Telos Foundation Inc.

Telos Foundation Inc. is a small, unpaid, family-operated private foundation run entirely by William M Mounger II (Secretary/Treasurer) and Callie Brandon Mounger (Vice-President) out of Jackson, Mississippi — both officers draw zero compensation, meaning virtually every dollar of investment income is available for either grants or asset growth rather than overhead. With roughly $3.5-3.7 million in assets, the foundation is a modest, closely-held giving vehicle, not an institutional grantmaker with program staff, a board of outside directors, or published funding guidelines.

The grantee pattern is the clearest signal of intent: of 60 tracked grants totaling $420,692, the largest single recipient is Highlands Presbyterian Church ($110,200 across 3 grants, over a quarter of all tracked dollars), followed by Third Millennium Ministries ($60,000), Reformed University Fellowship/RUF ($8,400), and Mission to the World ($15,600) — all explicitly Reformed/Presbyterian-affiliated ministries. Add Mississippi Children's Museum, Magnolia Speech School, Jackson Prep, and Belhaven University, and the picture is a Jackson-based Presbyterian family funding its own church, campus ministries, and a tight circle of Mississippi civic/educational institutions, with occasional national parachurch (Cru, Compassion International) and conservation (Delta Waterfowl, The Nature Conservancy) gifts.

There is no LOI-to-full-proposal pipeline, no site visit stage, and no online portal. The IRS filing instructs applicants to submit "a brief resume of qualifications and outline of the proposed use of the requested funds," with needy individuals asked to document need for food, clothing, shelter, or inability to obtain conventional financing. Grant-database aggregators independently flag that the foundation "only makes contributions to preselected charitable organizations and does not accept unsolicited requests" — a tension worth taking seriously: the technical process described in the 990 is real, but the grantee list suggests relationships (church membership, Presbyterian denominational ties, Jackson civic circles) drive who actually gets funded. First-time applicants with no connection to the Mounger family, Highlands Presbyterian, or the PCA/Reformed ministry network should expect low odds and should prioritize warm introductions over cold submissions.

Grant sizes are modest and heavily skewed toward small, recurring gifts. Per the DB's typical-grant-size sample (23 grants), the median is $3,600, the average is $7,674, and the range runs from $240 to $56,000. Across the fuller 60-grant tracked set, the average is $7,130 and the total is $420,692 — but that average is pulled upward by one outlier relationship (Highlands Presbyterian Church, $110,200) and a handful of $15,000-$60,000 ministry gifts; the true typical gift to most organizations is in the $200-$5,000 range (18 of the 34 distinct recipients received $5,000 or less).

Annual giving has been volatile because the foundation is funded purely by its own investment portfolio — contributions_received is $0 in every year with data back to 2012. Total giving by fiscal year: FY2013 $708,865 (an outlier peak), FY2014 $277,366, FY2015 $312,302, FY2019 $191,431, FY2020 $118,130 (COVID-era dip), FY2021 $304,830, FY2022 $176,666, FY2023 $204,977. Grants paid (a slightly narrower cash measure) tracked similarly: $102,896 (2020) to $176,496 (2021). FY2024 total revenue jumped to $297,037 (from just $12,346 in 2023) on realized investment gains, with total expenses of $196,519 and charitable disbursements of $168,164 — 85.6% of expenses, a high payout ratio for a foundation this size (source: ProPublica, since 990-PF grant detail for FY2024 isn't yet broken out in the DB).

Geographically, 39 of 60 tracked grants (65%) went to Mississippi organizations, with Florida a distant second (10 grants), and single-digit representation in Georgia, Colorado, Alabama, DC, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. By purpose, essentially all 60 tracked grants are coded "UNRESTRICTED" general-operating gifts rather than restricted program grants — consistent with a relationship-based funder writing checks to trusted organizations rather than running competitive RFP cycles. Individual assistance is explicitly capped at $10,000 per person over a rolling 4-year period.

Telos Foundation Inc. sits in a cluster of similarly-sized, opaque family foundations in the Philanthropy & Grantmaking NTEE category — all around $3.5 million in assets, none with a public website or disclosed application process, which is itself a pattern worth naming: at this asset scale ($3-4M), family foundations rarely publish guidelines, and grant seekers should expect to research the trustee family's affiliations (churches, alma maters, local civic boards) rather than find a grants page.

