Mary Pickford Private Foundation

Mary Pickford Private Foundation (EIN 81-1171385, Murrieta, CA) is not a conventional grants program — it is a legacy foundation that primarily funds its own direct charitable activities: restoring and scoring Mary Pickford's silent films, maintaining an archival research clearinghouse, and running the Arts Consortium LA. Its board is small and closely held: Henry Stotsenberg (Director, President) and Keith Lawrence (Director, Secretary & Treasurer) are the only listed officers, each drawing roughly $120,000/year in earlier filings, dropping to about $66,923 each in the most recent year in the data (combined officer compensation $133,846 in FY2022, down from a flat $240,000 combined in FY2018-2021). Program staff — Elaina Friedrichsen (Director of Archive and Legacy) and Aubrey Shepherd (Assistant Director) — run day-to-day archival and restoration work rather than a grants office. Multiple independent funder-intelligence sources (CauseIQ, Impala, GrantStation) confirm the foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals; funding is relationship-based and by invitation only, despite the foundation's own database record flagging 'accepting_applications: true' with no published deadline, form, or process — a discrepancy applicants should read as 'technically open, practically closed without a referral.' When the foundation does fund outside organizations, its 8-grant recent snapshot ($83,000 total, avg. $10,375, 100% in California) skews toward Los Angeles-area arts, design, and entertainment-industry-welfare organizations: Artworx LA and Create Now ($30,000 each across two grants), Art Center College of Design ($20,000), Tenrikyo Mission ($2,000), and Motion Picture and Television Fund ($1,000). First-time applicants should treat this as a peer/legacy network funder — the strongest entry point is a warm introduction through the entertainment-industry welfare community (e.g., organizations already connected to MPTF) or through youth/student arts-education programs that mirror the foundation's own scoring initiative, which pairs restored Pickford films with young and student musicians. A cold application through a public 'apply' form does not exist and is not the right channel here.

Total giving (which the foundation's 990-PF reports as combining direct charitable program spend with third-party grants) has ranged from $1.03M (FY2018) to $1.85M (FY2021), sitting at $1.25M in FY2022 — but the portion actually paid out as grants to external organizations is far smaller and has been shrinking: $170,543 (FY2018), $140,000 (FY2019), $21,000 (FY2020), $31,000 (FY2021), and $0 (FY2022, the most recent year in the financial history). This means the bulk of 'giving' funds the foundation's own restoration, scoring, and archival programs rather than outside grantees. In the sampled program-expense breakdown, direct charitable activity split across four buckets: film restoration/scoring ($255,804, including $206,977 paid to Mary Pickford Company as capitalized production advances), the online research/archive clearinghouse ($103,834), worldwide archive relationship-building and cataloging ($127,985), and the Arts Consortium LA community-arts initiative ($245,704). Assets have declined from $16.6M (FY2020, the five-year peak) to $12.1M (FY2022) — a 27% drop in two years — reflecting sustained drawdown for restoration and production advances rather than portfolio losses alone (net investment income was still positive at $79,552 in FY2022). Among the 8 recent external grants captured in the data (100% to California recipients, $83,000 total, average $10,375), the typical-grant-size field in the foundation's own record shows a tight band: minimum $1,000, maximum and median both $15,000, average $10,333 across 3 sampled awards. General support was the stated purpose for every recorded external grant — no restricted or capital grants appear in the snapshot. Applicants should calibrate outside-grant asks to the $1,000-$30,000 range and expect general-operating framing to be normal, not exceptional, for this funder.

All five peers sit within a narrow $11.09M-$11.10M asset band and share the same NTEE 'Philanthropy & Grantmaking' classification, but none has a public website on file — meaning Mary Pickford Private Foundation is unusually transparent for its peer set simply by having an active site (marypickford.org) with published mission and program pages. None of these peers publish annual giving totals or application processes in the available data, which is itself consistent with this asset tier: sub-$15M family and legacy foundations of this size rarely run formal public grant programs, and Mary Pickford's invitation-only model is the norm rather than the exception here.

The most recent verifiable, dated activity comes from the foundation's own announcements page: a Library of Congress partnership (March 2, 2021) to scan Cinderella, Rags, Pride of the Clan, Poor Little Rich Girl, and M'liss in 2K/4K alongside American Biograph shorts and home movies, with new scores commissioned for worldwide distribution; a Paramount Pictures Archive restoration partnership (November 17, 2020) that completed Tess of the Storm Country (1914) and Madame Butterfly (1915) in 2K HD, with Stella Maris (1918) then in production; and a UCLA Film & Television Archive digitization partnership (February 25, 2020) covering The Little American (1917), The Love Light (1921), and Amarilly of Clothesline Alley (1918). Restored titles, including The Love Light, are now distributed through VCI Entertainment. No new named institutional partnership or press release from 2022-2026 surfaced in web search, and the foundation's announcements/press pages do not appear to have been updated since the 2021 Library of Congress post — a four-plus-year gap in public-facing news even though the foundation continues operating (a Form 990-PF for fiscal year 2025 was added to public filing indexes on May 30, 2026, per CauseIQ's index). Leadership has stayed stable, with Henry Stotsenberg as President and Keith Lawrence as Secretary & Treasurer across every filing year in the data, and Elaina Friedrichsen (Director of Archive and Legacy) and Aubrey Shepherd (Assistant Director) running day-to-day programs. The financial data shows external grants paid dropped to $0 in FY2022, the latest year captured — grant seekers should treat this as a signal that outbound funding may currently be paused or fully redirected to invited/existing relationships rather than assume a steady annual cycle.

There is no open application form, published deadline, or LOI portal for this foundation, and three independent funder-intelligence sources (CauseIQ, Impala, GrantStation) confirm it does not accept unsolicited proposals — treat any 'apply now' assumption as wrong for this funder. The single highest-leverage move is securing a warm introduction: the foundation's own giving history clusters around Los Angeles entertainment-industry welfare (Motion Picture and Television Fund) and youth/community arts organizations (Artworx LA, Create Now, Art Center College of Design), so relationships built through MPTF-adjacent networks or LA arts-education circuits are the most plausible entry points. Because the foundation runs its own direct programs (film restoration, archival research, silent-film scoring with student musicians), proposals that partner with rather than duplicate this work — for example, offering a venue for screenings, a musician-training pipeline, or archival expertise — will resonate more than a generic operating-support ask. Use alignment language tied explicitly to the foundation's stated mission: 'preserving film history,' 'inspiring future generations of women and filmmakers' (the foundation's own mission language), 'supporting the entertainment community to live and age well with dignity,' and 'using the arts as a path to personal and professional development for youth.' A common mistake would be requesting a large or multi-year grant: the observed range tops out at $30,000 total across two grants to a single organization, with a $15,000 median single-grant size, so calibrate asks to $1,000-$20,000 for a first request. Given that officer compensation dropped roughly 44% between FY2021 and FY2022 combined with $0 in recorded external grants paid in FY2022, timing matters — this may not be a strong-fit prospect in a year when the foundation is visibly tightening outbound giving, so pair outreach with a check of the foundation's most recent 990-PF (FY2025, filed May 30, 2026) before investing significant relationship-building effort. Do not attempt to submit through the marypickford.org 'Contact Us' page without a referral; treat it as a channel for confirming a warm contact's information, not a proposal submission point.