Meer Family Foundation

Meer Family Foundation is not a prospect for cold outreach — it is a closed, family-run giving vehicle, and the data confirms it on every axis. The foundation lists `preselected_only: true`, has no grants page, no application form, and no published guidelines, and every third-party aggregator we checked (CauseIQ, Grantmakers.io, GrantExec) independently states it "only makes contributions to preselected charitable organizations and doesn't accept unsolicited applications." It is run entirely by two family members — Robert D. Meer (President/Treasurer) and Sondra Meer (Secretary) — both drawing $0 compensation, with filings showing roughly 2 hours per week of officer time. There is no program staff, no grants committee, and no site-visit process to court.

The organization it funds is remarkably consistent: of 406 recorded grants and $944,359 in cumulative giving captured in this dataset, every single recipient purpose is coded "GENERAL USE," and every named grantee is an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva, kollel, Chabad center, or chesed/social-welfare organization. The largest relationships — Bais Refeol Foundation ($184,650 across 3 grants), Yeshiva Beth Yehudah ($175,100 across 5 grants), and Yeshiva Gedolah Ateres Mordechai ($160,900 across 3 grants) — are all Detroit-area institutions, consistent with the foundation's Oak Park, MI address in the heart of that city's Orthodox community. A secondary cluster of NY yeshivas (Yeshiva Darchei Torah, Yeshiva Mir Yerushalayim, Yeshiva Gedola of South Monsey) accounts for the largest share of grant *count* (203 of ~406 recorded grants) even though Michigan dominates grant *dollars*.

For a first-time applicant, the honest strategic takeaway is that success here is relational, not proposal-driven: an organization needs an existing tie to the Meer family, to Oak Park's Orthodox community, or to the specific NY yeshiva network already funded. Absent that, resources are better spent elsewhere — this is not a foundation that discovers new grantees through applications, RFPs, or web visibility (it has no independently verifiable grants website; meer.org, listed as its website in this record, resolves to an unrelated climate-technology nonprofit, so it should not be treated as a source of programmatic detail).

Grant sizes are small and skew heavily toward token, recurring gifts. The FY2023 Form 990-PF typical-grant statistics show a median of $250, an average of $1,674, and a range of $50 to $36,750 across 85 grants. The more recent FY2025 filing (assets $7.5M, published June 2026) shows 69 grants with a median of $420 and a wider range of $18 to $150,000 — indicating at least one unusually large gift that year against a backdrop of otherwise tiny checks. Across the full multi-year grantee history captured here (406 grants, $944,359 total), the average grant is $2,326, but that average is pulled upward by a small number of large, multi-year relationships: the top 3 recipients alone (Bais Refeol Foundation, Yeshiva Beth Yehudah, Yeshiva Gedolah Ateres Mordechai) account for $520,650 — roughly 55% of all recorded giving — while the remaining 47 organizations in the top-50 list split the other 45% in amounts as small as $1,230.

Total annual giving has swung sharply: $52,096 (2011), $99,416 (2012), $146,083 (2013), $92,959 (2014), $105,712 (2015), $39,633 (2019), $37,391 (2020), $153,927 (2021), $332,641 (2022), $161,346 (2023), and $376,000 (2025 per web data) — a pattern of discretionary, non-linear payout rather than a steady percentage-of-assets policy. Total assets tell a parallel story: near-zero in 2011 (-$525) and 2019 ($10,647), then a rapid buildup via two large contributions — $3,998,831 received in 2020 and $1,899,904 in 2021 — bringing assets to $5.89M by 2021, $5.67M by 2023, and $7.5M by the 2025 filing. This is consistent with the Meer family periodically re-funding the foundation from outside wealth events rather than the foundation growing organically through investment returns (net investment income has never exceeded $164,034 in any recorded year).

Geographically, 100% of program dollars go to two clusters: Michigan (Detroit/Oak Park area, ~79% of dollars per web data, 129 of ~406 grants) and New York (Brooklyn/Monsey-area yeshivas, ~12% of dollars, but 203 of ~406 grants — the largest count). Smaller, incidental grants appear in NJ (14), DC (10), MD (9), IL (6), CT (7), CO (5), PA (5), and CA (4), almost all to the same type of Orthodox Jewish institution rather than a genuine multi-state program strategy. There is no evidence of giving outside religious/Jewish communal causes — no health, arts, environment, or general human-services grants appear anywhere in the record.

