Ringos Fund

Ringo's Fund (EIN 26-2757678, Leawood, KS) is not a public grants program — it is a private operating foundation created and 100% controlled by Charles A. "Chuck" and Jennifer D. Laue, who are its only two officers, serve unpaid (officer_compensation is $0 in every filed year), and whose website states in plain language that the fund is 'not currently accepting unsolicited proposals or applications.' Grant seekers should reframe the target: this is not a competitive RFP process to win, it is a founder's personal giving vehicle to influence. The fund's core and founding purpose, per its own IRS mission statement, is to 'help homeless pets by providing space to Great Plains SPCA' — a $262,120 program-expense line that dwarfs any grants made to outside organizations. Chuck Laue chairs the Great Plains SPCA board directly, so a large share of the fund's activity is really self-operated program spending rather than third-party grantmaking. The only outside grantee visible in the data is Wayside Waifs, a fellow Kansas City-area no-kill shelter, which received two general-support grants totaling $20,000 (avg. $10,000 each) — general operating support, not restricted program funding, and to an organization already inside the founders' local animal-welfare network. First-time applicants should not expect an LOI-to-proposal-to-site-visit pipeline; there is no evidence of one, no application_form_url, no deadline, and no staff to manage intake. The realistic path in is relational: Chuck Laue also chairs the Humane Society Legislative Fund, Stray Dog Institute, Stray Dog Capital and 50by40, and appears on the Good Food Institute team page, so organizations already networked into the national no-kill / companion-animal-welfare or farm-animal-alternative-protein circuits the Laues personally travel in have the only realistic shot at visibility. Everyone else should treat Ringo's Fund as effectively closed and redirect energy toward peer foundations in this report with an open or invited process.

Total assets have declined steadily from a peak of $5.55M (FY2012) to $4.45M (FY2023), after a one-time $4.6M contribution in 2012 that appears to have been the fund's founding capitalization. Total giving (which combines direct program spending and any outside grants) has ranged from $136,431 (2011) to $412,288 (2020), landing at $322,429 in the most recent filed year, FY2023 — essentially flat versus FY2022's $301,550. Crucially, grants_paid to external organizations is a tiny fraction of total_giving and has been erratic: $0 in 2019, 2020 and 2021; $10,000 in 2022; and just $699 in 2023. In the one year with a sizeable external grants figure, 2013, grants_paid reached $109,865, and 2015 saw $20,593 — but no year in the last decade shows a sustained pattern of third-party grantmaking. Contributions received are similarly lumpy: $0 in 2019 and 2021, but $200,000 in 2022 and $569,799 in 2020, consistent with the Laues making irregular personal contributions to fund the foundation's ongoing program rather than running a steady grants budget. The single documented outside grantee, Wayside Waifs (Kansas City, MO), received exactly two general-support grants totaling $20,000, averaging $10,000 each — 100% of tracked outside grant dollars and 100% of tracked outside grant geography sit in the Missouri side of the Kansas City metro. There is no program-area breakdown to analyze beyond animal welfare (NTEE code D20, Animal Protection & Welfare), and no evidence of geographic expansion beyond the KC metro. Bottom line for planning purposes: the addressable pool of outside grant dollars from Ringo's Fund is likely low five figures in a good year, concentrated on one or two known regional no-kill shelters, with the bulk of the fund's ~$300K in annual giving absorbed by its own facility-support program for Great Plains SPCA.

This is a tight cluster of small, single-family animal-welfare private foundations all holding $4.0M-$4.3M in assets, and Ringo's Fund sits squarely in the middle of that range by size. None of the five peers publish a website except Biophilia Foundation, so their application posture cannot be confirmed either way — but Ringo's Fund stands out for being unusually explicit rather than simply silent: it actively tells visitors it is closed to unsolicited requests. Combined with its private-operating-foundation structure (spending on its own program rather than distributing grants broadly), that makes Ringo's Fund likely the least accessible of this peer set to a cold applicant, even though its asset base is comparable to the others.

No 2025-2026 news specific to Ringo's Fund surfaced in web search — the foundation maintains a minimal public footprint (a single-page website with no news section, no social_media on file, and no contact_email in IRS data). The most recent filed financials available are for FY2023 (total_giving $322,429, essentially flat versus FY2022's $301,550), suggesting steady-state operation rather than a recent expansion or contraction. The clearest documented episode tied to the fund's founding purpose remains Great Plains SPCA's January 2019 announcement that it would stop operating its Independence, MO shelter by July 2019, despite a secured multi-year city contract worth roughly $550,000 plus $130,000 in county utility support — a reminder that the shelter facility Ringo's Fund helps sustain has faced real operating-cost pressure in the past. More recently, co-founder Charles A. Laue has continued to expand his footprint across the animal-welfare and alternative-protein philanthropic world: he chairs Great Plains SPCA, the Humane Society Legislative Fund, Stray Dog Institute and Stray Dog Capital, serves as Executive Chair of Companion Protect (a pet-insurance company), and appears on the Good Food Institute's team page. None of this indicates a change in Ringo's Fund's own grantmaking posture — it remains a closed, founder-directed vehicle — but it does confirm the Laues remain highly active donors and board members across a broader companion-animal and farm-animal-alternatives ecosystem that grant seekers may find easier entry points into than the fund itself.

The single most important tip: do not submit an unsolicited application to Ringo's Fund — its own website states it is not accepting them, and there is no application_form_url, deadline, or staff contact on file, so a cold submission will almost certainly go unread. This is a two-person, zero-compensation family board (Charles A. Laue and Jennifer D. Laue), not an institution with a program office, so there is no LOI-to-full-proposal-to-site-visit cycle to prepare for. If your organization has any realistic path to this funder, it will run through relationships, not paperwork: Chuck Laue chairs Great Plains SPCA, the Humane Society Legislative Fund, Stray Dog Institute and Stray Dog Capital, so a warm introduction via any of those organizations is far more likely to matter than a well-written proposal. The one documented outside grantee, Wayside Waifs, is a Kansas City-metro no-kill shelter already embedded in the same regional animal-welfare circle the Laues operate in — the closest analog for who might plausibly receive support is a similarly positioned, already-networked no-kill or companion-animal organization in or near the Kansas City metro, not a national or out-of-region applicant cold-emailing from a database. Set size expectations accordingly: the historical outside-grant pattern is $10,000 general-support awards, not large capital grants — this is not a funder to approach for a major facility or program build. A common mistake would be treating Ringo's Fund like a conventional foundation with a portal and annual cycle; there is no evidence of either, and persistent unsolicited outreach is unlikely to change the fund's stated posture. If circumstances change — a new program section appears on the website, an application_form_url is published, or a mutual connection surfaces an actual opportunity — re-verify the site's current 'not accepting' language before investing further effort, since a closed status like this can lift without public announcement.