Strachan Foundation

The single most important fact for any prospective applicant: the Strachan Foundation closed its grantmaking to new requests around 2021-2022 and its own website now states, "we do not accept requests for funding at this time." The foundation completed a documented shift from broad-based NGO grantmaking in Central America to a scholarship program ("Strachan Scholars") for individuals identified as future transformative leaders. Scholarships are awarded through four named intermediary institutions — CALI (Central American Leadership Initiative), INCAE Business School, ESEN, and ¡SUPÉRATE! — which select and manage candidates on the foundation's behalf. This means organizations cannot approach the Strachan board directly for funding; the practical path is to build a relationship with one of those four partner institutions and be nominated or selected as a scholarship candidate through their existing pipelines. Historically, when the foundation did fund NGOs directly (1994-2022), its DB grant history shows a strong preference for organizations already known to the family network: 41 of its 67 recorded grants (61%) went to repeat grantees receiving 2-3 sequential awards, evidencing long-term relationship-based giving rather than one-off competitive rounds. Its largest historical grant by far — $396,000 to INCAE Business School — dwarfs every other award, showing the foundation concentrated its biggest bets on a small number of trusted, elite institutional partners rather than spreading capital thinly. First-time grantees, when they appeared, were almost always small community organizations in El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Honduras working on education, health, or youth programming, introduced via the foundation's own field survey work (led by family member Andrea Dyrness) rather than through open calls. For grant seekers today, the realistic takeaway is that this is now effectively a closed, relationship-driven scholarship funder, not an open grants program, and time is better spent identifying and cultivating a relationship with CALI, INCAE, ESEN, or ¡SUPÉRATE! than attempting outreach to the Strachan board itself.

Across its full recorded grantmaking history, the foundation made 67 grants totaling $1,469,794, averaging $21,937 per grant. The IRS-reported typical grant size (based on 17 recent-year awards) shows a median of $18,750, a mean of $18,846, and a tight range of $5,000 to $37,500 — indicating that in its final active years, the foundation had standardized around modest, mid-four-to-low-five-figure awards rather than large capital gifts. That said, the all-time top grant was a clear outlier: $396,000 to INCAE Business School for education, more than 10x the next-largest award. Below that, the giving pattern drops sharply: American Baptist Foreign Mission received $75,000 (2 grants) for community health programming, Eric Reiche Scholarship received $67,500 (3 grants), and a cluster of organizations — Adisaasociacion De Padres Y Amigos, Fundacion Crisalida, Asociacion Cultural Monterrey, Casa Esperanza — each received exactly $50,000 across 2 grants apiece. By purpose, education dominates: scholarships, preschool programs, literacy projects, youth leadership, and business/economics training account for the clear majority of named grant purposes, with community health (feeding programs, women's health, pharma access) as the secondary theme (roughly 15-20% of dollars). Geographically, 63 of 67 grants (94%) are coded to the "AA" region (Central America/Latin America), with only isolated outliers in Illinois, Minnesota, and New Mexico — confirming an almost exclusively Central American giving footprint despite the Florida incorporation. On the balance sheet, total assets have been essentially flat: $11.8M (2021) to $12.7M (2023) to $12.3M (2024), while total giving fluctuated from $695,129 (2021) to $935,423 (2022) to a peak of $1,172,090 (2023) — a giving level that runs close to or above net investment income in most years, consistent with a foundation drawing down toward its now-completed grantmaking wind-down rather than building the endowment for future cycles.

The Strachan Foundation sits within a cluster of similarly-sized "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" category foundations, most with assets just above $12.3M. Unlike its peers, however, Strachan has publicly closed its grant application process, making it an outlier for accessibility despite comparable financial scale.

All five peers cluster within roughly $4,000-$6,000 of Strachan's $12,326,760 in assets and share its generic "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE classification, suggesting they are small, family-run foundations of a similar vintage and scale rather than large institutional funders. Like Strachan, family foundations at this asset tier typically do not run open competitive grant cycles; the practical difference is that Strachan has stated its closure explicitly on its own website, while peer foundations' application posture is unconfirmed absent direct outreach or public disclosure. For grant seekers, this tier of funder (sub-$15M assets, no professional program staff beyond a single part-time executive director) is best approached through warm introductions rather than cold applications across the board.

The most concrete recent activity is the foundation's partnership with the Restorative Practices Foundation to fund grantee attendance at the IIRP Latinoamérica Conference in San José, Costa Rica — a sign that even in its scholarship-focused phase, the foundation continues light-touch capacity-building support for its network of Central American nonprofit alumni. Administratively, the foundation's most recent Form 990 was filed November 13, 2025, reporting fiscal year 2024 figures of $12,326,760 in total assets and $885,385 in total revenue, confirming it remains a legally active, compliant private foundation even as new grantmaking has stopped. Leadership continuity is notable: Alan Miguel Tello (listed as Executive Director, $39,200 compensation in the 2021 filing but $0 in later years reviewed) managed the transition from active grantmaking to the scholarship model, and closed out his tenure with a comprehensive report covering roughly 29 years of foundation history (1994 to 2022/2023). The board remains entirely family-run: Harry Strachan (President), Robert Lindenberg Strachan (Treasurer), Charles K Strachan (VP), and Sandy Strachan (Vice President) all serve without compensation, per the DB people data — a classic unpaid, multigenerational family board structure. No new large single grants, executive hires, or public program launches were identified in web research beyond the IIRP conference partnership and the scholarship program's continuation through CALI, INCAE, ESEN, and ¡SUPÉRATE!. Grant seekers should treat the absence of visible 2025-2026 program news as itself informative: this is a foundation in steady-state wind-down of open grantmaking, not one actively expanding new initiatives.

The overriding tip is: do not apply. The foundation's own contact page states unambiguously, "we do not accept requests for funding at this time," and the broader website confirms open grantmaking ended around 2021-2022 in favor of the Strachan Scholars program. Sending an unsolicited LOI or proposal to the board (Harry Strachan, Robert Lindenberg Strachan, Charles K Strachan, or Sandy Strachan) is very unlikely to yield a response, since none of the 67 historical grants in the foundation's DB record reflect a cold-outreach origin — every identifiable pattern points to relationships built through the foundation's own field research (led by family member Andrea Dyrness) or through its four institutional partners. The realistic path to Strachan funding today is indirect: build or deepen a relationship with CALI (Central American Leadership Initiative), INCAE Business School, ESEN, or ¡SUPÉRATE!, since these organizations select and manage the individual scholarship candidates the foundation now funds. Organizations running youth leadership, business education, or scholarship pipelines in Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Panama should prioritize partnership conversations with those four named intermediaries over any direct foundation contact. For research, reference-checking, or understanding what the foundation valued historically, Miguel Tello (mtello_us@yahoo.com), the former Executive Director who oversaw the 1994-2022/2023 grantmaking era, is a credible contact — but he should not be treated as a live funding gatekeeper. If historical patterns are any guide to what would have impressed this funder had it still been open: grants consistently rewarded organizations that could show direct, measurable impact on a defined cohort (a scholarship class, a preschool's enrollment, a specific rural literacy cohort) rather than general operating requests, and the foundation favored multi-year, sequential funding (61% of grants were repeat awards) over one-time gifts — evidence this funder valued sustained partnership over transactional giving. Any organization citing this foundation as a target in a grant strategy should treat it as a closed prospect and reallocate research time to its four active partner institutions instead.