Mcnabb Foundation

McNabb Foundation (EIN 82-3609769) is a small, single-family private foundation established in June 2018, administered through Foundation Source, and run entirely by one person: Ernest J. McNabb, who holds every officer role (Director, President, Secretary, Treasurer) and draws no compensation. There is no program staff, no board beyond the founder, and no public grant-review process — this is personal philanthropy operating at scale, not an institutional grantmaker with published priorities. Independent 990 trackers (Impala, Grantable, Cause IQ, GuideStar) consistently confirm the foundation is preselected and invitation-only, and the underlying data record shows application_instructions as none and preselected_only as true. Organizations should not expect a portal, LOI, or review committee.

What the giving pattern shows instead is a very broad, very shallow annual distribution: roughly 300-330 grants a year across 1,144 grants tracked historically, averaging $1,134 each, with a median of just $1,000. Nearly all carry the purpose tag "General & Unrestricted," meaning McNabb funds operating support, not restricted programs. Many recipients appear repeatedly (grant counts of 2-4 in the same window) — Transcendence Theater Company ($55,000 across 3 grants), Mayo Clinic ($16,000/3), Pathways For Kids ($13,000/4) — indicating the founder maintains an ongoing personal roster of causes rather than making one-off gifts.

For a first-time applicant, the realistic strategy is relationship-building, not proposal-writing: 82% of dollars go to California, concentrated in San Francisco (39%), Santa Rosa (8%), and Sonoma (7%) — a Bay Area/Marin-Sonoma geographic footprint consistent with grantees like San Domenico School, Corte Madera Larkspur Foundation, Marin Village, and Sonoma Overnight Support. A smaller, reactive slice goes nationally to disaster-relief intermediaries (Red Cross-tier organizations) whenever a major crisis is in the news. Organizations outside that Bay Area cluster, or without a pre-existing personal connection to the founder, have little realistic entry point; the best lever is visibility at Northern California charitable events, several of which are explicitly tagged as funded "Charitable Events."

McNabb Foundation's historical grantee ledger totals 1,144 grants worth $1,297,000, averaging $1,134 per grant with a $1,000 median — confirmed independently by third-party 990 aggregators, which peg 2024 alone at roughly 328 grants totaling about $358,000 (range $500-$25,000, median $1,000). The foundation's own typical_grant_size data shows a tight recent band: minimum $1,000, maximum $5,000, average $1,163 across 178 grants.

Giving has moved cyclically rather than trending steadily upward. Total giving was $78,663 in 2019, jumped to $227,275 (2020), $400,798 (2021), and peaked at $462,539 (2022), before easing to $427,286 (2023) and an estimated ~$358K (2024). Grants paid (the disbursement line) followed a similar arc: $62,000 (2019) to $376,000 (2022) to $338,000 (2023). This tracks fresh annual contributions into the foundation, which ranged from $400,000 to $650,000 a year between 2020 and 2023, plus net investment income of $106,000-$264,000 annually — the foundation largely passes contributed cash straight through to grantees rather than warehousing it, with total assets growing only modestly, from $3.2 million (2019) to $4.85 million (2024).

By purpose, giving is overwhelmingly "General & Unrestricted" operating support — third-party trend data puts unrestricted/general-purpose giving at roughly 61% of dollars, with the remainder split across education, human services, and philanthropy/voluntarism categories. By geography, California dominates: 960 of the 1,144 tracked grants (about 84%) went to California nonprofits, with the next-largest states — DC, NY (31 grants each), and FL (20) — receiving a small fraction each, largely reflecting national relief and advocacy organizations (International Rescue Committee, Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity, GlobalGiving) rather than a deliberate multi-state strategy. The single largest identified grantee relationship, Transcendence Theater Company at $55,000 across three grants (about $18,300 average), stands well above the typical $1,000-$5,000 gift and suggests the foundation occasionally makes larger anchor commitments to a small number of favored organizations.

