Steve Young Family Foundation

The Steve Young Family Foundation is a small, closed, single-trustee family foundation, not an institutional grantmaker seeking new applicants. Records confirm the sole trustee across all filings is J. Steven Young — Chairman and Co-Founder of the Utah private equity firm HGGC, not the NFL Hall of Famer of the same name — and officer compensation is listed at $0 across every year on record, consistent with a personal giving vehicle run without staff. The database record marks it `preselected_only: true` with `application_instructions: "__none__"` and no `grants_page_url`, and the foundation's listed website (steveyoung.org) returned a certificate error on direct fetch, meaning there is no functioning public application portal to submit to. Every dollar traced in the top-recipient list (8 grants, $312,500 total across the available filing window) went to four organizations: Monterey Peninsula Foundation ($157,500 across 3 grants), Equality Utah Foundation ($80,000 across 2 grants), Off The Field ($50,000 across 2 grants), and The Signatry, a donor-advised-fund sponsor ($25,000, 1 grant). This is a textbook relationship-and-affinity foundation: Monterey Peninsula Foundation runs grantmaking tied to the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am golf circuit that PE executives commonly participate in, Equality Utah Foundation reflects the trustee's home-state civic interests, Off The Field supports NFL players' families (a network adjacency worth noting given the name overlap with the football Steve Young), and The Signatry is a pass-through DAF the trustee likely uses to direct funds to causes not held in the foundation's own name. For a first-time applicant with no prior personal connection to J. Steven Young, HGGC, or these four organizations, the realistic probability of a cold LOI landing a grant is very low. The only credible path in is a warm introduction through one of the four existing grantees, HGGC's Utah or Palo Alto professional network, or a shared board/committee seat (e.g., Monterey Peninsula Foundation's grant committee). Organizations without such a bridge should deprioritize this funder relative to open, application-based foundations of similar size.

Total charitable disbursements have grown unevenly with the foundation's asset base. Assets sat at $1.2M in FY2019, spiked to $13.4M in FY2021 after a single $7,939,816 contribution, dipped to $11.3M in FY2023, and stood at $11.86M as of FY2024 — meaning the corpus is now essentially static and funded almost entirely by investment returns ($208,240 net investment income in FY2023; $389,688 in FY2022) rather than fresh gifts. Grants paid tell a similarly lumpy story: $0 in FY2020, $57,500 in FY2021, $127,500 in FY2022, $175,000 in FY2023, and roughly $172,502 in FY2024 per third-party aggregation — a payout rate of only about 1.5% of assets in FY2024, well below the 5% federal minimum distribution requirement for private foundations, which itself signals the foundation is not under pressure to expand its grantee pool. Across the 8 grants captured in the top-recipient data (total $312,500), the average grant is $39,063, but funding concentrates heavily by recipient: Monterey Peninsula Foundation alone accounts for 50.4% of all dollars ($157,500/3 grants, ~$52,500 average check), Equality Utah Foundation for 25.6% ($80,000/2 grants, $40,000 average), Off The Field for 16% ($50,000/2 grants, $25,000 average), and The Signatry for 8% (single $25,000 grant). Geographically, giving is split California (3 grants), Utah (2 grants), Arizona (2 grants), and Kansas (1 grant, tied to The Signatry's Kansas headquarters) — there is no in-state-only restriction, but every dollar flows to organizations tied to the trustee's personal or professional network rather than an open geographic service area. All recorded grant purposes are listed simply as "OPERATING COSTS," indicating the foundation makes general operating support grants to trusted organizations rather than funding discrete programs or capital projects.

All five listed peers sit in an almost identical asset band (~$11.86M) and share the same NTEE classification, which reflects an asset-matched comparison set rather than confirmed programmatic overlap — most have no public website or grant history available to verify their giving posture. What distinguishes Steve Young Family Foundation from this peer set is not size but structure: it is a single-trustee, no-staff vehicle with a documented four-recipient concentration pattern, whereas foundations of this size more commonly run a small advisory board and at least a nominal LOI process. Grantseekers should treat all six entities in this table as low-yield cold-outreach targets and instead prioritize identifying the personal networks of each trustee.

No foundation-specific news, press releases, leadership changes, or new program announcements were found for Steve Young Family Foundation in 2025 or 2026 — it has no news page, no social media presence, and no coverage in nonprofit-sector press. The only relevant recent development is external to the foundation itself: on 2026-02-19, Bloomberg reported that HGGC, the private equity firm co-founded and chaired by sole trustee J. Steven Young, closed its latest flagship fund at $3.2 billion, above its fundraising target. This confirms continued liquidity and wealth on the trustee's personal balance sheet, but the foundation's own filings show no corresponding increase in charitable disbursements — FY2024 grants paid (~$172,502 per third-party aggregation) were roughly flat versus FY2023's $175,000. The most recent IRS Form 990-PF on file is for fiscal year 2024, filed in 2026; FY2025 filings were not yet publicly available as of this research (typical private-foundation filing lag runs 6-12 months after fiscal year-end). Given the foundation's small, stable four-recipient grant pattern documented since at least FY2022, the most reasonable expectation is continuity — the same recipients (Monterey Peninsula Foundation, Equality Utah Foundation, Off The Field, The Signatry) receiving similar operating-support grants in the $25,000-$60,000 range per check — rather than any new grant program or open call for proposals emerging in the near term.

There is no formal application process to describe: the database record explicitly lists `application_instructions: "__none__"`, `application_form_url: null`, `application_deadline: null`, and `grants_page_url: null`, and the foundation's own listed website (steveyoung.org) is unreachable (SSL certificate error on direct fetch), so there is no submission channel to target even opportunistically. Given the `preselected_only: true` flag in the platform's own data and the concentrated four-recipient grant history, the single highest-leverage move for any organization genuinely interested in this funder is relationship-building rather than proposal-writing: identify whether any board member, major donor, or executive has a personal or professional tie to J. Steven Young (HGGC Chairman/Co-Founder, based in Utah with a Palo Alto office presence) or to any of the four existing grantees — Monterey Peninsula Foundation, Equality Utah Foundation, Off The Field, or The Signatry. A warm introduction through one of those four organizations is far more likely to succeed than any cold LOI, since all recorded grants to date have gone to this same closed circle across at least three consecutive filing years (FY2022-FY2024). If an organization does identify a connection, the request should be framed as general operating support — every recorded grant purpose is "OPERATING COSTS," not program- or project-restricted funding, so proposals emphasizing organizational sustainability and trusted stewardship of unrestricted dollars will match the foundation's demonstrated giving style better than a project-specific pitch. A common mistake to avoid: assuming this is the same Steve Young as the NFL Hall of Fame quarterback and pitching sports-, youth-, or football-adjacent programming on that basis — the trustee here is the HGGC private equity executive, and messaging built on the wrong Steve Young's public profile will misfire immediately with anyone who actually reviews the request. Because the foundation distributes well below the 5% federal minimum payout in most years, there is no evidence of urgency or unspent-fund pressure that would make it more receptive to unsolicited inquiries than its filing pattern already suggests.