Persepolis Foundation

Persepolis Foundation is a closed, family-directed private foundation, not a competitive program grant-seekers can realistically apply to cold. It was established in 2000 by trustees Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, chief investment officer of Goldman Sachs' Private Wealth Management Group, and her husband Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani, an oil-and-gas industry executive. Its administrative address routes "% Goldman Sachs PFO" (Private Foundation Office), meaning grant decisions and paperwork flow through the family's wealth-management relationship rather than a staffed program office, and the foundation has no working public website (persepolis.org does not resolve) or grants portal. Multiple third-party directories — Instrumentl and Candid/Foundation Directory among them — explicitly state the foundation "does not accept unsolicited requests for funds" and "only makes contributions to preselected charitable organizations."

The grantee list bears this out: it is a small, stable circle of beneficiaries the trustees already know personally. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has received $355,000 across 3 grants — consistent with the trustees' own 2009 gift that funded the Museum's Persian art galleries (the likely source of the foundation's name). Harvard College has received $150,000 across 3 grants, mirroring the couple's 2005 endowment gift that created Harvard Kennedy School's Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. A further $301,675 across 2 grants is reported only as "see attached list" on the 990 (likely an aggregated batch of smaller gifts), and a single small local grant of $5,000 went to Montclair Shared Housing Association, a modest community nonprofit in New Jersey. This is a textbook signature of a personal-network family foundation: flagship cultural and educational institutions the trustees are personally invested in, plus one small community grant, rather than a competitively reviewed portfolio.

For grant-seeking organizations, the practical opportunity is relationship-building, not application-writing. Organizations with genuine ties to the Metropolitan Museum, Harvard, Princeton's Iran and Persian Gulf Studies program, or Persian/Iranian art, culture, and scholarship have the clearest thematic fit with the trustees' documented philanthropic interests. Organizations without an existing board, alumni, or professional connection to the Mossavar-Rahmani family should treat this foundation as a long shot and prioritize open, competitively-reviewed funders instead — unless a genuine warm introduction is available.

Persepolis Foundation's giving has been small and volatile relative to its roughly $9.5-11.4M asset base. Annual grants paid per its Form 990-PF filings: $119,900 (2021), $152,500 (2022), $205,000 (2023), and $327,500 across 4 grants in 2024 (range $2,500-$305,000, per Instrumentl) — a trend that roughly tripled total giving in three years. Two much larger outlier years appear in the longer filing history: $3,780,477 granted in 2012 (funded by $6.1M in contributions received that year) and $1,297,194 in 2019 (funded by a $2.0M contribution), showing that grant totals here track lumpy contributions to the corpus far more than steady investment income. Most recently, the FY2025 filing shows charitable disbursements jumping to $2,332,400 against $5,382,078 in total revenue, 92.9% of which came from new contributions — the largest giving year since 2012, and a signal that the family has recently refunded the foundation for a fresh round of grants.

At the grantee level, the platform's matched data covering 10 grants totaling $811,675 (average $81,168 per grant) shows extreme concentration: the Metropolitan Museum of Art alone accounts for $355,000 (44% of the total, across 3 grants), an unnamed batch reported as "see attached list" accounts for $301,675 (37%, across 2 grants), Harvard College accounts for $150,000 (18%, across 3 grants), and Montclair Shared Housing Association received just $5,000 (0.6%, across 2 grants). In other words, roughly 99% of tracked grant dollars went to two elite institutions, with a token amount reaching a genuinely competitive-application-style community nonprofit.

Geographically, grants concentrate in New York (5 grantees), Massachusetts (3, largely the Harvard gifts), and New Jersey (2, including the Montclair grant) — a footprint that maps directly to the trustees' home base (New York) and their major university relationships (Harvard, and by extension Princeton, though no Princeton grant appears in the matched data despite the trustees' $10M personal gift there). By program area, funding splits primarily between arts/culture (the Met) and higher education (Harvard), with philanthropy/community development as a minor category — a narrower and more elite-institution-weighted pattern than the platform's own "Community Development" tag for this foundation would suggest.

