Robert Lemelson Foundation

The Robert Lemelson Foundation is a small, founder-directed private foundation (EIN 27-3423670, Pacific Palisades, CA) that operates almost entirely through a fixed roster of institutional partnerships rather than a competitive open grants program. Founder Robert Lemelson, PhD — himself a psychological anthropologist and documentary filmmaker — personally chairs the board alongside Secretary Irene Sukwandi and CFO Beate Ritz, MD PhD, and directs funding into roughly eight standing initiatives: UCLA's Indonesian Studies and Lemelson Undergraduate Honors programs, the SPA and SVA/Lemelson fellowship and conference funds, an OHSU trauma-and-torture education workshop, a science lab in Indonesia (Sekolah Impian Putra Bangsa), and a martial-arts endowment at Hampshire College. With only $1.5M in total visible grant volume across 25 grants and 12 distinct recipients, the Foundation behaves less like a public grantmaker and more like a personal philanthropic vehicle that renews the same relationships annually. UCLA Foundation alone absorbed $1.09M (70%) of the sampled grant volume across four multi-year grants, confirming it as the anchor institutional partner. For grant seekers, this means direct, unsolicited proposals to the Foundation are a weak strategy — the website itself offers no application portal, no LOI process, and no stated deadlines, and web research turned up no evidence of open general operating support. The two realistic access points are the SPA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship (administered by the Society for Psychological Anthropology) and the SVA/Robert Lemelson Fellowship (administered by the Society for Visual Anthropology) — both are individual graduate-student research fellowships, not organizational grants, funded and named after Lemelson but run through third-party academic associations. Organizations working in Southeast Asian/Indonesian studies, psychological anthropology, transcultural psychiatry, or ethnographic film with an existing relationship to UCLA anthropology, SPA, or SVA have the only plausible path to inclusion; cold outreach outside these channels should not be a primary strategy.

Total giving has grown steadily from $258,689 in FY2012 to $584,593 in FY2023 (the last year with a full giving figure), though FY2024 shows only partial data (total_revenue $159,818, no giving figure reported yet). Grants paid rose from $243,433 (2012) to $520,050 (2023), a roughly 2.1x increase over 11 years, funded mainly by net investment income ($333,075 in 2023) against a relatively flat asset base — total assets have actually declined slightly from $6.68M (2015) to $5.51M (2024), meaning the Foundation is drawing down rather than growing its endowment. The Foundation's own typical_grant_size data (n=7 recent grants) shows a median of $40,000, average $49,331, and range from $512 to $141,708 — consistent with a mix of small fellowship-fund contributions and larger multi-year institutional commitments. The visible grantee sample (25 grants, $1,545,162 total, average $61,806) is dominated by two recipients: UCLA Foundation ($1,085,464 across 4 grants — anthropology honors, Study of Black Life and Racial Inequality program, and Long COVID clinic funding) and the American Anthropological Association ($194,757 across 4 grants for SPA/SVA Lemelson Fellows). International Documentary Association received $120,000 across 3 grants for a single filmmaker's project ('I Say, No No'), and Give2Asia received $53,543 for Indonesia-based gamelan/consortium work. Below that, a long tail of small grants ($105-$34,000) went to USC Pacific Asia Museum, Case Western Reserve, and several general-support gifts under $6,000. Geographically, California dominates (12 of 25 grants), followed by Massachusetts (5, largely AAA/SPA-SVA administrative grants) and Virginia (4); by program area, anthropology/academic research and fellowships account for the large majority of dollars, with documentary film and Indonesia-focused cultural/educational projects as secondary strands.

Robert Lemelson Foundation sits in a cluster of very small, closely-asset-matched private foundations (all roughly $5.5M in assets), several of which are trusts or family vehicles with no public web presence — a common profile in the Philanthropy & Grantmaking NTEE category among funders under $6M. Unlike Pine Street Foundation, which maintains a public grants site, most of Lemelson's asset-tier peers (Wade Charitable Trust, Philip Cohen Scholarship Trust, John J Flynn Trust, Chase and Ashley Anderson Family Foundation) have no website at all, making Robert Lemelson Foundation comparatively more discoverable despite its own site lacking a formal application process.

