Roessner Family Foundation

Roessner Family Foundation is a small, entirely volunteer-run family foundation established in 1996 by John K. Roessner III in memory of his wife Ellen. Its four trustees — John K. Roessner III (President/Treasurer), John K. Roessner IV (Vice President), Nancy Roessner King (Secretary), and Susan Roessner Domski (Executive Director) — draw zero compensation in every year of financial data on file, meaning there is no paid program staff reviewing applications; the family reads and decides on every request directly. The foundation's motto, "Giving Youth the Tools They Need to Grow Their Best," and founder John K. Roessner III's own words — "If you help a child in the beginning, he or she will have a better chance later on in life" — signal a funder oriented around direct, tangible impact on individual children rather than systems change or policy work.

A critical, non-obvious finding from direct web research: multiple third-party grant databases (Instrumentl, Grantable, Hinchilla) describe Roessner as invitation-only, funding only preselected organizations. That is now inaccurate. The foundation's own website runs a live "Apply Online" section with a Grant Request Form, a dedicated submission email (apply@roessnerfamilyfoundation.org), and published deadlines. Applicants should not be deterred by outdated third-party listings.

That said, the underlying grant history still shows a strong preference for renewing existing relationships: most top recipients (Albright Science Research Institute, Mental Health Collaborative, Green Mountain Farm To School, Perkins School for the Blind) received 2-4 separate grants rather than a single award, and 148 recorded grants concentrate overwhelmingly in Massachusetts (93), Southwest Florida (21), and Vermont (19). First-time applicants should treat an initial award as the opening move in a multi-year relationship, not a one-time transaction, and should request modestly (the site caps new requests at $15,000) rather than aiming for the historical top grantee totals of $100,000-$200,000, which reflect four or more years of cumulative funding, not single grants.

Roessner's own site-published typical grant size is a median of $10,000 and average of $13,071 across a $5,000-$50,000 range (35 grants sampled from a recent 990-PF). Looking at the fuller multi-year grantee history in the data (148 grants, $2,300,500 total, $15,544 average), the picture is consistent: this is a high-volume, modest-size funder, not a few-large-checks funder. Total giving reached $725,117 in FY2023 against $12.5M in assets, with $657,000 paid out in grants that year.

The growth trajectory is the most striking pattern in the financial history. Grants paid climbed from just $53,000 (2011) to $63,000 (2012), $71,000 (2013), $87,000 (2014), and $103,000 (2015) — slow, steady growth typical of a small family fund. Then two large capital events reshaped the foundation: contributions received of $4,352,510 in 2020 and $3,805,259 in 2021 pushed total assets from $4,983,434 (2019) to $9,680,070 (2020) to $13,846,775 (2021). Grants paid responded in lockstep: $188,500 (2019) to $239,500 (2020) to $457,500 (2021) to $593,000 (2022) to $657,000 (2023) — a roughly 3.5x increase in annual giving in four years, and 12x growth since 2011.

Geographically, of 148 recorded grants, Massachusetts accounts for 93 (63%), Southwest Florida 21 (14%), Vermont 19 (13%), with small numbers in Pennsylvania (8), New York (5), and one each in Minnesota and Virginia — likely legacy or trustee-network relationships outside the core three-state/region footprint. Program purposes in the 990 data are uniformly tagged "CHARITABLE" without finer IRS-level breakdown, but the foundation's own website groups its giving into four buckets: educational programs (STEM, arts, after-school, youth leadership), assistive/educational technology (laptops for foster youth, tools for visually impaired children), well-being programs (mental health, mentoring, trauma support), and animal-assisted therapy (therapeutic riding, service dogs).

All five peers fall within roughly $13.3-13.4M in assets — an almost identical size cohort to Roessner, and all share the same broad "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE classification, which reflects their IRS foundation-type coding rather than a specific programmatic focus. None of the five peers have a website on file in this dataset, which itself is a notable point of differentiation: Roessner stands out among same-size peers for maintaining a public, navigable site with a stated mission, published grant recipients, and an actual online application — most similarly-sized single-family foundations operate with no public presence at all, making Roessner comparatively easy for a grant seeker to research and approach directly.

No 2025 or 2026 news coverage, press releases, or public announcements specific to Roessner Family Foundation turned up in web research — consistent with an all-volunteer, four-person family board that has never listed any paid staff or communications function in any year of the financial data reviewed (2011-2023). Small single-family foundations of this type typically do not issue press releases or maintain active news sections, and this one is no exception: the foundation's own website has no blog, news, or dated-announcement section.

The most recent verifiable activity is the FY2023 Form 990-PF, showing $657,000 in grants paid, $725,117 in total giving, and $12,503,923 in total assets — a slight dip in assets from the $13,846,775 peak in 2021, consistent with normal investment-market fluctuation (net investment income swung from $718,713 in 2021 to $168,344 in 2022 before recovering to $654,097 in 2023) rather than any change in strategy or leadership. Leadership has been fully stable across the entire dataset: John K. Roessner III (President/Treasurer), John K. Roessner IV (Vice President), Nancy Roessner King (Secretary), and Susan Roessner Domski (Executive Director) appear unchanged in every filing year captured.

Grant seekers should not expect to track this foundation through news monitoring or press coverage; the foundation's own website (About Us > History, and Grant Recipients pages) and direct email contact are the only reliable channels for current information.

Apply through the foundation's own "Apply Online" portal at roessnerfamilyfoundation.org, not through a third-party database — several well-known aggregators (Instrumentl, Grantable, Hinchilla) currently describe Roessner as invitation-only/preselected-recipients-only, which contradicts the live, published application process found directly on the foundation's own site as of this research.

Respect the foundation's own request cap of $15,000 per the "Before You Apply" page — this is lower than the $50,000 maximum seen in the historical typical-grant-size data, so first-time applicants should not anchor to past large awards, which likely reflect cumulative multi-year funding to established grantees (e.g., Albright Science Research Institute has received $200,000 across 4 separate grants, not one).

Submit by the preferred June 1 date, not the October 1 hard deadline — the site explicitly frames June 1 as preferred, October 1 as the final cutoff, with late submissions rolling to the following January's cycle. Given a stated response time of roughly two months and grant distribution required by December 31 of the application year, a June submission gives the most runway for both review and disbursement within the same calendar year.

Have all four required attachments ready before starting the online form: current Program Budget, current Organizational Budget, IRS 501(c)(3) Determination Letter, and the most recently filed Form 990. Because the board reviewing applications is the Roessner family itself with no paid program staff, incomplete submissions are unlikely to get a courtesy follow-up request — submit complete on the first attempt.

Tightly align eligibility language: the foundation funds 501(c)(3) organizations serving children and adolescents in New England (with heavy concentration in Massachusetts and Vermont) or Southwest Florida — 90% of all 148 recorded grants (133 of 148) went to organizations in MA, VT, or FL. Applicants outside this geographic footprint face materially longer odds. Use the foundation's own framing — "Giving Youth the Tools They Need to Grow Their Best" — and describe concrete, measurable impact on individual children (academic, social-emotional, or physical outcomes) rather than systemic or advocacy framing, which is not reflected anywhere in the grantee list or website language.

A reasonable common mistake to avoid: assuming (based on outdated secondary sources) that this funder cannot be approached directly and skipping the application entirely.