Meehan Foundation

Meehan Foundation is a small, closely-held family trust run by two trustees, Terence S. Meehan and Emily Souvaine Meehan, operating out of an accounting office at 39 Broadway in lower Manhattan (c/o Meehan & Associates). Every one of its top 50 recorded grantees carries the purpose code GENERAL SUPPORT — this is not a program-restricted funder; it writes unrestricted operating checks to organizations the trustees already know. Multiple aggregator profiles independently confirm what the grantee pattern implies: the foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals, and funding is by invitation only. There is no public grants portal, no published RFP, and no dedicated foundation website (meehan.org, despite matching the EIN record's website field, is an unrelated personal family site in Australia and should be disregarded). For a grant seeker, this means the standard cold-LOI playbook will not work here. The realistic path in is a warm introduction — through a shared board member, a Catholic parish or school connection (the grantee list includes Georgetown University, Church of St Ignatius Loyola, Delbarton School, Canterbury School, Saint David's School, and St Elizabeth School), an Irish-heritage affiliation (Irish Art Center), or a peer relationship with an already-funded national hunger/human-services coalition (Alliance to End Hunger, Bread for the World Institute). The relationship arc visible in the data is incremental and loyalty-based: many top grantees show 2-5 separate grants recorded over the observed period rather than a single lump sum, and the typical first-year grant is modest (median $5,000) with room to grow into a $25,000-$100,000+ relationship over several years if the fit holds — Alliance to End Hunger, the largest cumulative grantee, has drawn $604,000 across 4 grants. First-time applicants should not expect a large opening gift, should not submit a restricted project budget, and should assume the trustees are evaluating personal/institutional trust as much as programmatic merit. Given the tiny footprint (no staff, no compensation paid to trustees, an accountant's office as the mailing address), treat this as reaching two individuals directly rather than navigating a program-officer review process.

Across the years with full grant-level detail, Meehan Foundation has recorded 166 grants totaling $2,159,050, an average of $13,006 per grant. The foundation's own typical-grant-size figure (drawn from a 46-grant year, most consistent with FY2021's $567,750/46 grants) shows a median of just $5,000 against an average of $12,342 — meaning a handful of larger grants pull the average well above the typical gift, while most awards cluster small. The full range on record runs from $500 to $105,000. Annual paid-out totals have moved in a fairly narrow band for a decade: $262,300 (2012, an outlier low year) up through $396,250-$568,400 in 2013-2023, with FY2022 the recent high point ($568,400 paid / $773,037 total giving) and FY2023 the most recent confirmed low ($554,748 paid / $720,870 total giving). Third-party aggregators report FY2024 distributions jumped to roughly $1.1M across 39 grants — nearly double FY2023 — though this has not yet been confirmed in the foundation's own filed-990 record. Geographically, New York dominates: of the ~155 mapped grants in the detailed record, 67 (43%) went to New York organizations, followed by California (18), New Jersey (15), Connecticut (12), the District of Columbia (11), Massachusetts (9), South Carolina (9), Virginia (7), Delaware (4), and Montana (3) — consistent with the foundation's self-tagged geographic focus of NY and CA. By program area, the foundation's own focus-area tag reads "Community Development," but the grant-purpose data tells a more precise story: essentially 100% of dollars are GENERAL SUPPORT rather than restricted program funding, spread across hunger relief, Catholic parishes/schools, youth mentoring, human rights/civic advocacy, and health nonprofits. Total assets have declined gradually from $10.1M (FY2012) to $8.06M (FY2024), roughly a 20% contraction, while FY2024 total revenue was $1,194,328 — meaning if the reported ~$1.1M FY2024 payout holds, the foundation distributed nearly all of that year's revenue rather than growing its corpus.

Meehan Foundation sits in the middle of this peer set by asset size but punches above the smallest peers on annual output relative to its corpus — its payout ratio (roughly 7-14% of assets depending on the year) is well above the 5% federal minimum and closer to the Feil Family Foundation's pattern than to the larger, more institutionalized Smart Family Foundation. All four funders share the same defining trait for grant seekers: none run an open application process, and all favor unrestricted general support over restricted program grants — this is a segment of NY family philanthropy where relationships, not proposals, drive decisions. The unrelated-name coincidence with William M. & Miriam F. Meehan Foundation Inc. is worth flagging explicitly to grant seekers so they don't confuse the two EINs when researching or seeking introductions.

No dedicated press coverage, leadership changes, or program announcements exist for this Meehan Foundation specifically — it has no communications staff, no website, and no public program office, consistent with its two-trustee, accountant-office structure. The only notable recent signal is financial: third-party 990 aggregators (Instrumentl, Impala, Grantivo, Grantable) report FY2024 total distributions of roughly $1.1M-$1.14M across 39 grants, which would be close to double the $554,748 paid in FY2023 and the largest single-year total in the available record. Two of those aggregators also cite a ~$500,000 FY2024 grant to MIT, which — if accurate — would be far outside the foundation's historical $500-$105,000 typical grant range and would represent a significant one-time departure from its usual pattern of small-to-mid-five-figure general support gifts. Because the foundation's own internal record still shows FY2024 grants_paid as not yet available, and because the aggregator sites don't fully agree with each other on the FY2024 grant-by-grant breakdown (one lists Alliance to End Hunger and Bread for the World Institute among the largest FY2024 gifts, at levels that appear to conflate multi-year cumulative totals with single-year amounts), grant seekers should treat the FY2024 acceleration as directionally likely but not yet fully confirmed pending the primary Form 990-PF filing. No trustee turnover was found — Terence S. Meehan and Emily Souvaine Meehan have been the only two listed trustees across every year of available data, and neither draws compensation from the foundation.

Because this foundation states plainly (via multiple third-party funder profiles) that it does not accept unsolicited proposals, the single highest-leverage move is securing a warm introduction rather than polishing a cold LOI — a board member, parish priest, school administrator, or already-funded peer organization vouching for you will do more than any proposal document. If a direct ask becomes possible, keep it to a concise one-page letter of inquiry addressed to Terence S. Meehan or Emily Souvaine Meehan at 39 Broadway, 29th Floor, New York, NY 10006 (phone (212) 949-8700), and frame it explicitly as a request for general operating support rather than a restricted-project budget — every grant in the detailed record carries a GENERAL SUPPORT purpose code, so a narrowly scoped program ask works against the foundation's own giving pattern. Anchor the first ask at a realistic, modest level: the recorded median grant is $5,000, and even the average across 166 grants is only $13,006, so an opening request in the $5,000-$15,000 range is far more credible than a five- or six-figure first ask. Common mistakes to avoid: treating this like an open RFP funder with a portal or deadline (there is none — application_deadline and application_form_url are both blank in the underlying record); submitting a heavily branded project proposal instead of a plain-language organizational overview; and failing to identify any personal connection to the trustees, their schools (Delbarton, Canterbury, Saint David's, St Elizabeth School, Georgetown), their parish network (Church of St Ignatius Loyola, St Augustine RC Church), or Irish-American cultural institutions — these affinities recur across the grantee list and are the clearest signal of what resonates personally with the family. If a first gift is awarded, prioritize simple, low-burden stewardship (a short thank-you and outcomes update) over elaborate reporting — the foundation's own administrative footprint (two unpaid trustees, an accountant's office) suggests it has no capacity to process or want heavy compliance paperwork, and its pattern of multi-year repeat gifts to the same organizations suggests relationship continuity matters more than formal grant reporting.