What distinguishes Robert Lemelson Foundation from this peer set is not size but specialization and personal direction: rather than broad, diffuse family-foundation giving, virtually 100% of its grantmaking is concentrated in a single founder's academic discipline (psychological/visual anthropology) and geographic interest (Indonesia), channeled through eight recurring institutional relationships. For a grant seeker, that means Lemelson is far more predictable than its peers — but only within its narrow lane.

The most concrete, verifiable recent activity is the annual fellowship cycle: the SPA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Student Fellowship released its 2026 application form in November 2025 (via americananthro.org and useanvil.com), continuing $3,000-$6,000 awards for dissertation-planning fieldwork in psychological anthropology. The SVA/Robert Lemelson Fellowship, now in its ninth year, opened its 2026 cycle with a deadline of April 17, 2026 at 5:00 PM Eastern, again offering up to six or seven awards of up to $6,000 for graduate students in visual anthropology, with fellows expected to present at the AAA Annual Meeting in St. Louis in November 2026. Beyond the fellowship cycles, no board changes, new initiatives, or major announcements surfaced in web research — the Foundation maintains a low public profile with no press office or news archive, consistent with its founder-directed, low-overhead structure (officer compensation reported as $0 across all recent Form 990-PF filings). Note that a large volume of 2025-2026 news referencing "Lemelson Foundation" grants ($24M inventor-education announcement, Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams, an NSF-Lemelson engineering-curriculum initiative, an Oregon Tech grant) belongs to the separate, unrelated Lemelson Foundation in Portland, OR, and should not be attributed to Robert Lemelson Foundation. The most recent confirmed institutional activity in the DB record is FY2023 grant-making of $520,050 across the standing partner roster, with FY2024 revenue data ($159,818) suggesting a normal, non-disrupted year.

Do not approach this Foundation as a conventional LOI/proposal funder — its website (robertlemelsonfoundation.org) publishes no grant guidelines, no deadlines, no online application, and no contact form specifically for funding inquiries; application_instructions in Foundation records is explicitly blank, confirming there is no public intake process. Applicants have two realistic paths. First, if you are a graduate student in psychological anthropology, apply through the Society for Psychological Anthropology's annual fellowship (americananthro.org): submit a 750-1,000-word project statement (excluding references) describing specific research or methods training, and note explicitly that preference goes to exploratory research conducted abroad — domestic-only proposals are competitively weaker. Second, if you work in visual/multimodal anthropology, apply through the Society for Visual Anthropology's SVA/RLF Fellowship: you'll need four components (a 750-1,000-word project statement, a 1-2 page CV, an itemized budget using SVA's template, and enrollment verification), and you must hold current SVA and AAA membership as of the deadline — join early, since late memberships risk disqualification. For both fellowships, emphasize field-site access, preliminary data or contacts already in place, and a clear plan to complete the work within roughly a year, since these are exploratory/pre-dissertation grants, not multi-year research funding. Outside the two fellowships, the only proven route in is an existing institutional relationship — UCLA's Department of Anthropology, OHSU's trauma/torture program, or an Indonesia-based cultural/educational partner are the Foundation's actual grantee base; a cold proposal from an unaffiliated organization has essentially no track record of success in the visible grant history (12 named recipients total across all years sampled). If proposing a documentary film project (as International Documentary Association successfully did for three grants totaling $120,000), align explicitly with psychological anthropology, mental health, or Indonesian/Southeast Asian subject matter, since that is the through-line across every non-academic grant in the record. Common mistake to avoid: conflating this Foundation with the much larger Lemelson Foundation (Portland, OR) in your outreach — citing their invention/STEM programs or $24M initiatives in a proposal to Robert Lemelson Foundation signals you have not done basic diligence.