Stahl Family Charitable Foundation

Stahl Family Charitable Foundation is a small, closed-network private foundation with no published grant guidelines, deadline, or application portal — its DB record lists application_instructions as literally blank, and its listed website (stahlfamilyfoundation.org) returned a 404 on both the www and root domains as of September 2026. Governance sits with six part-time, uncompensated family directors — Lowell I Stahl, Jeffrey J Stahl, Patricia Stahl, Suzanne L Braley, Tim Braley, and David J Arts — plus a seventh board member, Br. Konrad Diebold, whose title pattern points to a Christian Brothers religious affiliation. That detail matters: the single largest beneficiary in the recorded grant history is St. Patrick High School, a Chicago-area Catholic school long associated with the De La Salle Christian Brothers, which has received $1,000,000-plus combined across at least two separate award years — roughly 80%+ of all cumulative giving in the top-recipient dataset ($2,308,500 across 20 grants). Everything else the foundation funds sits in a much smaller, second tier: disease- and cause-specific nonprofits including Cure Childhood Cancer, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, National Brain Tumor Society, Southwest Autism Research, Organization for Autism Research, Chicago Lighthouse, High Country Adaptive Sports, and Alpha Chi Omega Foundation. This pattern — one dominant institutional relationship plus a bench of personally meaningful health and human-service causes — is the signature of a family foundation funding causes tied to lived experience (illness, disability, alma mater, sorority) rather than a publicly recruited grant program. There is no evidence of an LOI-to-full-proposal-to-site-visit pipeline; repeat, multi-year grants to the same organizations (Cure Childhood Cancer and Dana-Farber each appear across three separate award years) suggest relationships are renewed quietly rather than re-competed. First-time applicants without an existing tie to a director, to Br. Konrad Diebold, or to the existing grantee cohort should treat this as a long-shot, warm-introduction-only funder rather than a responsive grantmaker, and should not expect a cold LOI to be reviewed.

The DB's top-recipient dataset totals $2,308,500 across 20 recorded grants (average $115,425), but that average is skewed almost entirely by St. Patrick High School, which appears twice for $1,000,000 combined (likely the same underlying relationship recorded across separate 990 filings). Stripping that anchor gift out leaves roughly $308,500 across the remaining 17-18 grants, averaging closer to $17,000-$18,000 — which lines up much more closely with the foundation-level typical_grant_size figure pulled directly from its most recent Form 990-PF: a median of $11,250, an average of $12,250, and a range of $1,000 to $25,000 across 6 grants. In other words, expect two very different tiers depending on your relationship to the foundation: six-to-seven-figure support for the one legacy institutional tie, and four-to-five-figure grants ($1,000-$82,500 observed) for everyone else. By cause, cancer-related giving is the largest secondary bucket — Cure Childhood Cancer ($107,500 combined across 4 records), Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ($95,000 combined across 4 records), and National Brain Tumor Society ($32,500) total roughly $235,000, well over half of non-anchor giving. Geographically, the 20 recorded grants break down as Massachusetts (6), Illinois (5), Georgia (4), Arizona (3), Indiana (1), and Virginia (1) — Massachusetts and Illinois are the clear hubs, reflecting Dana-Farber (Boston) and the St. Patrick HS/Chicago Lighthouse cluster (Chicago), with Georgia (Cure Childhood Cancer, Atlanta) and Arizona (Southwest Autism Research, Phoenix) as secondary nodes. Annual giving has been extremely lumpy over the available history: $71,500 (2013), $68,500 (2015), $75,000 (2019), $73,500 (2020), $115,000 (2021), a jump to $500,000 (2022), $570,000 (2023), an apparent near-zero year (2024), then $1,050,000 (2025) — the largest single year on record. That step-change tracks a major capital event: contributions_received spiked to $3,512,411 in FY2023 versus $500,000 or less in every prior year, pushing total_assets from $1.6M (2022) to $4.6M-$5.6M (2023-2024). At $1,050,000 paid out in FY2025 against $4,726,912 in assets, the foundation is currently distributing roughly 22% of assets — well above the 5% IRS minimum — signaling an active deployment year after the 2024 lull.

