 15 grants issued with a $1,000 median grant size and a range of $1,000 to $68,000 — the $68,000 figure is consistent with a continuation of the large Bowdoin College scholarship commitment seen in prior years.

The foundation's board has been stable across the filings on record: Terry LaCore and Jennifer LaCore (founders/directors) alongside Jennifer Grace and Erin Wasserman (directors, with Wasserman also described on the foundation's own site as Executive Director and Grace as the listed IRS contact, "% Jenifer Grace"). No leadership transitions, new program launches, or public statements from the foundation were identified.

On the funding side, the trend visible in the underlying 990-PF data is growth: total giving nearly tripled from FY2021 ($480,569) to FY2023 ($1,213,078), and cumulative third-party tracking shows $341,000 disbursed across 51 grants to 26 organizations between 2022 and 2025. Absent a dedicated newsroom or social presence beyond a listed Facebook page, prospective applicants should treat the foundation's own website (lacorefamilyfoundation.org) and its annual 990-PF filing as the only reliable sources of current activity — there is no indication of a grants portal, newsletter, or announcement cadence to monitor.

This is not a funder to approach with a cold, general grant proposal — the foundation's own public materials and third-party aggregator profiles state plainly that it "only makes contributions to preselected charitable organizations" and does not solicit or review unsolicited applications for general funding. Spending time on a standard LOI-and-full-proposal package aimed at LaCore will very likely go unanswered; the foundation has no visible program staff, no grants management portal, and no published RFP.

The one legitimate, open door is the Melissa Senior Scholarship, a downloadable PDF application on lacorefamilyfoundation.org aimed at graduating student-athletes, presumably from Melissa Independent School District. Any student-athlete applicant should: use that specific form (not a generic scholarship essay template), clearly document both athletic participation and academic standing, and submit well ahead of graduation given the foundation processes awards on an annual cycle tied to the school year — no exact deadline is published on the site, so applicants should call the foundation directly (972-439-1750) or email through the site's contact form to confirm the current-year submission window rather than assume a fixed date.

For youth sports organizations, teams, or facilities, the realistic path is relationship-based: the foundation already sponsors six specific teams (basketball, baseball, football, soccer, volleyball, and "MC Elite") in the Melissa, TX area. A team, league, or facility outside that existing roster with a genuine local tie should approach the foundation through a warm introduction — a coach, school athletics director, or existing beneficiary organization — rather than a written proposal, and should frame any ask around breaking down "financial barriers to participation" in youth sports, language taken directly from the foundation's own stated mission.

Common mistakes to avoid: treating this as a national or even statewide funder (its footprint outside Melissa, TX is almost entirely an artifact of where past scholarship winners attend college, not an active giving territory); submitting operating-support or capital-campaign requests with no student-athlete or Melissa-youth-sports connection; and expecting any acknowledgment of an unsolicited proposal, since the foundation's preselected-recipient model means silence is the expected default response, not a sign the request was mishandled.