Simon Bolivar Foundation Inc.

The Simón Bolívar Foundation (SBF) is the private corporate foundation of CITGO Petroleum, and it behaves like one: narrowly mission-bound to Venezuelan and diaspora health, invitation-only, and staffed by CITGO finance/legal personnel (President Mariela Poleo; Treasurer functions held by CITGO's Controller/Ast. Treasurer Bob Shoemaker) rather than a dedicated program team. The Foundation explicitly does not accept unsolicited proposals - grants flow either by direct invitation or through periodic open calls (e.g., the 2022 $1M call for up to five organizations, or the August 2026 $10M earthquake-response tranche). First-time applicants should not treat this as a typical LOI-to-full-proposal funder they can approach cold; the realistic path in is (1) already being known to SBF as a partner of one of its established intermediaries, or (2) responding fast when a public call appears.

The grantee roster splits into two tiers. A top tier of large, brand-name humanitarian intermediaries - GlobalGiving Foundation ($2.02M across 3 grants), International Federation of Red Cross ($1.52M/3), Pan American Development Foundation ($953,500/4), World Central Kitchen, Project HOPE, Medical Teams International, International Medical Corps - absorbs the bulk of dollars and appears repeatedly across multiple grant cycles, indicating SBF values proven absorptive capacity and multi-year relationships over one-off awards. A second, smaller tier of diaspora-focused and Houston/Florida-based nonprofits (Aid for Aids, Friends of the Children of Venezuela, Ven Da Tu Mano, Sociedad Amigos Del Hep) receives grants in the $50,000-$500,000 range, often for narrower COVID-19, food-assistance or small-grants-program purposes.

Unusually for a foundation of its size, SBF also makes direct medical-assistance grants to named individuals - nine such cases in the grantee data (Nelson Useche, $793,819 across 3 grants for a liver transplant; Isabella Guevara, Marco Bello, Victoria Garcia, and others) - through a "Medical Grants" mechanism for critically ill Venezuelans needing care unavailable domestically. Local Venezuelan or regional organizations without US tax status must secure a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor before any conversation can proceed; this is treated as a strict eligibility gate, not a formality to resolve after a soft yes.

SBF's giving is volatile and crisis-correlated rather than steadily incremental. Total giving was roughly flat at $3.40M-$3.75M/year from 2019-2021, then $4.06M in 2022, before nearly doubling to $8.19M in 2023 (against $7.78M in contributions received) as the Foundation signed 25 grant agreements reaching an estimated 281,722 beneficiaries. That volatility has historical precedent: total giving spiked to $9.07M (2012), $11.85M (2013) and $14.93M (2015) during an earlier phase of the Venezuela crisis, showing the Foundation scales sharply with acute need rather than growing linearly. Total assets sit at $4.77M (FY2024) - a small balance sheet relative to annual giving, consistent with a pass-through model where CITGO contributions ($7.78M in 2023) are largely redistributed the same year rather than endowed.

Across 143 tracked grants totaling $15.46M in the grantee database, the average grant is $108,127; a separate sample of 28 grants puts the median at $42,500 with a range of $1,110 to $1,155,968 and an average of $119,975 - evidence of a genuinely bimodal portfolio: a handful of six-figure-to-seven-figure institutional grants alongside a long tail of sub-$50,000 individual medical-assistance and small-grants-program awards.

Geographically, recipients cluster where CITGO and the Venezuelan diaspora are concentrated: Texas leads with 73 grants (Houston HQ effect), followed by Florida with 23 (Miami's Venezuelan community), New York with 9, and Washington DC with 8 (home to INGO headquarters like PADF and the Red Cross). By purpose, "Humanitarian health program" is the dominant category, anchoring the largest grants (GlobalGiving, Red Cross, PADF), while a distinct COVID-19 mitigation cluster (Sociedad Amigos Del Hep $420,000; Universidad Central de Venezuela $314,530) concentrated in 2020-2022 has now given way to disaster response (the 2026 earthquake tranche) as the acute-need driver.

