One Life Foundation Inc.

One Life Foundation Inc. is a small, uncompensated family foundation run entirely by four members of the Sastri family — Dr. Suri A. Sastri (President), Malini Sastri (Secretary), Rakhal Dev Sastri (Treasurer), and Candace J. Sastri — out of Lexington, Massachusetts, with zero paid staff. Every aggregator we checked (Impala, Instrumentl) independently confirms the foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals and funds strictly by invitation, which the DB's own null application_process and application_form_url fields corroborate. There is no LOI portal, no published deadline, and no formal review cycle to apply into. Grant seekers should abandon the standard proposal-writing playbook here and instead pursue relationship access: warm introductions through mutual board or nonprofit connections in the Lexington/Boston philanthropic community, engagement through causes the family already funds, or third-party prospecting tools like Impala's Funder Prospecting. First-time applicants should also understand the foundation's dual structure revealed in its grant history: the large majority of its measured 990 grant dollars (roughly $8.6M across 6 transfers in the tracked record) move to its own donor-advised fund at Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, where the family then directs further giving privately and largely outside public 990 grant listings. The publicly visible direct-to-charity grants — to organizations like Smile Train, Feed the Children, Boston Rescue Mission, TechnoServe, Mara Elephant Project, MSPCA-Angell, and in 2024 Doctors Without Borders USA and Project HOPE — are comparatively small, ranging roughly $200 to $3,000 per gift. Realistic applicants should treat a first grant from One Life as a modest, relationship-opening gift rather than a program-scale award, and recognize that sustained engagement with the family — not a polished cold proposal — is what moves an organization from the DAF's private consideration into a named, direct grant. One important caution for outreach: the website listed in public records for this foundation, one-life-foundation.org, is not this organization — it belongs to an unrelated Danish nonprofit incubator with a completely different board and mission. Do not use that site for research or contact; use the IRS filing contact instead.

One Life Foundation's charitable disbursements have grown roughly 5.7x over fourteen years: $400,000 in FY2010 to $1,334,234 in FY2019, $2,351,001 in FY2022, and $2,293,296 in the most recent filing (FY ending October 2024). Total assets stood at $12,638,652 as of FY2024, essentially flat from $13,304,673 in FY2022 — despite rising giving, because the foundation is now spending well beyond its investment returns. FY2024 revenue was just $456,807 (almost entirely dividend income), against $2,300,228 in expenses, a net asset decline of roughly $1.8M for the year — implying an effective payout rate near 18% of assets, more than triple the 5% minimum private foundations must distribute. Within the tracked multi-year grant record (18 grants, $8,609,014 total, average $478,279), the mix is heavily bimodal: Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund alone accounts for $8,605,514 across 6 transfers — effectively the foundation seeding its own donor-advised fund — while every other identifiable recipient received far smaller sums: Feed the Children ($1,250 across 3 grants), Smile Train ($1,000 across 2), Boston Rescue Mission and TechnoServe ($400 each across 2 grants), Mara Elephant Project ($250), and MSPCA-Angell ($200 across 2). The foundation's own typical_grant_size metadata reflects this split: a $100–$1,325,224 range with a median of just $375 but an average of $95,302, confirming that most individual gifts are tiny while a handful of large DAF transfers dominate the total. Geographically, the 18 tracked grants skew to Ohio (6), Massachusetts (4), Oklahoma (3), New York (2), Virginia (2), and Indiana (1) — despite being headquartered in Lexington, MA, the foundation's direct giving is not geographically concentrated near home. By cause, the visible pattern spans global health/humanitarian relief (Smile Train, Doctors Without Borders, Project HOPE, Feed the Children), domestic homelessness relief (Boston Rescue Mission), international economic development (TechnoServe), and animal welfare/conservation (MSPCA-Angell, Mara Elephant Project) — consistent with a personally-curated family portfolio rather than a single institutional focus area.

