Sam S Bloom Foundation

The Sam S. Bloom Foundation is a small, independent Colorado family foundation (EIN 84-0929690, based in Littleton, ruling date 1984) with roughly $7.9M in assets and an intentionally narrow, deeply relational grantmaking style. It is not a foundation for first-contact cold applications: both its own website and third-party funder guides emphasize calling the office (303-771-2266) before submitting anything, to confirm alignment with current priorities. This is a foundation built for sustained partnerships rather than one-time grants — DB grantee data shows the majority of its top 50 recipients (e.g., The Pinon Project Family Resource Center, Beyond Home, Florence Crittenton Services of Colorado, and La Puente Home, each at $120,000 across 4 grants) received funding across four consecutive cycles at consistent amounts, indicating the Foundation renews commitments to proven partners rather than constantly rotating in new grantees. First-time applicants should expect a multi-year courtship: many first-year awards in the data cluster at $15,000-$22,000, with renewal contingent on demonstrated outcomes. The Foundation favors direct-service nonprofits with concrete, measurable programs — early childhood centers, family resource centers, and job-training providers — over policy, advocacy, research, or capacity-building intermediaries. Board composition (President Donald R. Jacobs, VP Jon Ludwigson, Secretary Neil Kesselman, Treasurer Zachary Feldman, plus directors including Sasha Jacobs-Lowry, suggesting a multi-generational family-governed structure) points to a foundation where personal relationships and institutional memory matter; a warm introduction or reference from an existing grantee peer strengthens the LOI-stage conversation. Applicants should lead with self-sufficiency outcomes for at-risk families with young children — the Foundation's stated sweet spot — rather than generic child-welfare framing, and should explicitly note alignment with diversity, equity, and inclusion values now referenced on the Foundation's site.

The Foundation's own reporting (pf990 enrichment) puts the typical grant at $2,000-$30,000, with a median of $4,500 and average of $6,514 across 69 tracked awards. Broader grantee-history data (304 tracked grants, $1,940,000 total) shows a similar average of $6,382/grant, but a much wider top end: the four largest recipients — The Pinon Project Family Resource Center, Beyond Home, Florence Crittenton Services of Colorado, and La Puente Home — each received $120,000 total across 4 grants (effectively $30,000/year for four straight years), representing the Foundation's ceiling for sustained core partners. By program area, early childhood education and family-support services dominate the top 50 grantee list (roughly half of listed purposes reference early childhood, preschool, or family resource programming), followed by self-sufficiency/job-readiness training (Project Self-Sufficiency of Loveland and North Colorado, Warren Village, Mi Casa Resource Center, Women's Bean Project) and parenting education (Growing Home, Bright Futures, multiple family resource centers). Geographically, giving is almost exclusively in-state: 303 of 304 tracked grants went to Colorado organizations versus a single Pennsylvania grant, confirming the Foundation's stated Colorado-only mandate. On the finance side, total giving has ranged from $457,706 (2010) to a peak of $696,653 (2019), with the most recent Form 990 year (2022) showing $674,748 in total giving and $541,000 in grants paid; web sources report $573,500 across 84 awards in 2025. Total assets have been essentially flat for over a decade — $7.77M (2011) to $8.63M (2020) to $7.93M currently — meaning grant budgets track investment performance rather than a growing corpus; net investment income has swung sharply, from $775,792 (2020) to just $124,610 (2022), which likely explains the giving dip in leaner years. With no material asset growth, applicants should not expect the Foundation's grant pool to expand meaningfully in coming cycles.

The Sam S. Bloom Foundation occupies the small end of Colorado's early-childhood/self-sufficiency funder landscape — larger than a purely local family fund but a fraction of the scale of the state's biggest early-childhood players.

Bloom is roughly 1/8th to 1/40th the asset size of these peers, which explains its much smaller typical grant ($2,000-$30,000 vs. six-figure awards common at Buell or Gates) and its preference for a handful of renewing, deeply known partners rather than a broad open portfolio. Unlike the larger invitation-only funders, Bloom remains genuinely accessible to a first-time Colorado applicant who calls ahead — but grant seekers should size their ask to Bloom's typical $4,500-$30,000 range rather than treating it as a source of large general operating grants.

The most recent verifiable activity is FY2025 giving of $573,500 across 84 awards (per Instrumentl's 990 aggregation), in line with the Foundation's historical $450K-$700K annual range and showing no major expansion or contraction. The Foundation's Form 990-PF data was last enriched 2026-02-21 and the profile last verified 2026-08-01, with the most recent full financial year in the underlying dataset being fiscal year 2022 ($674,748 total giving, $541,000 in grants paid, $7,625,269 in assets). No leadership transitions were identified: the board slate (President Donald R. Jacobs, VP Jon Ludwigson, Secretary Neil Kesselman, Treasurer Zachary Feldman, and directors including Cheryl Caldwell, Mary T. Carraher, Debbie Strait Gonzales, Sasha Jacobs-Lowry, Deana Lemos-Garcia, Penny McFarland, and Nancy J. Saltzman) appears stable across the historical filings reviewed, consistent with a long-tenured family-governed board. No new program announcements, press releases, or major single-recipient headline grants were found for 2025-2026 — the Foundation's public communications remain limited to its static website and direct mail with grantees, typical of a foundation of this size and operating style. The one notable programmatic anchor remains the Motivated Families Grant Program (MFGP), a standing initiative since 2006 that has directed nearly $2 million to five partner organizations; there is no indication MFGP has been restructured or that new partner organizations have been added recently. Grant seekers should treat November 2026 as the next award-notification point following the May 1, 2026 (or 2027) submission deadline, and should not expect meaningful news coverage of this Foundation between cycles.

The single most important tactic for this Foundation is the pre-application phone call: contact the office at (303) 771-2266 before requesting materials, to confirm your program fits current priorities — this is explicitly recommended by both the Foundation's own site and independent funder guides, and skipping it is the most common first-time-applicant mistake. Request the grant packet in March; it is not downloadable, and packets are only distributed on request each year. The application itself is a Modified Colorado Common Grant Application — use the standard Colorado Common Grant Application format as your base and adapt it per the Foundation's specific instructions rather than submitting an unmodified generic template, which signals a lack of funder-specific research. Expect a paper-based, mail-in process: multiple physical copies of the proposal and all attachments must be mailed to PO Box 2413, Littleton, CO 80161-2413 — there is no online portal, so build mailing lead time into your plan well ahead of the May 1 deadline. In the proposal narrative, foreground self-sufficiency outcomes for financially disadvantaged Colorado families with infants and young children — this is the Foundation's explicitly stated sweet spot, not generic child-welfare or education framing. Do not apply for research, healthcare, elderly services, religious programming, animal welfare, endowment gifts, food banks, or primarily recreational programs — the Foundation explicitly excludes all of these categories. Given that its largest, longest-tenured grantees (The Pinon Project, Beyond Home, Florence Crittenton Services, La Puente Home) each received four consecutive years of $30,000 awards, first-time applicants should apply for a modest amount in the $15,000-$22,000 range typical of new relationships, frame the request as the start of a multi-year partnership, and explicitly reference the Foundation's stated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in describing your organization's practices and the population served. Applicants will be notified in writing of all decisions in November, so plan program timelines around a roughly 6-month gap between submission and notification.