The Bond Foundation Inc.

The Bond Foundation Inc. is best understood not as a competitive grants program but as a closely held, single-family giving vehicle whose disbursements largely follow the personal board commitments of its unpaid President, Baron Bond. Bond sits on the Cato Institute's board of directors and serves as a Reason Foundation trustee, and those two organizations — together with the Atlas Society — have absorbed 98.1% of the $1,554,500 in tracked historical giving ($1,004,500 to Cato, $275,000 to Reason, $245,000 to Atlas Society). The remaining 1.9% ($30,000) went to four unrelated one-off recipients (Rockford College, Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and a $5,000 gift labeled simply 'Ftp'), a pattern consistent with a small number of personal or alumni connections rather than a programmatic outreach effort. The foundation's own IRS filing corroborates this closed posture directly: application_instructions is recorded as none, and the foundation is flagged preselected_only — meaning grants are directed to organizations already identified by the board, not solicited through a public process, despite a generic accepting_applications flag that should not be read as an open call. There is no dedicated foundation website; the domain listed in public records (bondbldg.com) resolves to an unrelated Winter Garden, Florida commercial real-estate business and should not be treated as the foundation's actual site. For an organization outside the Cato/Reason/Atlas Society core, the realistic path to consideration is a relationship, not a proposal: a warm introduction through a mutual board or trustee connection at Cato or Reason, or through the broader classical-liberal movement network (Students for Liberty, Institute for Humane Studies, State Policy Network affiliates), is far more likely to succeed than a cold letter of inquiry. The 2025 gift to Free the People Foundation — a new name absent from the historical grantee list — shows the circle can widen, but almost certainly through the same relationship-driven mechanism rather than a published call for proposals. First-time approaches should lead with explicit ideological alignment (individual liberty, limited government, free markets) rather than general nonprofit merit, since that framing, not sector or geography, is what has determined every dollar in the record.

Across the 20 grants captured in the foundation's grantee history, total giving is $1,554,500 at an average of $77,725 per grant; the foundation's own typical_grant_size record shows a median of $55,000, a mean of $79,875, and a range of $5,000 to $204,500. Concentration is extreme: Cato Institute received $1,004,500 across 5 grants (64.6% of all dollars, averaging roughly $200,900 per gift — the foundation's single largest funding line by a wide margin), Reason Foundation received $275,000 across 5 grants (17.7%, averaging $55,000), and The Atlas Society received $245,000 across 5 grants (15.8%, averaging $49,000). The remaining four recipients — Rockford College ($10,000), Washington University ($10,000 across 2 gifts), Johns Hopkins University ($5,000), and 'Ftp' ($5,000) — together account for just 1.9% of total giving. Annual grants_paid has grown steadily over the tracked filing years: $120,000 (2012), $285,000 (2013), $235,000 (2014), $290,000 (2015), $315,000 (2019), $320,000 (2020), $319,500 (2021), $310,000 (2022), $295,000 (2023), and — per the most recent Cause IQ 990-PF read — $500,500 disbursed in FY2025, the highest payout in the recorded decade and a roughly 70% jump over FY2023. Total assets have ranged between $2.28M (2021) and $4.21M (2024), currently standing at $4,090,046, with the swings driven almost entirely by market performance: net investment income ranged from $102,156 (2013) to $2,252,260 (2022, a year with a large realized-gains event), and the foundation has received $0 in outside contributions every year from 2019 through 2023 — it is self-funded from its own endowment, not from ongoing fundraising. Officer compensation is minimal and stable: Treasurer Jeff Daley is the sole paid officer at roughly $25,000-$26,000 annually since 2020 (up from $6,731 in 2020 and $0 before 2020); President Baron Bond, Vice President Mayrav Bond, Secretary Michele Shaffer, and Director Howard B. Miller all serve unpaid. Geographically, grant dollars cluster in the home states of the three anchor think tanks — DC (6 grants), CA and TX (5 each), MO (2), with single grants in IL and MD — reflecting recipient headquarters rather than a stated geographic mission.

