Sitchin Foundation Inc.

Sitchin Foundation Inc. is a small, closely-held family foundation run out of West Harrison, NY, under the c/o of Director/Secretary Salo Aizenberg, alongside directors Janet Sitchin (Asst. Treasurer), Arthur Feldman (Treasurer), Tamar Aizenberg (VP), and Amnon Sitchin (VP) — five names that recur unchanged across the last several 990-PF filings, signaling a stable, tightly-controlled board with no outside program staff. There is no open portal, RFP, or published funding cycle; the entire application process is a single line in the foundation's own IRS filing: "letter request with description of use of funds." With ~$5.2M in assets and roughly $420K-$460K distributed annually across 27-35 grants, this is not an institution built to process high application volume — it behaves like an extension of the founding family's personal giving, concentrated overwhelmingly on Jewish communal, educational, and pro-Israel organizations (synagogues, day schools, summer camps, Hillel chapters, Israel-advocacy groups) plus a handful of general civic and public-safety causes near its Westchester County base. First-time applicants should not expect a competitive, criteria-scored review; instead, expect a relationship-driven decision made directly by the board members named above. The grantee list is dominated by repeat recipients receiving the same or similar amount year after year (Aish South Florida, Camp Ramah in the Poconos, Beth El Synagogue Center, Leffell School, HonestReporting, Schechter Institutes), which means the realistic path in is either (a) already being known to the family, (b) a warm introduction through a shared synagogue, day school, Israel-advocacy, or Westchester civic network, or (c) a well-targeted letter that explicitly names the foundation's demonstrated cause areas rather than a generic ask. Organizations well outside Jewish communal life, Israel-related advocacy, or the New York/Westchester civic sphere should treat this as a long-shot cold prospect and deprioritize it in favor of funders with open, criteria-based programs.

Per the foundation's own 990-PF typical-grant-size data, awards range from $100 to $54,000 with a median of $6,500 and an average of $9,380 across 35 tracked grants. The broader grantee database (70 grants, $541,514 total, $7,736 average) confirms the same shape: a small number of larger unrestricted grants ($40,000-$90,000 combined across two years) to anchor organizations like Aish South Florida ($90,000/2 grants), Camp Ramah in the Poconos ($72,400/2 grants), Burn Design Lab ($72,000/2 grants), Momentum ($50,000/2 grants), and Beth El Synagogue Center ($44,120/2 grants), tapering down through a long tail of $2,000-$25,000 grants to synagogues and day schools, and finally a cluster of token gifts under $1,000 (Salvation Army $602, Hillel Foundation $560, West Harrison Fire Department $200) that look like small community loyalty gifts rather than programmatic grants. Geographically, New York dominates with 30 of the tracked grants, followed by Illinois and Pennsylvania (10 each), DC (4), Louisiana (4), and single-digit counts in California, Connecticut, Florida, and Maryland — matching the foundation's self-reported geographic focus of NY/PA/IL. On the finance side, total giving has been remarkably stable in the modern era: $411,070 (2019), $427,855 (2020), $463,842 (2021), $423,081 (2022), and $421,591 (2023), funded almost entirely by net investment income ($221,532-$553,291/year) against zero new contributions received since 2013 — this is a mature, self-sustaining endowment, not a foundation dependent on fresh donor inflows, and total assets have declined gently from $5.85M (2019) to $5.20M (2024) as annual giving modestly outpaces investment returns in some years.

Sitchin sits in a cluster of similarly sized ($5.2M asset) Philanthropy & Grantmaking-classified private foundations, all of which are closely-held, letter-request-only vehicles with no public program staff — a common profile for family foundations of this size.

All six foundations cluster within a few thousand dollars of $5.2M in assets, which is typical of the dataset's asset-based peer matching rather than programmatic similarity — none of the five peers publish grantee lists or funding priorities in the available data, so no head-to-head giving-level comparison is possible. What differentiates Sitchin from this peer set is that it does have a discoverable, consistent giving pattern (70 tracked grants, clear cause concentration) where the peers appear to be dormant or non-disclosing on public 990 data — making Sitchin, despite its small size, one of the more "knowable" and thus more efficiently targetable prospects in this tier.

No new program announcements, leadership changes, or press coverage were identified for 2025-2026. The foundation's most recent Form 990-PF was filed November 11, 2025 (covering the fiscal year ending in 2024), showing total assets of $5,202,564 and total revenue of $431,726 — consistent with prior years and showing no signs of wind-down, merger, or strategic pivot. Its own website, sitchin.org, is currently an inactive WordPress.com placeholder page reading "Something new is coming," indicating the foundation either never built out a public-facing site or has let one lapse; either way, prospective applicants cannot rely on it for guidance today. Directory aggregators (GrantStation, Cause IQ, Candid/Foundation Directory) list the foundation but either paywall detail or note the profile "is no longer active" on their platforms, reinforcing that this is a low-visibility, non-marketing funder. The board of directors — Salo Aizenberg, Janet Sitchin, Arthur Feldman, Tamar Aizenberg, and Amnon Sitchin — has remained unchanged across the filings reviewed, with compensation levels also flat year over year ($13,700 each for most directors, $28,700 for Aizenberg in the most recent year shown), suggesting continuity of control and no imminent generational transition visible in the public record. Absent direct outreach to the foundation, grant seekers should assume its practices and priorities from FY2019-FY2023 remain the best available predictor of FY2025-FY2026 behavior.

There is no online portal, LOI form, or published deadline — the foundation's own filing describes the entire process as a "letter request with description of use of funds," so applicants should send a concise, physical or emailed letter (not a lengthy proposal) addressed to Salo Aizenberg, Director/Secretary, at 15 Shelley Ln, West Harrison, NY 10604 (917-363-4919). Because the foundation has no fiscal-year-end application rush implied by public data and directors control timing personally, there is no evidence of a hard annual deadline — but given that grants are paid out fairly evenly (roughly $420K-$460K/year for the last five years on record), a letter sent well before calendar year-end (when private foundations often finalize distributions) is a reasonable default timing choice. The strongest alignment language mirrors the actual grantee base: organizations serving Jewish day schools, synagogues, summer camps (e.g., Camp Ramah-style programming), Hillel/campus Jewish life, Israel education and advocacy, or Israeli/Jewish veterans' causes should lead with that framing explicitly, since these categories account for the overwhelming majority of the 70 tracked grants. Organizations in Westchester County or the broader NY/PA/IL corridor should also note local/regional ties, since geography clearly correlates with award likelihood (30 of 70 tracked grants went to New York recipients). The single biggest mistake an applicant can make is treating this like a competitive, criteria-scored RFP: there is no scoring rubric, no site-visit pipeline, and no restricted-program language in the public record — nearly all tracked grants are marked "UNRESTRICTED," meaning the foundation is funding organizations and relationships, not projects. A cold, generic template letter with no communal or geographic tie-in is unlikely to succeed; a short, personal letter that references any existing connection to a board member's network, a shared institution (e.g., a day school or synagogue also supported by the foundation), or the Westchester/NY Jewish community will fare better. Given repeat funding to the same ~35-70 organizations year after year, first-time applicants should also set realistic expectations: an initial award, if any, is likely to be modest (in the hundreds to low thousands) with room to grow into the $10K-$90K range only after the relationship is established over multiple cycles.