McNabb Foundation sits among a cluster of similarly sized private foundations in the Philanthropy & Grantmaking NTEE category, all holding roughly $4.84 million in assets — these appear to be algorithmically matched by asset size and classification rather than curated for programmatic similarity, and none have public grantee-level data available for direct comparison in this dataset.

What stands out is that McNabb Foundation's asset base is essentially indistinguishable from all five peers — a common pattern among single-family vehicles set up around the same funding threshold, several sharing McNabb's own registered-agent state of Delaware. Unlike its peers, however, McNabb Foundation has an unusually granular public paper trail (1,144 itemized grants via Schedule I of its 990-PF), making it one of the more transparent small family foundations in its size class even though it remains functionally closed to outside applicants.

The most concrete recent activity is administrative: McNabb Foundation's Form 990-PF for fiscal year 2024 was filed with the IRS on November 14, 2025, reporting $977,582 in revenue, $424,759 disbursed to charitable causes, and $4,845,073 in net assets — consistent with the foundation's steady, unspectacular growth pattern since its 2018 founding. Third-party aggregators tracking the same filing count roughly 328 individual grants in 2024, averaging just over $1,000 each, in line with prior years.

No foundation-specific press coverage, leadership changes, or new-program announcements for EIN 82-3609769 turned up in web searches; as a single-officer, Foundation Source-administered vehicle with no public program staff, it does not appear to generate its own news cycle.

One important flag for anyone researching this funder: the website and contact email associated with this database record (mcnabbfoundation.org, Pamela.Coleman@mcnabb.org) belong to the Helen Ross McNabb Foundation, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based fundraising arm for the Helen Ross McNabb Center behavioral-health nonprofit — a distinct organization with its own recent news (a $307,500 grant from the Boyd Foundation in April 2026, a $203,750 grant from the Clayton Homes Foundation in January 2026, and a $2.5 million capital campaign for a 72-bed recovery-housing facility in Knox County). That organization's mental-health/substance-use mission, East Tennessee focus, and news should not be attributed to the Wilmington, DE family foundation that is the actual subject of this report. Grant seekers should treat that website and contact as unverified for this specific EIN and rely instead on the Form 990-PF/ProPublica record.

McNabb Foundation does not run an open application process — there is no portal, no LOI form, and no published funding cycle, and every independent tracker that covers EIN 82-3609769 describes it as preselected and invitation-only. Submitting a cold proposal is very unlikely to reach anyone with grantmaking authority, since the foundation has no program staff; decisions rest entirely with founder Ernest J. McNabb.

The more productive approach is to build visibility within the funder's existing giving pattern. Nearly all of the foundation's dollars go to Northern California nonprofits, especially in San Francisco, Santa Rosa, and Sonoma — organizations based in that Marin/Sonoma/SF corridor are far more likely to be on the founder's radar than groups elsewhere. Several grants are explicitly tagged as tied to a "Charitable Event," suggesting galas, fundraisers, and community events are a real channel through which the foundation discovers and commits to causes — sponsoring or attending Bay Area nonprofit events is a more realistic entry point than a written proposal.

Requests should be framed as general operating support rather than restricted program funding; "General & Unrestricted" is by far the dominant purpose across the grantee ledger, and grant sizes cluster tightly at $1,000-$5,000, with occasional larger relationships (Transcendence Theater Company received $55,000 across three grants) reserved for organizations with an established multi-year relationship. New relationships should therefore start small and expect to be renewed annually rather than scaled quickly — several grantees show 2-4 repeat gifts over the tracked period.

Organizations working in disaster or crisis relief should note that McNabb's reactive giving (Ukraine, Libya floods, Israel-Palestine, Hurricanes Ian/Idalia, Maui wildfires) has consistently gone to large, well-known national or international intermediaries — International Medical Corps, Americares, GlobalGiving, the International Rescue Committee — rather than grassroots local responders, so smaller relief organizations are unlikely to break into that giving line without an existing relationship. Finally, do not rely on mcnabbfoundation.org or its listed contact for outreach to this specific foundation — that site and email address track to an unrelated Tennessee organization; verify any contact information independently against the Form 990-PF filing before attempting outreach.