All five peers sit within roughly $1,500 of Stahl's $4,726,912 in assets — an unusually tight cluster suggesting these are grouped by asset tier rather than mission similarity, and none has a website on file, reinforcing that funders in this exact asset band tend to be small, low-visibility, family-run vehicles rather than programmatically staffed grantmakers. Stahl stands out within this peer set as the only one with a confirmed (if now-offline) public web presence and a documented, if opaque, giving history; its FY2025 payout of $1,050,000 represents an unusually aggressive ~22% asset payout rate compared to the 5% IRS floor peers in this tier typically hover near. Grant seekers should not expect any foundation in this comparison group to run an open RFP process — outreach strategy (warm introduction over cold LOI) should be identical across all six.

No foundation-specific press coverage or news mentions turned up in 2025-2026 web searches; results returning for "Stahl Family Foundation" news predominantly reference unrelated, similarly-named entities in Atlanta, GA and New York, NY. The foundation's own listed website, stahlfamilyfoundation.org — including its /news subpage, which third-party search indexes still show cached under the title "THANK YOU — Stahl Family Charitable Foundation" — returned HTTP 404 on every path checked (www root, bare root, and /news) as of September 3, 2026, suggesting the domain has gone offline or lapsed since it was last crawled by aggregators. The last confirmed activity in third-party 990 data is FY2025: $1,050,000 distributed across 3 grants per Instrumentl, the largest single-year total in the foundation's recorded history, following a reported near-zero FY2024 (roughly $33,000 in expenses, no grants distributed). No grantee names for the FY2025 cycle have yet surfaced in public aggregator data, likely because Schedule I of the FY2025 Form 990-PF has not yet been indexed. The DB's own last_verified_at timestamp is 2026-06-20, ahead of this 404 finding, so the site outage appears to be a very recent development. Grant seekers should monitor ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer (EIN 06-1764358) directly for the FY2025 Schedule I filing to identify which organizations received the $1,050,000, and periodically recheck stahlfamilyfoundation.org in case the site is restored.

Because no public application infrastructure exists — no LOI form, no deadline, no portal, and (as of this research) no reachable website — the highest-value move is not a written proposal but a warm introduction. The strongest lever available is a genuine connection to one of the foundation's six family directors (Lowell I Stahl, Jeffrey J Stahl, Patricia Stahl, Suzanne L Braley, Tim Braley, David J Arts) or to board member Br. Konrad Diebold, whose name and title pattern point to a Christian Brothers religious affiliation tied to St. Patrick High School in Chicago — by far the foundation's largest and most consistent beneficiary. Organizations with board, alumni, parish, or diocesan ties to that school or order have materially better odds than any unaffiliated applicant. Health and human-service nonprofits should lead with cause-specific alignment rather than general operating appeals: the giving history clusters around pediatric and adult cancer (Cure Childhood Cancer, Dana-Farber, National Brain Tumor Society) and autism services (Southwest Autism Research, Organization for Autism Research), a pattern typical of a family foundation shaped by personal or family health experience. Expect renewal-based, multi-year relationships rather than one-off awards — Cure Childhood Cancer and Dana-Farber both appear across three separate grant years in available records — so a first gift, if it comes, is more likely to be a foothold than a single transaction. Calibrate the ask: outside the St. Patrick HS relationship, typical awards run $1,000 to $25,000 (median $11,250); requesting sums in that band is far more realistic than pitching a six-figure ask without an established relationship. The clearest mistake to avoid is treating this like an open RFP funder — with $4.7M in assets, no published guidelines, and a currently offline website, a mass-mailed LOI is very unlikely to be read, let alone answered. Given the family's apparent continuing Chicago-area ties (the foundation's phone number, (847) 291-7288, is an Illinois area code despite the Boerne, TX mailing address), a brief, personalized phone call referencing a specific shared connection is a more promising first move than an emailed proposal. There is no evidence of a fixed giving cycle — FY2025's outsized $1,050,000 payout followed a quiet FY2024 — so timing outreach around a calendar deadline is not applicable here; timing should instead follow the relationship.