Mclean Foundation

The McLean Foundation (EIN 27-4280133, Okemos, MI) is a small, closely-held family foundation, not a staffed grantmaking institution. Its governance is a three-person circle — June Mclean Gregory (President & Secretary), Robert J Gregory (Vice-President), and Donald Mclean (Director) — none of whom draw compensation, and the official IRS contact is simply '% Robert J Gregory' at a residential-style Okemos address. There is no dedicated foundation website, no published mission statement beyond the IRS filing category (Philanthropy & Grantmaking, NTEE T20), and no listed grants administrator. Multiple third-party sources (Cause IQ, Grantable) independently describe it as a foundation that 'only makes contributions to preselected charitable organizations' — consistent with this dataset's own preselected_only flag and an application_instructions field that reads '__none__'. In practice, this means the foundation is not soliciting or reviewing unsolicited proposals the way a program-staffed community or corporate foundation would.

The realistic path in is relational, not procedural. Across 38 tracked grants totaling $210,500, every recipient but one is a large, established national nonprofit the family already knows: faith-based organizations (Moody Bible Institute, Guideposts Foundation, American Bible Society, The Navigators), health and disability charities (Arthritis Foundation, American Lung Association, Guiding Eyes for the Blind, The Chicago Lighthouse), veterans and civic groups (Amvets National Service Foundation, The Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch), and disaster/poverty relief (American Red Cross, Food For The Poor). Most of these relationships recur two or three years running at the same modest dollar amount, indicating standing annual gifts rather than competitively awarded grants.

For a grant seeker, the honest strategic read is: if your organization is not already one of this small, stable roster, cold outreach has low expected return. The one path worth pursuing is identifying a genuine affinity — a shared donor, board connection, or geographic/mission overlap with the family's known giving pattern (Christian ministries, disability/health services, veteran support, conservative policy organizations) — and making a warm, low-dollar-ask (in the $1,000-$5,000 range) introduction rather than a formal LOI.

This is a very small giving program by absolute dollars. Across the 38 grants captured in this dataset, total giving is $210,500 with an average grant of $5,539. The foundation's own typical-grant-size metric (based on 16 recently tracked awards) shows a median of just $2,000 and a tight range of $1,000-$5,000 — this is the number a first-time applicant should anchor to, not headline foundation assets.

One outlier dominates the historical total: a single $100,000 grant to the Naples Children & Education Foundation (organizer of the Naples Winter Wine Festival) accounts for 47.5% of all tracked giving in this dataset. Excluding that one gift, the remaining 37 grants total $110,500 at an average of about $2,986 — a far more representative picture of what a typical grantee actually receives. Below that outlier, the largest recurring relationships are Moody Bible Institute and Guideposts Foundation ($15,000 each across three annual gifts), followed by Arthritis Foundation and American Lung Association ($13,000 each across three gifts), and American Red Cross ($10,000 across two gifts).

Geographically, the tracked grantee base skews toward Illinois (8 grants) and Florida (7 grants), with smaller clusters in DC (5), New York and Connecticut (3 each), and two each in Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Virginia — reflecting the location of the national charities themselves rather than any stated Michigan or regional giving priority, since the DB record lists no formal geographic_focus for this specific foundation.

On the finance side, Form 990 filings show grants_paid climbing unevenly: $8,000 (2011) → $21,000 (2013-2014) → $38,000-$58,000 (2019-2021) → $45,000 (2022) → $120,500 (2023), the highest year on record. Total giving (including administrative costs) was $121,670 in FY2023 against total revenue of -$12,931 that year — the foundation distributed more than it earned, drawing down principal. Net investment income has ranged from roughly $14,500 to $57,000 annually, and the filings show no recent contributions received in most years, meaning the corpus is largely self-sustaining rather than replenished by new donor gifts.

All five peers share the same NTEE category and cluster within a few thousand dollars of McLean's ~$3.05M asset figure, which strongly suggests they were matched on asset size rather than mission overlap — grant seekers should not assume shared funding priorities. None of the peer foundations have public websites or application portals in this dataset, reinforcing that this entire peer cluster consists of small, family-run private foundations that behave more like passive family giving vehicles than competitive grantmakers. Note that McLean's $3.05M asset figure (from the IRS Business Master File) is roughly 9x its last-reported Form 990 balance-sheet total ($327,166 in FY2023) — a discrepancy worth flagging rather than reconciling with confidence, since it may reflect a more recent, unfiled asset event or a data-source mismatch.

No 2025-2026 news coverage, press releases, or leadership changes specific to EIN 27-4280133 were found in web research — unsurprising for an unstaffed, three-person family foundation with no communications presence. The most concrete 'recent activity' signal is financial: Form 990 data shows grants_paid jumping from $45,000 in FY2022 to $120,500 in FY2023, the largest single-year increase on record for this foundation, alongside a swing to negative total revenue (-$12,931) that same year, meaning the board distributed considerably more than the foundation earned in FY2023.

Separately, third-party aggregator pages (Instrumentl) report substantially larger and still-rising totals for 'McLean Foundation' — $270,000 in 2024 and $502,500 in 2025, with an average award of $89,300 and two 'active grant opportunities' in the $20,000-$500,000 range. These figures are inconsistent by roughly an order of magnitude with both this dataset's own typical-grant-size data (median $2,000) and the FY2023 990 total, and likely reflect aggregator conflation with a larger, differently-focused 'McLean' entity rather than genuine growth at this EIN. Grant seekers should independently verify any such figures against the foundation's actual IRS Form 990-PF before relying on them.

No governance changes were identified — the same three family members (June Mclean Gregory, Robert J Gregory, Donald Mclean) appear across all available filing years in this dataset, with the foundation's ruling date on file since April 2011.

There is no published application process for this foundation. The DB record's application_instructions field is explicitly empty ('__none__'), application_process and application_form_url are both null, and independent sources (Cause IQ, Grantable) describe the foundation as giving only to preselected organizations. Do not submit a cold LOI expecting a response — there is no indication anyone reviews unsolicited mail at the Okemos address beyond routine correspondence.

The most important tactical point: verify you are not accidentally researching or applying to the wrong 'McLean Foundation.' A well-populated, SEO-visible website at mcleanfoundation.org belongs to a completely different organization — a Humboldt County, California community foundation founded in 2000 by Mel and Grace McLean, which does run an open Expression-of-Interest portal, funds Eel River Valley/Southern Humboldt nonprofits in education, health, and social welfare up to roughly $15,000 (with larger grants available), and reviews one application per organization per year. If your organization is not located in or near Humboldt County, applying there will not reach this Okemos, MI funder.

For organizations genuinely seeking to build a relationship with EIN 27-4280133: focus on affinity, not process. The realized giving pattern points to a family with interests in evangelical/faith-based ministries (Moody Bible Institute, Guideposts, American Bible Society, The Navigators), conservative policy and civic organizations (The Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch), veterans' services (Amvets), and health/disability charities (Arthritis Foundation, American Lung Association, Guiding Eyes for the Blind). If your organization shares one of these missions and has any existing donor, alumni, or board connection to the Gregory or McLean family names, a warm personal introduction — not a portal submission — is the only channel with plausible traction. Keep any ask modest and specific: the working median gift is $2,000, and even the largest recurring relationships top out around $5,000/year, aside from the one-time $100,000 Naples Children & Education Foundation gift, which appears tied to that organization's gala/auction model rather than a standard proposal.