Nopec Foundation Inc.

NOPEC Foundation Inc. is a small, Solon, Ohio-based supporting foundation (EIN 84-2544336, IRS ruling 2019) funded by contributions from NOPEC, the nonprofit electric/gas aggregation council serving dozens of Northeast Ohio communities. It is not a large, staffed grantmaker — total assets sit at roughly $6.35 million and its own board (Chair Joseph Ruby, Secretary Jeffrey Linton, Treasurer David Gillock, all uncompensated) delegates actual application review and disbursement to the Cleveland Foundation's Affiliated Funds program. This structure matters strategically: applicants are not building a relationship with NOPEC Foundation staff directly, they are competing within a Cleveland Foundation-administered fund with its own intake process, forms, and reviewers. First-time applicants should treat this as a hyper-local, geography-gated fund rather than a national or thematic one — the single hardest eligibility filter is whether your organization sits inside the NOPEC service footprint (dozens of Northeast Ohio municipalities), not your mission area. The Foundation explicitly favors projects that fall outside what conventional grants or public resources already cover — feasibility studies, digital-divide and energy-equity pilots, capacity-building, and diversity/inclusion initiatives are called out as qualifying examples. The DB grantee history bears this out: 22 recorded grants worth $3.125 million, but $3.0 million of that (96%) went in two grants to a single grantee, The Cleveland Foundation itself — almost certainly the administrative pass-through/endowment transfer rather than a program grant — while the remaining $125,000 splintered into 20 small grants (median under $3,000) to Ohio food banks and hunger-relief nonprofits (Greater Cleveland Food Bank $56,486, Second Harvest Food Bank $13,237, down to $500 for Brunswick Food Pantry). This tells first-time applicants two things: (1) the Foundation's genuinely competitive, broadly-open money is modest — well under $150,000 in a typical year once the Cleveland Foundation transfer is excluded — and (2) social-services/hunger-relief organizations have historically captured most of that competitive pool, even though environment, health, and economic development are equally eligible on paper. There is no LOI stage or site-visit tradition documented; it functions as a single-stage annual application through Cleveland Foundation's portal, opening April 1 and closing August 1, with awards announced in fall.

Total recorded giving across the dataset is $3,125,000 over 22 grants (average $142,045), but that average is misleading: it is entirely skewed by two grants totaling $3,000,000 to The Cleveland Foundation, which functions as an administrative/fiscal-sponsor transfer rather than a competitive program award. Excluding that pair, the remaining 20 grants total just $125,000 — a median of roughly $2,000 and a range from $500 (Brunswick Food Pantry Inc) to $56,486 (Greater Cleveland Food Bank). That $125,000 in genuinely distributed, small-dollar giving is concentrated almost entirely in hunger relief and food-bank/pantry organizations across Ohio (Second Harvest Food Bank $13,237, McKinley Community Outreach Center $12,022, Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank $5,000, plus a dozen county-level food pantries at $500-$5,000 each) — 100% of tracked recipients are Ohio-based, consistent with the Foundation's ntee code (C12 — Environment focus per IRS filing, though actual disbursements skew social-services). Financial trend data shows real volatility: total assets grew from near-zero in FY2019 to $1.55M (FY2020) to $2.72M (FY2021, with $0 in grants paid that year) to $2.34M (FY2022, $1.5M in grants paid) to $6.64M (FY2023, $875,000 in grants paid). Contributions received jumped sharply in FY2023 ($4.19M, versus $1.14-1.68M in the prior three years), suggesting a large one-time inflow from NOPEC's parent organization that year — likely explaining the $3M Cleveland Foundation transfer. Officer compensation is $0 across all five years, confirming an all-volunteer board with no paid program staff, which reinforces why review is outsourced to Cleveland Foundation. Applicants should expect the externally-published $10,000-$40,000 award band (per NOPEC's own site and Instrumentl) to apply to the newer, forward-looking Cleveland Foundation-administered cycle rather than the historical small-grants pattern seen in the DB, which may reflect an earlier, less formal disbursement process before the relationship with Cleveland Foundation matured.

