Sayers Foundation Inc.

Sayers Foundation Inc. is a small, closely held family foundation run out of Saint Louis, Missouri by two unpaid officers, W. Grant Williams III (Director/President/Treasurer) and Cynthia A. Reese (Director/Secretary). With total assets of roughly $5.86 million and annual giving in the $430,000-$695,000 range, it operates far below the radar of most grant databases: the foundation's listed website carries no grants information, Instrumentl shows zero live opportunities, and there is no public LOI portal, RFP, or published deadline. The internal data flag for this foundation is explicit — "preselected_only" — meaning the trustees fund organizations they already know rather than running an open competitive process. This is corroborated by the grantee list itself: core recipients such as Gateway To Hope, Maren Fund, Ed Choice, College Bound, American Federation for Children, United Way Greater St Louis, and Backstoppers Inc. appear with 3-4 grants apiece, implying multi-year renewed commitments to the same roughly two dozen organizations rather than a rotating cohort of new grantees. First-time applicants should not expect a standard proposal-to-award pipeline. The realistic path in is a warm introduction: a board or staff connection to Williams or Reese, a shared St. Louis civic/business network tie, or affiliation with one of the foundation's two clear thematic lanes — (1) St. Louis-area health, disability, and human-services nonprofits (cancer care, Down syndrome education, first-responder support, addiction recovery) and (2) national school-choice/free-market policy organizations (EdChoice, American Federation for Children, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Club for Growth Foundation). A large pass-through gift to Schwab Charitable Fund ($404,679 across 3 grants) also suggests the foundation sometimes routes money through a donor-advised fund for further onward granting, which may itself be worth investigating as an indirect access point. Organizations outside these two lanes, or without a Missouri/DC/New York presence, should treat this as a low-probability, low-effort-appropriate prospect rather than a primary target.

Across the grantee history captured (130 grants totaling $2,010,679, average $15,467 per grant), the foundation's per-grant sizing skews small: the DB's typical_grant_size shows a median of just $5,000, a mean of $13,110, and a range of $1,000 to $117,120 across 33 recent-year grants. Annual totals have fluctuated with market performance rather than a fixed payout formula — total_giving was $531,987 (2021), $693,532 (2022), and $636,975 (2023), while grants_paid (a narrower cash-out figure) ran $432,620, $576,871, and $520,688 in those same years, off a total_assets base that has hovered between $5.7M and $6.3M since 2019. The single largest identifiable disbursement, $404,679 to Schwab Charitable Fund across 3 grants, is a donor-advised-fund pass-through and not a program grant to an operating charity — excluding it, the largest direct grantee is Gateway To Hope at $325,000 across 4 grants (~$81,250/year) for breast cancer care and treatment, followed by St. Louis Community Foundation ($150,000, one grant) and Variety The Children's Charity ($125,000 across 4 grants) for children with physical/mental disabilities. Geographically, giving is heavily concentrated: of 130 grants by state, 70 (54%) went to Missouri recipients, with secondary clusters in Washington DC (19 grants — largely the free-market/school-choice policy organizations) and New York (15 grants), and small numbers to California, Florida, Indiana, Virginia, Colorado, Illinois, and Ohio. By cause, roughly a third of top-50 grant dollars trace to health/disability/human-services (Gateway To Hope, Variety, Maren Fund, Friends of Kids with Cancer, Camp Jump Start, Washington University School of Medicine), another meaningful share to K-12 school-choice and education-access nonprofits (Ed Choice, College Bound, American Federation for Children, ExcelinEd, North Side Community School, Today Tomorrow Educational Foundation — roughly $260,000+ combined), and a distinct policy/advocacy bucket of $20,000/year-scale gifts split evenly across Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and George Mason University Foundation, all coded "RELIEF FROM GOVT. BURDENS."

Sayers sits in an almost perfectly matched asset cohort — all five peers cluster within $2,000-$3,000 of its $5,856,937 in assets, and all five share the NTEE "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" classification with no public website on file, which strongly suggests this entire peer set is made up of similarly small, single-family, trustee-directed foundations rather than staffed public charities. None of the peers publish an application process either, reinforcing that outreach at this asset tier across the board should be relationship-first, not portal-first. Sayers is nonetheless more identifiable than its peers thanks to its (unrelated-content) website domain and its detailed 990-PF grant schedule, which is the primary advantage a grant seeker has here versus these peers.

No news coverage, press releases, leadership changes, or program announcements specific to Sayers Foundation Inc. surfaced in web searches covering 2025-2026; the organization does not appear to issue public communications. The most recent verifiable activity is financial: FY2024 total revenue was $766,406 (up from $531,192 in FY2023), driven largely by asset sales and dividend income rather than new contributions — the foundation received $0 in outside contributions in FY2024, FY2023, and FY2022, meaning it is now operating purely off its existing $5.86M endowment rather than being replenished by the Williams/Reese family. FY2023's 990-PF (the most recent year with full grant detail in this data) shows grants_paid of $520,688 against total_giving of $636,975, roughly in line with the FY2019-2023 average of ~$550,000/year. Leadership has been stable and unpaid across all available years: W. Grant Williams III and Cynthia A. Reese remain the sole two officers with zero reported compensation, and there is no indication of a recent trustee change, merger, or wind-down. Absent new contributions, the foundation's giving capacity is now tied to investment performance, which introduces some year-to-year variability but no signal of imminent closure or expansion.

There is no published deadline, LOI process, application form URL, or grants portal for Sayers Foundation Inc. — the application_instructions field is explicitly blank and Instrumentl lists zero live opportunities, so a cold, unsolicited proposal mailed or emailed to the foundation's Overhills Drive address is unlikely to be reviewed through any formal process. The single most effective move is finding a warm connection: because officers Williams and Reese serve without compensation and the grantee list reads like a personal giving list (recurring gifts to the same ~25 organizations year over year), a board member, volunteer, or donor relationship with the foundation's principals — likely surfaced via St. Louis civic, business, or philanthropic networks (e.g., the St. Louis Community Foundation, a past $150,000 grantee, may be a useful intermediary) — will do more than any written proposal. If your organization fits the health/disability/human-services lane (cancer care, Down syndrome or disability services, first-responder support, addiction recovery), lead with concrete local-impact metrics the way Gateway To Hope and Variety The Children's Charity likely have, since those relationships have been renewed 3-4 consecutive years. If you fit the school-choice/education-access lane (EdChoice, American Federation for Children, ExcelinEd, College Bound, North Side Community School), frame the ask around expanding access/choice for underserved students specifically, matching the "EDUCATION SUPPORT FOR IMPOVERISHED" and "ACADEMIC IMPR THRU EDUC CHOICE" purpose codes used repeatedly in their 990 filings. If you are a free-market/limited-government policy or research organization, note the foundation already funds a full slate of national think tanks (Heritage, AEI, Cato, Manhattan Institute, CEI, Club for Growth Foundation) at a consistent ~$20,000/year each — a new entrant in this space competes against an already-full roster and should differentiate sharply. The most common mistake would be treating this as an open-call funder and investing significant proposal-writing time before securing any introduction — given the preselected-only pattern, that effort is better spent identifying the relationship path first.