Schwartz Fam Foundation Trust

Schwartz Fam Foundation Trust is not a grants program in the conventional sense — it is a private family foundation, formally checked as "preselected organizations only" on its IRS filings, run out of trustee Alan D. Schwartz's office (c/o Guggenheim Partners, 330 Madison Avenue, New York) with Nancy M. Seaman as co-trustee. There is no program officer, no open RFP, and its nominal website (schwartzfam.org) currently resolves to a bare, unmaintained server directory rather than a grants portal. Every one of its 189 recorded grants since inception carries the identical stated purpose "TO SUPPORT THE GENERAL PURPOSE FUND," indicating the trustees write unrestricted checks to organizations they already know rather than funding specific proposals or programs. The grantee roster is telling: Robin Hood Foundation ($2.08M across 4 grants), Duke University ($1.23M across 4 grants) plus the Duke-affiliated Emily Krzyzewski Center ($160K+ across multiple grants), and Chai Lifeline ($755K across 4 grants) account for over half of all recorded giving. That pattern points to durable personal or board-level relationships (Robin Hood's donor/trustee circle, Duke basketball/Krzyzewski network, Jewish communal and children's-health causes) rather than issue-area strategy. For a grant seeker, the realistic path in is relational, not transactional: board overlap, a personal introduction from an existing grantee, or shared affiliation with one of the anchor causes above. Cold LOIs or portal-based applications have essentially no track record of success here because no application infrastructure exists. First-time applicants should treat this profile the way they'd treat a family office, not a foundation with published guidelines — research who sits on the boards of Robin Hood, Duke's Krzyzewski Center, and Chai Lifeline, and look for a warm-introduction path through those networks rather than budgeting staff time on a standalone proposal. Organizations without any relationship to the Schwartz/Seaman circle should deprioritize this funder relative to peers with open, published application processes.

Across the 189 grants captured in filings, Schwartz Fam Foundation Trust has distributed $7,569,540 total, averaging $40,050 per grant — but that average is skewed heavily by a handful of large, repeat commitments. The Foundation's own most-recent-year (pf990) breakdown shows a typical grant of $10,000 (median), ranging from $500 to $329,500, with a $25,855 average across 58 grants in that filing year — a more realistic band for a new grantee to expect than the $40K all-years average. Giving is concentrated at the top: Robin Hood Foundation ($2,079,500), Duke University ($1,232,938), and Chai Lifeline ($755,000) together account for roughly 54% of all recorded dollars, while the remaining ~47 organizations in the top-50 list split amounts mostly in the $10,000-$225,000 range, tapering to $10,000-$25,000 gifts for smaller community and school-based grantees. Geographically, funding is overwhelmingly New York-centric: 88 of the mapped grants (about 47%) went to NY-based organizations, with Massachusetts (26 grants, largely Nantucket-area nonprofits — Nantucket Book Festival, Nantucket Golf Club Foundation — suggesting a second-home/vacation-community tie) and Connecticut (21 grants) rounding out the core geography. Smaller pockets reach DC (10), California (12), Virginia (8, tied to the Duke/Krzyzewski and Marine Corps University grants), North Carolina (8, again Duke-linked), Florida (4), New Jersey (3), and Texas (3). Annual total giving has been volatile rather than trending steadily up or down: $5.61M (2019), $2.82M (2020), $5.28M (2021), $2.16M (2022), and $4.03M (2023, the latest year with complete giving data). That volatility tracks investment performance and discretionary trustee decisions more than a programmatic budget cycle. Meanwhile total assets have fallen sharply — from a $24.1M peak in 2013 to $9.27M in 2024, a 61% decline — meaning the pool available for future giving is structurally smaller than the historical grant list might suggest.

The near-identical asset figures across all five peers (all clustering at $9.27M) reflect an asset-matched comparison set rather than a meaningful strategic cohort — these foundations are similarly sized, not necessarily similarly run. What sets Schwartz apart within this group is transparency: it is the only one with a detailed, multi-year public grant history (189 recorded grants) and disclosed financials, while none of the five peers have public grants pages, and only Pennies From Heaven Foundation maintains a live website (penniesfromheaven.org). That combination — a documented giving history but a formally preselected-only application posture — is common among family trusts in this asset tier: enough scale to be visible in IRS data, but structured as a personal giving vehicle rather than an institutional grants program.

No 2025-2026 press coverage, leadership changes, or new program announcements surfaced in web research — this Foundation does not issue press releases or public statements, consistent with its unmaintained website and closely held structure. The most concrete recent signal comes from third-party 990 aggregation: giving activity dropped from 57 grants in 2023 to 38 grants in 2024, and the Foundation's own filings show total assets falling from $11.14M (FY2023) to $9.27M (FY2024), continuing a decade-long contraction from the $24.1M peak recorded in 2013. FY2024 total revenue was just $74,677 (versus $1.07M in 2023), suggesting a quiet year for new contributions into the trust — grants_paid and total_giving for FY2024 were not yet reported as of the most recent filing pulled. Leadership has been stable throughout the recorded history: Alan D. Schwartz and Nancy M. Seaman are listed as trustees across every filing year available, with zero officer compensation reported in any year — consistent with a family-run vehicle rather than a staffed institution. Alan Schwartz's public role as Executive Chairman of Guggenheim Partners (the Foundation's mailing address routes through Guggenheim Partners' New York office, with Rothschild Inc. handling administrative contact) is the only notable public-figure connection tied to this entity; no foundation-specific announcements have been tied to that role. Grant seekers should not expect a predictable news cycle, annual report, or grant-cycle announcement from this funder — treat the absence of news as the norm, not a gap in research.

There is no formal application process to optimize for here — the Foundation's own IRS filing marks it as preselected-organizations-only, its `application_instructions` field is explicitly blank, and it has no grants portal, LOI form, or published deadline. The single most important piece of advice for a grant seeker is to correctly diagnose that this is a relationship-driven family vehicle, not a program to apply into, and to allocate effort accordingly. Concretely: (1) Map the boards and donor circles of the Foundation's largest recurring grantees — Robin Hood Foundation, Duke University (especially athletics and the Krzyzewski Center), and Chai Lifeline — since a warm introduction through one of those networks is the most credible path to trustee attention. (2) If your organization is based in New York, Connecticut, or Massachusetts (88, 21, and 26 of the mapped grants respectively), you at least fit the geographic pattern, but geography alone will not overcome the lack of a relationship. (3) Notice the Nantucket-area cluster of small grants (Nantucket Book Festival, Nantucket Golf Club Foundation, Nantucket Book Foundation) — this strongly suggests a personal seasonal residence and community tie; local Nantucket nonprofits with an existing footprint there may have a more plausible, if still indirect, path than out-of-network national organizations. (4) Do not send an unsolicited proposal to the Madison Avenue address or attempt outreach via Rothschild Inc. — there is no program staff to route it to, and the most common mistake would be treating this like a foundation with a mailbox that gets reviewed. (5) If a relationship does exist, keep any ask simple and unrestricted: every single recorded grant purpose reads "TO SUPPORT THE GENERAL PURPOSE FUND," so proposals framed as general operating support (not program-restricted asks) match the Foundation's actual giving behavior. (6) Expect gift sizes in the $10,000-$25,000 range for a first-time relationship; the $500,000+ grants in the record (NYU Langone, Robin Hood) reflect long-standing, deeply personal commitments, not a realistic opening ask.