Newco Foundation

NewCo Foundation is a small, founder-led family foundation (David and Dawn Gross, both uncompensated officers) operating on roughly $8.7M in assets, and it behaves like one: giving is concentrated, personally directed, and split between two distinct lanes that rarely overlap. Lane one is hyper-local — Ventura County, California youth programs, school-based Career Technical Education (CTE) enterprises, Boys & Girls Clubs, and public school districts (Oxnard Union High School District, Rancho Campana High School). Lane two is national and thematic — blindness and braille literacy organizations (National Braille Press, National Braille Association, California Transcribers and Educators for the Blind and Visually Impaired), reflecting a personal cause the Grosses have backed with a five-year, $150,000 pledge to National Braille Press since 2021. A first-time applicant should recognize which lane their organization fits before approaching; there is no visible precedent for grants outside Ventura County education/CTE or national blindness services. Relationship progression looks informal for organizational grants: the foundation's own website carries no downloadable LOI, no grant guidelines PDF, and no application form for general nonprofit funding — only a generic contact form and a note that the DB record itself codes application_instructions as 'as appropriate depending on circumstance.' That phrasing, combined with grants like the National Braille Press commitment being structured as multi-year installments (year 2 of 5, year 3 of 5), suggests the Grosses prefer building an ongoing relationship with a small number of grantees over multiple years rather than one-off awards to a broad pool — 8 of 12 tracked grants in the current window went to just 3-4 recipients receiving multi-year support. First-time applicants without a warm introduction through Ventura County civic/school networks or the national blindness-services community should expect a longer cultivation period, likely starting with the contact form or a direct approach at a community event, since the foundation is described as actively hosting guests and attending local functions in Camarillo.

NewCo Foundation's giving is small in absolute terms but has grown sharply and unevenly. Total giving was $192,881 (FY2019), $146,170 (FY2020), $397,741 (FY2021), $320,279 (FY2022), then jumped to $1,223,122 in FY2023 (of which $833,725 was grants paid) — a roughly 4x year-over-year increase driven by a $928,000 contribution from the Grosses that year rather than investment returns (net investment income stayed a modest $140K-$215K annually throughout, and officer compensation is $0). Total assets have grown from $5.3M (2019-2020) to $8.0-8.7M (2022-present), with contributions received swinging wildly — from $13,576 in 2019 to $3,142,797 in 2022 to $928,000 in 2023 — confirming this is a founder-replenished vehicle, not an endowment living off returns. On the grant-level data available: 12 tracked grants to 8 recipients totaled $356,641, averaging $29,720 per recipient relationship (a separate DB field pegs a narrower recent window at median $10,000, average $14,162, range $594-$30,000 across 7 grants — the two figures reflect different time slices but agree the typical single check is $5,000-$30,000). The single largest award was $183,000 to The Miracle League of the 805 (an 'initial match' grant, its own category), followed by a $150,000-over-five-years commitment to National Braille Press ($60,000 recorded so far across two installments). By geography, roughly 78% of tracked dollars stayed in California — chiefly Ventura County (Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo $43,540 across 2 grants, Oxnard Union High School District $24,507, Rancho Campana High School ASB $594) — with the remaining ~22% flowing to national blindness/braille organizations based in Massachusetts and New York (National Braille Press, National Braille Association, California Transcribers and Educators for the Blind and Visually Impaired at $20,000 each pair). Notably, the foundation's IRS-filed mission statement describes STEM/science-and-math career-education back-office services, but its actual grant purposes skew toward braille literacy and general youth/CTE materials — applicants should weight observed grantee behavior over the filed mission language.

NewCo Foundation sits in the middle of a peer set of small, single-family Human Services foundations with $7-9.4M in assets, but it is the only one in this set with a public website, a branded set of scholarship programs, and a documented multi-year national grant commitment — most peers show no discoverable web presence at all.

Four of the five peers have no indexed website, meaning NewCo Foundation is unusually accessible and transparent for its asset tier — a real advantage for prospective applicants who can at least see mission language and scholarship deadlines rather than working from IRS filings alone. Two of the five peers (Future In You, Maybach Foundation) share NewCo's California base, suggesting some geographic overlap in the small-foundation Human Services landscape applicants may also want to research.

The most concrete recent activity is procedural rather than a single splashy announcement: the foundation's website (newco.foundation) now lists three named, dollar-specific scholarship funds — the StepUp Scholarship ($50,000/year, Ventura County special-needs students), the Young Entrepreneurs Scholarship ($50,000/year), and the Progressive Civic Leadership Scholarship ($100,000/year, public-service-track students) — all administered through the Ventura County Community Foundation's AcademicWorks portal. The Young Entrepreneur Scholarship's 2026 cycle carried a January 16, 2026 deadline, confirming the program runs on a predictable annual calendar even though the foundation's own site does not publish the date directly. On the national side, the foundation's five-year, $150,000 pledge to National Braille Press for the Children's Braille Book Club (announced via press release January 4, 2021) remains active, with IRS filings showing 'year 2 of 5' and 'year 3 of 5' installments of $30,000 each already paid — meaning at least one or two more annual installments should be expected through roughly 2025-2026. No leadership changes were found: David Gross (President) and Dawn Gross (Secretary) remain the only listed officers, both uncompensated, consistent with a hands-on founder-operated structure. No other 2025-2026 press coverage, new program launches, or major one-time grants surfaced in web searches; the foundation maintains a low public profile outside its scholarship portal and occasional grantee-side press releases.

Treat NewCo Foundation as two separate funders with two separate front doors. For the three named scholarships (StepUp, Young Entrepreneurs, Progressive Civic Leadership), the real application lives entirely on the Ventura County Community Foundation's AcademicWorks portal (vccf.academicworks.com) — apply there directly, not through the foundation's own site, and note the Young Entrepreneur fund's pattern of a mid-January deadline (January 16 for the 2026 cycle) with preference given to applicants who identify as female or non-binary and to first-generation college students. Required proof for that scholarship includes documentation of business ownership or at least 60 hours in a Student-Led Enterprise (SLE) internship plus two completed Career Technical Education (CTE) classes — generic ASB, club-fundraiser, or student-store activity explicitly does not qualify, so applicants should be precise about which CTE/SLE program and faculty advisor backed their experience. For organizational (non-scholarship) grants — the lane that funded Miracle League of the 805, National Braille Press, Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo, and the blindness-services organizations — there is no visible LOI template, guidelines PDF, or online application; the foundation's own contact page is a bare name/email/message form with no stated response-time commitment. The strongest path in is a warm introduction through Ventura County school districts, Boys & Girls Clubs, or CTE/SLE program contacts (for the local lane) or through the national blindness-and-braille-literacy field (for the national lane) — cold outreach to an unrelated cause has no precedent of success in the available grant history. A common mistake would be pitching a single one-off need; the observed pattern (National Braille Press's 5-year commitment, two consecutive years to Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo, two consecutive years to both blindness conference sponsors) strongly favors proposals framed as a multi-year partnership with a return-on-relationship narrative, not a one-time ask. Language that mirrors the founders' own framing — 'pay-it-forward,' transformative experiences for young entrepreneurs, and 'the right to read' for blind children (a direct Gross quote) — is likely to resonate given how consistently it appears across their own public statements.