The five peers in this dataset were matched to SBF by asset size (~$4.7M in total assets) rather than by mission - all five carry the same broad "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE classification but none discloses a Venezuela- or health-specific focus, underscoring how specialized SBF's mandate is relative to typically-sized grantmaking vehicles of its scale.

Of the peer set, Ab Inbev Foundation is the closest structural analog as another single-corporate-sponsor foundation, though its focus and application process are not documented in available data. What distinguishes SBF from this entire peer cohort is throughput relative to assets: SBF gave away roughly 1.7x its total asset base in 2023 alone, confirming it operates as a pass-through vehicle for CITGO contributions rather than an endowed grantmaker - applicants should expect giving capacity tied to CITGO's own funding decisions and crisis-response commitments in a given year, not a stable annual budget.

The Foundation's most consequential recent action is its response to the June 24, 2026 Venezuela earthquakes (magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, centered on Caracas, La Guaira and Miranda state): on August 17, 2026 it approved an initial $3 million for three implementing partners - World Central Kitchen, Project HOPE, and ChildFund International - with CITGO adding $7 million more, for $10 million total in 2026 earthquake funding projected to reach over 64,900 people and rehabilitate 14 primary care centers over 12 months. This mirrors the Foundation's established disaster-response playbook: fast approval (weeks, not months) channeled through large, already-vetted intermediaries.

On the compliance side, the Foundation publicly disclosed on June 16, 2026 that an internal audit had identified an erroneous grantee disclosure, leading it to terminate that grant, recover unspent funds, and confirm the remaining balance had gone toward meals for Venezuelan families - a transparency move that followed a January 12, 2024 episode in which the Foundation publicly rejected accusations from officials aligned with the Maduro government about its purpose and activities. Both episodes point to a funder operating under continued political scrutiny given its Venezuela focus and CITGO's contested corporate-governance history.

On the program side, the Foundation released its 2024 Annual Report on October 30, 2025, reporting over 342,000 beneficiaries served that year and more than one million cumulative lives impacted over five years, and it extended its partnership with Texas Children's Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine in La Guajira, Colombia (April 2, 2024) to strengthen maternal and child health services for Venezuelan migrants and host communities - consistent with the 2019 mission expansion into regional migrant health beyond Venezuela's borders.

Do not send an unsolicited full proposal - the Foundation states plainly that it does not accept these, and cold submissions outside an active call go nowhere. The realistic entry points are: (1) becoming a sub-grantee or consortium partner of an already-funded intermediary (GlobalGiving, PADF, Red Cross, World Central Kitchen, Project HOPE, ChildFund International, Medical Teams International), or (2) responding immediately when SBF posts an open call, which historically move fast - the 2022 $1M call ran concept note (April 22) to finalist notice (May 9) to full proposal (May 31) to pre-approval (June 17), roughly an eight-week window end to end, and the 2026 earthquake response moved from disaster to $3M in approved funding within about seven weeks.

Use the Foundation's own vocabulary. Its published program materials score submissions against three named pillars - Access (medicine/nutrition availability), Capacity (provider training and infrastructure), and Empowerment (community organization strengthening) - plus explicit evaluation criteria: alignment with program priorities, cost-effectiveness, a project design with clear milestones, measurable impact indicators, and a defined timeframe (grants run up to about one year). Concept notes and proposals that map directly onto this language and structure will read as more credible to reviewers than generically-worded pitches.

Geography and population framing matter: roughly 76% of beneficiaries are inside Venezuela, but the Foundation has funded migrant-health work in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru since its 2019 mission expansion, and it separately funds US-based diaspora organizations serving Venezuelan communities in Texas and Florida (the two largest grantee-count states). Position your target population clearly within one of these three geographies.

A hard gate: local Venezuelan or regional organizations without US 501(c)(3) status must have a fiscal sponsor lined up before engaging - arrange this in advance rather than after interest is expressed. Given two recent public disputes (a 2024 government-aligned accusation and a 2026 grant-termination/audit disclosure), expect elevated due diligence: be ready to document that no officers or the organization itself has ties to any government official, and build in a clear fund-tracking and reporting plan, since the Foundation has shown it will terminate grants and claw back funds over disclosure issues.