Paideia Foundation

Paideia Foundation (EIN 81-4269305, Scottsdale, AZ) is a small, closely held family foundation, not a program-staffed grantmaker. Its five directors — George A. Little (President/Treasurer), Annalaura H. Little (VP/Secretary), Daniel J. Little, Grant W. Little, and Michelle S. Yates — are all uncompensated family members, and the foundation's own 990-PF states it "conducts no direct charitable activities" as an operating foundation. There is no grants officer, no published guidelines, and (as of this report) no functioning website: paideiafoundation.org now redirects to a GoDaddy "domain for sale" parked page. Instrumentl's third-party database confirms "0 live grant opportunities." This is best understood as a relationship-driven vehicle for the Little family's own giving rather than a competitive funding source. The grantee data bears this out sharply: of 101 tracked grants worth $2.92M, 60 went to Nebraska organizations and 9 to Idaho — 68% of all grants cluster in just two states, despite the Scottsdale mailing address (the (402) area-code phone number points to Omaha, NE as the family's actual base). Within Idaho, funding concentrates on a tight network of Moscow-based classical-Christian and Reformed institutions: Christ Church Moscow, Logos School, and New Saint Andrews College. Within Nebraska, funding favors Christ Church Omaha, local pregnancy-resource and rescue-mission charities, and civic/scholarship groups (Aksarben Scholarship Fund, Avenue Scholars Foundation, Omaha Hockey Club). Trinity Classical Academy alone received $691,200 across just 4 grants — an average of $172,800 per grant, the signature of an anchor-donor relationship rather than a competitive award. First-time applicants with no tie to the Omaha civic/faith community or the Reformed classical-education network should expect this foundation to be effectively closed to them; the realistic path in is a warm introduction through someone already inside one of those two circles, not a cold proposal.

Assets have held essentially flat at $10.9M-$11.9M since FY2019, funded entirely by investment income (dividends and asset sales) — contributions received from outside donors have been $0-$262/year in every filed year, meaning this is a closed corpus with no active fundraising. Annual grants paid have declined for three straight years: $840,878 (FY2021) to $704,150 (FY2022) to $609,750 (FY2023) to $582,050 across 35 grants (FY2024, per Instrumentl) — roughly a 31% drop in giving volume even as assets stayed constant. Across the 101-grant/$2.92M sample in the record, the average grant is $28,885, but the disclosed 990-PF typical-grant-size range runs from $250 to $543,000 with a median of $17,500 — a highly skewed distribution. Concentration is severe: the top 6 recipients (Trinity Classical Academy $691,200, Christ Church Omaha $531,678, Assure Women's Center $350,000, Logos School $200,000, New Saint Andrews College $180,000, Christ Church Moscow $150,000) total $2,102,878 — 72% of all tracked giving — while the remaining ~44 organizations split the other 28% ($814,550), mostly in gifts of $200 to $10,000. By purpose, essentially every grant in the record is tagged simply "DONATION" (one exception: Logos School's $200,000 was tagged "BUILDING CAMPAIGN"), indicating unrestricted or general-operating gifts rather than program-specific awards — consistent with a founder relationship rather than a competitive RFP process. Geographically, Nebraska draws 60 of 101 grants (59%), Idaho 9 (9%), with the balance scattered thinly across Arizona, Colorado, Alabama, Illinois, New York, Virginia, Minnesota, and North Dakota (2-6 grants each) — almost certainly one-off gifts to national organizations (Alliance Defending Freedom, Tunnels to Towers Foundation, HSLDA) rather than an active regional strategy.

All five peer foundations sit within roughly $8,000 of Paideia's $10,900,281 in assets and share its NTEE classification (Philanthropy & Grantmaking, T20) — this is a common asset tier for family-run, non-operating private foundations with small closed boards. None of the five peers has a website on file in the database either, reinforcing that foundations in this size bracket typically operate as private family giving vehicles rather than public-facing grant programs. Grant seekers should not expect any foundation in this peer set to run an open competitive process; success in this tier depends almost entirely on personal or institutional ties to the founding family.

No foundation-specific news, press coverage, or announcements were found for this Paideia Foundation (Scottsdale, AZ / EIN 81-4269305) in 2025 or 2026 — searches surfaced only unrelated organizations sharing the "Paideia" name (Paideia School in Atlanta, Paideia Scholarship Foundation in Lancaster PA, the National Paideia Center, and Penn's SNF Paideia Program), none of which are this funder. The most notable and concrete recent development is that the foundation's own domain, paideiafoundation.org, has expired and now redirects to a GoDaddy "domain for sale" parked page as of this research date (2026-07-17) — the foundation's already-minimal web presence has effectively disappeared. Instrumentl's 990-derived profile lists zero live grant opportunities, consistent with a foundation that does not solicit. Leadership has been stable across all available filing years (2019-2024): the same five Little-family directors appear with no compensation and no turnover. The clearest recent trend in the financial record is a steady decline in annual grantmaking — from $840,878 in FY2021 down to $582,050 in FY2024 — while total assets have stayed essentially flat, meaning the foundation is distributing a shrinking share of its corpus each year rather than expanding its giving.

Treat this foundation as closed to unsolicited applicants rather than as a normal prospect. There is no online application, no portal, no published deadline, and the foundation's own IRS filing lists its application instructions as none — that absence is the single most important fact for any grant seeker to internalize before investing time here. The foundation's now-defunct website (paideiafoundation.org, currently a parked domain-for-sale page) confirms it never built out a public-facing grants process. Because every grant in the visible record is simply coded "DONATION" with no formal program structure, funding decisions appear to flow directly from personal relationships the Little family (George, Annalaura, Daniel, and Grant Little, plus Michelle Yates) already has with grantees — most visibly the Reformed/classical-Christian education cluster around Moscow, Idaho (Christ Church Moscow, Logos School, New Saint Andrews College, Knox Classical Academy) and the family's home community of Omaha, Nebraska (Christ Church Omaha, Habitat for Humanity of Omaha, Food Bank for the Heartland, Avenue Scholars Foundation, Aksarben Scholarship Fund). Organizations with an existing connection to either the CREC/classical-Christian-education network or the Omaha faith and civic-nonprofit scene have a realistic path: a warm introduction from a mutual contact, framed around shared theological or community identity, is far more likely to work than a cold LOI. Organizations without such a tie should not expect a response — mission alignment alone (education, human services, philanthropy broadly) is not sufficient, since the foundation's actual giving pattern is narrower and more relational than its stated NTEE categories suggest. If attempting contact anyway, the only channels available are the Omaha-area phone number, (402) 578-7430, and the Scottsdale mailing address, 10040 E Happy Valley Rd Unit 284, Scottsdale, AZ 85255 — expect a slow or nonexistent reply given the lapsed website and declining, non-competitive grantmaking pattern documented above.