The Bond Foundation operates at a fraction of the scale of the other funders in its ideological lane, though it shares anchor grantees with all three peers below.

Even against Dunn's Foundation (roughly 23x Bond's assets) and Searle Freedom Trust (roughly 5-13x), The Bond Foundation is a minor funder in dollar terms — and next to the $1.3B Diana Davis Spencer Foundation it is essentially a rounding error. What it lacks in scale it makes up in concentration: its 98.1% three-recipient share is a purer, more personal expression of one director's own board seats than any of these larger peers, which typically spread dollars across dozens of organizations each cycle. All four funders anchor on Cato and/or Reason, underscoring that this is a small, interlocking donor network in which governance relationships — not competitive proposals — determine access at every size tier.

The most concrete recent signal is financial: FY2025 charitable disbursements of $500,500 mark the highest annual payout in the foundation's recorded filing history (2012-2025), a roughly 37% increase over FY2023's $364,752 and consistent with a rebound in net investment income after 2022's outsized $2.25M gain year. Per Cause IQ's read of the most recent Form 990-PF, four grants were made in 2025: $100,000 to Reason Foundation (about double its historical per-grant average of $55,000), $25,000 to Free the People Foundation (a name not present in the foundation's historical top-grantee list, and the clearest evidence of the giving circle widening beyond the Cato/Reason/Atlas Society core), $5,000 to Washington University in St. Louis (a recurring small, unrestricted university gift), and one additional grant whose amount was not disclosed in public summaries. Leadership shows no turnover: Baron Bond (President), Mayrav Bond (Vice President), Michele Shaffer (Secretary), and Howard B. Miller (Director) appear identically across the three most recent filing years in the data, and Cato Institute's own 2025 published board listing confirms Baron Bond remains a sitting Cato director alongside his Reason Foundation trusteeship — the direct link explaining the foundation's grant concentration. No press releases, news coverage, or social-media activity from the foundation itself were found in this research; it does not appear to issue public announcements, which is typical for a foundation of this size with zero staff and no public-facing grants program. Absent a personal relationship or a future 990-PF filing, there is no additional recent activity to report.

There is no application to optimize — the foundation's own filing lists application_instructions as none, records no grants page, application form, or opportunities URL, and is flagged preselected_only, meaning recipients are identified by the board rather than solicited. Do not use a third-party grant-database listing (GrantExec, Instrumentl, etc.) as evidence of an open call; those listings reflect generic registry metadata pulled from the IRS filing, not an actual invitation to apply. The realistic path in runs through relationships, not paperwork: Baron Bond personally sits on the Cato Institute board and serves as a Reason Foundation trustee, and 98.1% of every dollar this foundation has given has flowed to organizations he governs directly. Organizations without an existing tie to Bond should look for a warm introduction through the broader classical-liberal/libertarian movement network — a mutual contact on Cato's or Reason's board or staff, an Atlas Society advocacy circle connection, or a shared affiliation through Students for Liberty, the Institute for Humane Studies, or a State Policy Network member — rather than submitting a cold letter of inquiry. If outreach is attempted, frame it explicitly in the funder's own language: individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and classical liberalism, since that ideological alignment (not sector diversity, geography, or general nonprofit merit) is the only variable that has ever predicted a Bond Foundation gift. The clearest recent proof that the circle can widen is the 2025 gift to Free the People Foundation, a name absent from the foundation's entire prior grant history — almost certainly the product of a personal introduction within the same donor network rather than a submitted proposal. Address any correspondence to Baron Bond, President, The Bond Foundation Inc., 9690 Deereco Rd Ste 820, Timonium, MD 21093; the foundation's only paid officer is Treasurer Jeff Daley, and its listed administrative contact (derek@sbmcpa.com) appears to be an outside accounting firm rather than program staff, so expect any written inquiry to route slowly, if at all. The single largest and most common mistake would be investing grant-writer time in a formal, unsolicited proposal: with a zero-dollar acknowledged application process and a decade of evidence that funding follows the President's own board seats, that effort is better spent building the relationship first.