NOPEC Foundation sits at the small end of the Environment-category peer set by assets, and its per-grant sizes ($500-$56,486 for competitive awards) are modest against the stated $10,000-$40,000 target band peers in this class typically support.

All five peers cluster tightly in the $6.3-6.4M asset band, making NOPEC Foundation's $6.35M almost exactly median for this cohort. What sets NOPEC Foundation apart is transparency and process: unlike the peer set (none of which have public websites listed in this data), NOPEC Foundation has a documented, dated, externally-administered application cycle via the Cleveland Foundation — a structural advantage for applicants who need certainty about deadlines and eligibility rather than cold-outreach guesswork common with small conservation-focused peers.

The clearest recent milestone is procedural: the Foundation's 2026 application cycle opened April 1, 2026 and closes August 1, 2026, with awards to be announced in fall 2026, continuing the arrangement in which the Cleveland Foundation's Affiliated Funds program administers intake and review on NOPEC Foundation's behalf (a continuation of the 2025 round's structure). No leadership changes surfaced in web research — the board (Joseph Ruby as Chair, Jeffrey Linton as Secretary, David Gillock as Treasurer) appears unchanged and remains uncompensated, consistent with the IRS filings. The most financially significant recent event is on the parent-organization side: NOPEC (the electric/gas aggregation nonprofit that funds the Foundation) obtained Ohio electricity and natural gas brokerage licenses in June 2025 and is launching a commercial/industrial "Energy Vision" program in 2026, alongside a new standard residential rate of 8.999 cents/kWh effective for January-May 2026 meter reads. These are not Foundation grant announcements, but they matter to applicants because Foundation contributions are funded by NOPEC's aggregation margins — the FY2023 financials already show contributions received jumping to $4.19 million from a prior three-year range of $1.14-1.68 million, and continued revenue diversification could sustain or grow the Foundation's giving capacity into 2026-2027. No large individual grant announcements, press releases, or media coverage specific to the Foundation's nonprofit grant recipients were found in this research pass; the Foundation maintains a low public profile relative to NOPEC's consumer-facing energy programs.

Apply only if your organization operates substantially within a NOPEC member community — check the "NOPEC Community Map" on nopec.org before investing any drafting time, since this geographic gate eliminates most applicants nationally and even many Ohio nonprofits outside the specific member-township footprint. Submit through the Cleveland Foundation's Affiliated Funds portal, not NOPEC directly — the 2026 window runs April 1 to August 1, so start assembling budgets, 501(c)(3) documentation, and board letters in Q1 rather than waiting for the portal to open, since a five-month window can compress quickly around a hard nonprofit fiscal-year-end. Size your ask to the stated $10,000-$40,000 band; the historical DB data shows the Foundation's actual small-grant activity clustering far lower (many awards under $5,000 to food banks and pantries), so an ask at the top of the published range should come with a correspondingly detailed, outcomes-specific budget to justify it relative to past practice. Frame the project explicitly as filling a gap conventional grants or public funding won't cover — the Foundation's own language calls out feasibility studies, energy equity, digital divide, and capacity-building as favored project types, so proposals that read as "more of the same" recurring operating support (versus a discrete, gap-filling initiative) are less aligned with the stated purpose. Common mistakes to avoid: applying from outside the NOPEC footprint (the single most avoidable rejection reason), treating this as a national or open-thematic environmental funder (it is a hyper-local, five-category fund: Health & Medical, Economic Development, Community Development, Environment, Social Services), and expecting a relationship with NOPEC Foundation's own board — all substantive review, forms, and correspondence run through Cleveland Foundation staff, so build that relationship instead. Because awards aren't announced until fall (after the August 1 deadline), do not attach the grant to a summer program start date; structure project timelines to begin no earlier than Q4 2026 or Q1 2027.