Meer Family Foundation sits in a peer set of similarly small, single-family philanthropy vehicles, all coded Philanthropy & Grantmaking and clustered near $5.49M in assets as of the comparison snapshot (Meer has since grown to $7.5M per its FY2025 filing). None of the five peers in this dataset have a listed website, mission statement, or public application process, underscoring that this asset tier of family foundation is characteristically closed rather than exceptional.

What differentiates Meer within this peer group is transparency of pattern, not openness: because its 990-PF grant lists are indexed by nonprofit-data aggregators, we can see a hyper-concentrated, single-community giving program, whereas the peer foundations' giving patterns are simply not surfaced in available data (which itself is telling of similarly low public engagement). None of the six foundations in this comparison, including Meer, should be treated as approachable via a standard proposal process; all fit the profile of closely-held family philanthropy rather than institutional grantmaking.

The most concrete recent signal is the foundation's FY2025 Form 990-PF (tax year ended December 2025, filed and indexed by aggregators around June 2026): total assets of $7.5 million, up from $5,670,847 at the end of FY2023, and $376,000 distributed across 69 grants — a payout level that reverses a dip to $161,346 in FY2023 and roughly matches the $332,641 given in FY2022. No leadership change is evident; Robert D. Meer (President/Treasurer) and Sondra Meer (Secretary) appear as the sole officers in every filing period captured in this dataset, from at least FY2011 forward, each drawing $0 compensation.

No independent news coverage, press release, or announcement referencing the Meer Family Foundation by name was found for 2025 or 2026 in general web search — its public footprint is limited entirely to nonprofit-data aggregator profiles (CauseIQ, Grantmakers.io, GrantExec, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Charity Navigator, GuideStar) built from IRS filings, not from any communications the foundation itself has issued. Notably, the website listed in this record, meer.org, is not the foundation's site: it belongs to MEER, an unrelated climate-technology nonprofit focused on passive radiative cooling systems, with no reference anywhere on that site to a Meer Family Foundation, Robert D. Meer, or Sondra Meer. Grant-seekers should disregard meer.org entirely when researching this funder and rely on the phone number and mailing address on file with the IRS instead: (248) 968-4790, 26081 Stratford Pl, Oak Park, MI 48237-1029.

There is no formal application to optimize — the single most important piece of advice is to recognize that. Multiple independent nonprofit-data sources (CauseIQ, Grantmakers.io, GrantExec) all state that Meer Family Foundation funds preselected organizations only and does not accept unsolicited requests, and this record shows no `grants_page_url`, no `application_form_url`, and no `application_deadline` on file. Treat any "apply now" advice generically given for private foundations as inapplicable here.

What the data does support is relationship-based access. Every one of the top 50 recorded grantees is an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva, kollel, Chabad center, or chesed/social-welfare organization, concentrated in two geographies: metro Detroit (Oak Park/Southfield, where the foundation is based) and the Brooklyn/Monsey, NY Orthodox community. An organization outside this religious and geographic profile has effectively no precedent for funding here — 406 recorded grants and zero exceptions to this pattern is a strong signal, not a coincidence. Organizations that do fit this profile should pursue a warm introduction through a rabbi, yeshiva administrator, or communal leader who already has a relationship with Robert D. or Sondra Meer, rather than mailing an unsolicited letter.

If a relationship exists, keep the ask calibrated to what is actually funded: the FY2025 median grant was $420 and the FY2023 typical-grant median was $250, with the large majority of gifts falling well under $5,000. Every purpose code on file reads "GENERAL USE," so frame requests as unrestricted operating support rather than a tied program or capital campaign — there is no evidence this foundation funds capital projects, though the FY2025 filing's $150,000 top gift shows it is capable of a large one-time award within an existing relationship. A common mistake would be treating this like an institutional foundation with a review cycle: there is no site visit process, no board deck, and no multi-week evaluation timeline evident anywhere in the record — decisions appear to be made informally between the two family officers.