All five peers show nearly identical asset bases (within $600 of each other, $3,533,924-$3,534,544) with no public website, grantee list, or stated focus area on file — a signature of small, single-family, professionally-administered private foundations that file the statutory minimum and give quietly to a closed circle. Telos is actually more transparent than this peer set by virtue of having IRS-filed application instructions and a multi-year grantee history to analyze; grant seekers should not expect any of these six funders to run a competitive, publicly-advertised process, and outreach strategy should center on identifying personal, denominational, or geographic ties to the controlling family rather than treating any of them as an open RFP.

No news coverage, press releases, program announcements, or leadership changes were found for Telos Foundation Inc. in any web search — this is consistent with its profile as a two-person, unpaid family foundation with no communications function. The most recent verifiable activity is the FY2024 Form 990-PF, which shows total revenue of $297,037 (a sharp rebound from $12,346 in FY2023, driven by realized gains on the investment portfolio rather than new contributions, which remained $0), total expenses of $196,519, and charitable disbursements of $168,164 (85.6% of expenses). Net assets closed FY2024 at roughly $3.73 million, in line with the foundation's stable $2.8-3.7 million range going back to at least 2012.

Leadership has been unchanged across every year of available data: William M Mounger II (Secretary/Treasurer, listed as President on some third-party aggregators) and Callie Brandon Mounger (Vice-President) are the only two officers, both uncompensated, appearing identically in every filing year in the DB's people list. There is no indication of a recent or pending leadership transition.

The DB record lists a foundation website of telos.org, which this research confirms is incorrect — that domain belongs to Telos Academy, an unrelated therapeutic boarding school in Orem, Utah, with no connection to the Mounger family or Mississippi. Grant seekers should not rely on that URL; no verified official web presence for Telos Foundation Inc. was located during this research, and the foundation's own IRS filings (990-PF, EIN 64-0854272, available 2001-2024 via ProPublica) remain the only authoritative public source on its activity. Given the two-year cadence of filings analyzed here, the next meaningful data point will be the FY2025 Form 990-PF, typically filed in late 2026 or early 2027.

Because Telos Foundation Inc. has no grants portal, published RFP, or communications staff, the entire relationship runs through a single IRS-filed instruction: submit "a brief resume of qualifications and outline of the proposed use of the requested funds" to the foundation's mailing address (c/o William Mounger, 4450 Old Canton Rd Ste 207, Jackson, MS 39211). There is no stated deadline — applications are accepted any time — and no committee cycle or LOI-then-proposal structure is described, so treat this as a single, concise letter rather than a multi-stage application.

Alignment language matters more than formatting here. The grantee history is dominated by Reformed/Presbyterian Christian ministries (Highlands Presbyterian Church, Third Millennium Ministries, Reformed University Fellowship, Mission to the World) and Mississippi civic/educational institutions (Jackson Prep, Belhaven University, Mississippi Children's Museum, Magnolia Speech School). Applicants whose mission touches Christian ministry, Presbyterian/Reformed theological education, or Mississippi-based human services and education should say so directly and early; applicants outside those categories — especially outside Mississippi — are competing for the small residual of funding the 990 language allows "to the extent funds are available."

Common mistakes to avoid: sending a full multi-page grant proposal with budgets and logic models (the stated instructions ask for a brief resume and outline, not a formal application packet); requesting more than $10,000 for an individual (hard IRS-documented cap per person over 4 years); and treating this like a competitive, staffed foundation that will respond to cold outreach — third-party aggregators explicitly note the foundation appears to fund preselected organizations rather than solicit unsolicited requests.

The highest-leverage approach is relationship-building, not proposal-writing: identify any connection to Highlands Presbyterian Church, the PCA/Reformed ministry network, or Jackson, Mississippi civic and philanthropic circles, since virtually every substantial grantee in the record has one of those ties. A warm introduction through a shared church, denomination, or Jackson-area institution is far more likely to succeed than an unsolicited written request, however well-crafted.