Persepolis Foundation sits within a peer cohort matched by asset size (all in the $9.49M-$9.50M band) and shared "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE classification — an IRS asset-band pairing rather than a curated set of programmatically similar funders. None of the five peers have a listed website in the data reviewed, and no dedicated giving-total or application-process research was conducted on them for this report; the comparison below reflects only what is verifiable from the foundation records available.

All six foundations cluster within a $10,000 band of total assets and share the generic "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE code, which typically identifies small, family-controlled trusts with unpaid trustee boards rather than staffed grantmaking operations. Given that pattern, and that Persepolis itself confirms it is closed to unsolicited requests, grant seekers should assume most or all of these peers are similarly relationship-driven, low-volume funders rather than open competitive programs, and should verify each individually before investing application effort.

No dedicated press coverage or news announcements specific to Persepolis Foundation were found for 2025-2026 beyond its IRS filings — this is consistent with a foundation that has no active website or communications function. The most concrete recent signal is financial: the foundation's latest available Form 990-PF (FY2025) shows total revenue of $5,382,078, up sharply from the $175K-$500K range typical of 2020-2024, with 92.9% of that revenue coming from new contributions received rather than investment returns. Charitable disbursements for the year reached $2,332,400 (99.3% of total expenses), the largest giving level since the $3.78M granted in 2012. Combined with 2024's total of $327,500 across 4 grants (up from $205,000 in 2023 and $152,500 in 2022), the data points to the family having recently refunded the foundation for a new, larger round of gifts, likely to the same small circle of grantees it has favored historically.

No leadership changes are evident: Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani remain the only two trustees, both uncompensated, exactly as in prior years. Their broader, better-documented philanthropy continues outside this foundation vehicle — Sharmin was named to a 2025 honoree list by the Fixed Income Analyst Society, and the couple's namesake academic centers (Harvard Kennedy School's Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, established 2005, and Princeton's Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, funded by a $10M gift) remain active, indicating their major giving continues to run through personal gifts and other vehicles as much as through this foundation. Grant seekers should not expect a public announcement cycle from Persepolis Foundation itself; any outreach should be timed around the family's known institutional relationships rather than a foundation press calendar, since none exists.

Persepolis Foundation does not run an application process in any conventional sense, so generic grant-writing advice does not apply here. The single most important fact for any grant seeker is that Instrumentl and Candid/Foundation Directory both independently confirm the foundation "does not accept unsolicited requests for funds" and gives only to "preselected charitable organizations." There is no LOI form, no online portal, no published deadline, and no RFP — sending a standard cold proposal to the PO Box 73 mailing address is very unlikely to receive a response, since correspondence is routed through Goldman Sachs' Private Foundation Office as an administrative function of the trustees' personal wealth management, not a program staff that reviews inbound requests.

The realistic path in is relationship-based, and the data points to specific access routes. Organizations affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (especially its Persian/Ancient Near Eastern art programs, given the trustees' 2009 gift funding that gallery and the foundation's own Persepolis namesake) have the clearest documented fit. So do organizations connected to Harvard — specifically the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Kennedy School — or to Princeton's Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, which the trustees funded with a $10M personal gift outside this foundation. A pattern also exists for small, geographically local community organizations: the $5,000 grant to Montclair Shared Housing Association in New Jersey suggests the trustees occasionally support modest local nonprofits with a personal or community connection, likely introduced by a board member, friend, or family associate rather than a cold pitch.

Common mistakes to avoid: treating this as an open RFP funder and submitting a generic LOI (it will almost certainly go unanswered); assuming the foundation's stated "Community Development" category on aggregator platforms reflects its real giving pattern (the actual grant history is dominated by arts/culture and elite higher education, not grassroots community work); and expecting a quick turnaround (with only 2-4 grants awarded per year, review cycles — to the extent they exist — are informal and infrequent). The best use of effort is identifying a genuine warm introduction through the Met, Harvard, or Princeton's Iran studies program, or through a shared New York/New Jersey philanthropic or professional network connected to Sharmin or Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani, rather than preparing a formal application package.