One Life Foundation sits in a cluster of similarly-sized private family foundations classified under Philanthropy & Grantmaking, all holding roughly $12.6M in assets. None of the five closest asset-matched peers in this dataset disclose comparable annual giving figures, and only one maintains a public website, reinforcing that this asset tier tends toward closed, relationship-based family foundations rather than open grant programs.

One Life Foundation is distinguished within this peer set by an unusually high payout rate — its FY2024 giving of roughly $2.29M represents about 18% of assets, far above the 5% IRS minimum, indicating the family is actively drawing down principal rather than only distributing investment income. Four of the five peers have no public website at all, matching the closed, invitation-only pattern One Life itself follows; South Fork Foundation is the outlier with a live public site, suggesting it may be comparatively more accessible to outside applicants.

Public news coverage of this foundation is essentially nonexistent — as a zero-staff, four-person family board with no press office, it generates no press releases or media coverage, and none of our four targeted searches surfaced dedicated news articles from 2025 or 2026. The most current verifiable activity is the foundation's Form 990-PF for the fiscal year ending October 2024, filed around September 2025, which reported total assets of $12,638,652 and charitable disbursements of $2,293,296 — consistent with the foundation's long-term trend of steadily rising giving (up from $2,359,790 total giving in FY2022 and $1,363,827 in FY2019). That filing's grant list, per third-party 990 aggregators, includes continued transfers to the foundation's donor-advised fund at Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund alongside direct grants to Doctors Without Borders USA and Project HOPE - The People-to-People Health Foundation, both global-health/humanitarian organizations. No leadership changes were found; the same four Sastri family members — Dr. Suri A. Sastri (President), Malini Sastri (Secretary), Rakhal Dev Sastri (Treasurer), and Candace J. Sastri — have governed the foundation across all filings reviewed, each serving without compensation. No new program announcements, strategic plan changes, or public grant cycles were identified. Grant seekers should not expect this foundation to publish news or updates; the only reliable way to track its activity is through annual Form 990-PF filings on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, typically available roughly 10-11 months after the foundation's October fiscal year-end.

Because One Life Foundation has no public application process, no LOI portal, and no deadline (confirmed by both the foundation's own 990 metadata and independent funder databases stating grants are "by invitation only"), conventional grant-writing tactics will not work here. First, do not attempt outreach via one-life-foundation.org — that domain belongs to an unrelated Danish nonprofit incubator with a different board and mission; using it will waste time and risks contacting the wrong organization entirely. Instead, direct any outreach to the IRS-of-record contact: c/o Suri A. Sastri, 10 Bicentennial Dr, Lexington, MA 02421, (781) 345-5720. Second, calibrate expectations on size: aside from the foundation's recurring multi-million-dollar transfers into its own Fidelity Charitable donor-advised fund, publicly visible direct grants to outside charities have run just $200 to $3,000 per gift — this is not a source for six-figure program grants through the public channel, though the family's DAF-directed giving (invisible on the 990) may be larger and warrants a different, more personal approach if a genuine relationship develops. Third, align messaging with the family's demonstrated interests: global health and humanitarian relief (Doctors Without Borders, Project HOPE, Smile Train, Feed the Children), domestic homelessness services (Boston Rescue Mission), international economic development (TechnoServe), and animal welfare/conservation (MSPCA-Angell, Mara Elephant Project) — organizations working in adjacent causes have the clearest historical fit. Fourth, pursue a warm introduction rather than a cold pitch — Impala's Funder Prospecting tool is one documented pathway, and past grantees or shared nonprofit-board connections in the Lexington/Boston area may offer another. Fifth, keep any eventual pitch to a concise one-page overview of mission, budget, and concrete impact rather than a full formal proposal, since there is no submission process to write a lengthy application against. A common mistake to avoid: assuming the "accepting_applications: true" flag in aggregator data means there's an open channel — it does not; every independent source confirms unsolicited submissions are not reviewed. Finally, do not expect a response to a single unsolicited email — with no staff, follow-up capacity is minimal, so a warm introduction meaningfully outperforms cold outreach here.